I’ll snatch that last question from maniac45 in the Weekly Dev Questions thread. 

“Does Star Sonata plan to do any sorts of increasing in the community as to bringing more players? if so what kind of plans are set to action?”

This post might be a little wordy and talk about some pretty boring things, but hopefully it’ll give you some insights into how marketing an indie game is a fun and challenging juggling act. So marketing and promoting Star Sonata is my department, so I’ll give some insights into how I go about promotion. I’ve been starting to heavily work on the marketing strategy for Star Sonata over the course of the last month. That survey you guys have taken, is part of my effort to learn more about YOU so I can know who likes to play Star Sonata and why. From that survey we’ll learn who primarily enjoys SS and where they like to visit online so we know where to focus our efforts.

Many of you guys have often sent me emails & private messages asking me why I haven’t gotten SS on this website, or this blog, or this youtuber’s page. Most of the messages I receive from you guys deal with marketing and promotion! The fact of the matter is, I probably HAVE contacted them. We have a spreadsheet of hundreds of various websites, forums, youtube channels, and news sites that we contact for big things, like T22′s launch, and uni resets. We even subscribe to press release services made specifically for gaming. The problem however is for every 100 places we contact, we’re lucky if even one of them bites. It’s not so much Star Sonata’s fault as it’s the way of games journalism, and even journalism itself.

Marketing an indie game is a juggling act, you don’t want to waste time contacting the big websites that don’t consider you newsworthy, and you don’t want to contact the bloggers or youtubers that made one video or blog and called it all off and never posted again. The strategy is simple. Daily I contact youtubers that have small, but dedicated followings, and research websites that NEED the content. We give these sites something to talk about, and we get promotion as well. The plan is to essentially get press on places that are eager for devs to contact them. There are a lot of great youtubers out there with interesting channels, and awesome videos, but none of them ever get the popularity of youtubers like TotalBiscuit, Tobuscus, or SeaNanners. Did you see MartyrA2J’s review of Star Sonata? Amazing right?  We’re all about the indie here at Star Sonata, and if we can support smaller, fantastic channels, then that’s what we’ll do.

Now I know what you might ask next. “Well, yeah okay that’s news, and blogs and stuff, but what about ADVERTISING?” There were lots of changes in web advertising over the last few years that severely gimped us.  Old Star Sonata players might remember the surge of activity we got back in 2009-10. This was due to Google’s advertising platform. Unfortunately things have changed, making advertising on specific websites nearly impossible to do cheaply or effectively.

Another thing that costs a ton of money is things like gaming conventions. We prefer this to advertising on a smaller budget because it allows us to actually interact with our players and future players. We went to PAX Prime this year to see how it’s done, and had our first appearance at the Norwich Game Expo this year. If you know of a gaming focused convention close to you, toss me a PM or an email and I’ll look into getting us an exhibitor space!

We’ve also increased our efforts in our outward communications such as social media and blogs. We’re making an effort to focus on writing blog posts that provide useful information to not only our players, but to non-players as well.

So for the Tl;dr of this post I’ll answer maniac45′s question in as few words as possible:

Yes, we plan on increasing our playerbase. Our plan is to finish conducting research into our target audience and contact youtubers, and smaller blogs & sites that cater to that audience. We also plan on attending various gaming centric conventions as exhibitors to make sure our name and game is consistently out there and on people’s minds. Once we start seeing a consistent gain of players we’ll start pushing for the bigger websites, youtubers, and bloggers.

If you are a developer with questions about marketing, toss me an email at marty@starsonata.com! I’d love to chat with you!

This week’s update is going to be rather short, I only worked half the week due to the Thanksgiving holiday!

I started last week doing a little bit of cleaning up. When we do holiday events, we often add new galaxies and they tend to clutter up the map. After this Halloween’s Zombie Rat Invasion I am sure everyone noticed the map was a complete mess… so I have created a new holiday map layer where all holiday galaxies will end up. This will include the future Lapland, Easter Warren and Egg Hunting galaxies as well as all levels of Plaguespace. I’ve also moved all the current Plaguespace galaxies from their current layers (Earthforce, Subspace, Celestial Garden, Wild Space) into this new layer. Your maps should look much nicer!

After tidying up the map clutter, I started on something I think is much more exciting. For those who aren’t aware, one of our volunteer content developers has been working on a very exciting and interesting new zone targeted at players ranging from levels 40 to 120. Unfortunately, they were unable to get this finished before real life intervened and they had to take a leave of absence. I had collaborated a little bit with them on the zone while they had been actively working on it so last week I took up the mantle of finishing it.

This new zone is group of galaxies called the Color Empires. These areas are inhabited by a race of sentient crystal beings who send the player on a very exciting series of missions ranging from mining, assassination and even to ship capture. Most of the work has already been finished; missions written, galaxies created, items made, etc. I am just taking the time to make sure those missions are fully implemented and making sure everything looks great. This will officially launch with the next universe reset and should provide a very nice amount of exciting level-up content for newer players.

That’s all I have for this week’s update, come back next week for a full-sized update. As always, feel free to comment on the forums with suggestions and other feedback!

Yup, it’s that chilly time of year again, nights are short, dark and cold, unless you live really down south, in which case enjoy your summer!
However, this all means one simple thing: It’s Christmas time! And that means if you’ve been a good boy or girl, kept your workers fed and didn’t abuse those Crack Whores you’ll get lots of goodies from Astro-Santa. But how will Astro-Santa know what to get?! Clearly, you need to send him a letter, a Christmas Letter so he knows.

That’s right! It’s time for our annual Astro-Santa Christmas letter competition. Same rules as usual, send Astro-Santa (or maybe the Astro-Elves) a lovely letter, for what things Astro-Santa should get people, or just to raise their Christmas spirits. You have until Friday 20th of December to get your entries in. Winners will be chosen shortly after the end and awarded prizes when the event starts. Prize includes some flavour of unique item (permanent holoprojector or soundprojector, or mix of the two) and an assortment of Christmas related items, as well as their letter in the game.

Submissions can be made via the forum discussion topic at the end of this post

Note: We may disqualify a person or entry for reasons we see fit.

Another new super item currently under development is the Shield Inversion Device for Shield Monkeys.  There are tech 9 and tech 20 versions of this. These devices reverse polarity on a portion of the Shield Monkeys shields and funnel them at a target, simultaneously reducing both shields.

The tech 20 version, “Large Shield Inversion Device” takes 1,000 energy over 10 seconds to charge up, but upon use, saps an addition 8,000 shields from the ship firing it. The target is hit with 4,000 energy damage, and a shield debuff that takes off an additional 16,000 shields over 4 seconds, for a total of 20,000 damage before resists.

The nice thing is that only the 4,000 energy damage is reduced by the targets resists. Be careful, though, because since the bulk of the damage inflicted with this super item is in the form of a shield debuff, it will not stack with other shield debuffs, so if you have multiple people attempting to use this item on a single target, make sure to stagger the attacks. It also takes a half second before the damage is actually inflicted, so careful aiming is also required.

This week I was asked to answer the weekly dev questions, so here we go.

Me!!

First, let’s start with a question asked by The Crazy Game Master. They ask,

“IIRC, you were gone from SS for a very long time. Where’d you go? What did you do? Why’d you come back? (Not saying that we’re not all REALLY happy you are back).”

I was first asked to work on content for Star Sonata by Atlum (everyone remembers Atlum and Code Herder, right?) in late 2005. Over the next few years I did content projects on the side of my crappy regular job and churned out a bunch of stuff; parts of the Nexus, Tortuga, Aug Tweaking, Enigmatic Sector, etc. I ended up leaving in 2008. This was because I headed off to university. During my time at uni I pretty much didn’t do anything for Star Sonata and I stopped playing (mainly due to coursework and a distasteful, shameful addiction to WoW). I really got roped back in right before C2 was going to launch in 2011. Jeff asked that I come back and refurbish the Nexus. I was still pretty low key then though. The following year, 2012, I graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science. I had a hard time finding an entry level programming job in the area I wanted to live and Jeff offered a position as a Content Developer / Programmer. So, I’m here full time now.

The next questions are from Arias. They ask the following things,

“1. Hours of SS played weekly?
2. Recent content influenced?
3. As you have a role in major content, how’s the Adum-themed zone going?
4. Any plans to redo the Ur’Qa UZ?”

So, first, how much do I actually play Star Sonata? I probably put in 10 hours a week onto my main, Calypso. Most of this is checking up on bases so I can set colony prices or toss excess metal from my mining base. The rest is spent leveling up my Sniper alt, Evil Calypso. Yes, that’s me.

Second, recent content influenced. The entire Subspace Assault ‘expansion’ was pretty much my project. The alien invasion mechanic is something that has been planned for a long time and a little work had been done on the programming, but for the most part, everything from lore, language, missions, instances, invasions, etc, was something that I started and finished over the better part of a year. Most recently, I’ve been working on server programming related to the forthcoming class rebalance. Jey is busy with a lot more important things (some of which, even with a uni education, only vaguely makes sense to me), so a lot of this content programming falls to me.

Third, the adum-themed zone is going swimmingly. It will consist of a set of instances, a single player instance where one player completes the trials of adum to get a key that unlocks a multiplayer boss. Most of the work on this is finished, I will be doing some balance testing sometime in the near future and I hope to have it live next universe.

Fourth, the UrQa Uber Zone. Everything related to the planning of this area, etc, was safe in analog storage (a notebook), and I’ve moved it all into a pretty elaborate series of gDocs. I’d like to work on this again sometime soon, but there are some other projects that take priority, chief among them, working on the new-player experience some more. We also want to flesh out the existing tech levels a bit more before we start barreling towards T23 (which is what this project would probably turn into).

The last question for today comes from Captain Fatbeard, They ask,

“ask him why he decided on the african names for T22…”

Are you sure you’re thinking of T22? Those names are not African. Perhaps you’re thinking of the Mzungu missions in Enigmatic Sector which are written in pidgin-Swahili? If you are thinking of T22, you mean my pseudo-mangling of a dead language originating in the Indus Valley? It’s because the aliens don’t know Standard Galactic English.

That’s all the time I have for the dev questions this week, hopefully you enjoyed a look into why I’m here, what I’ve done and what I plan on doing. Feel free to post comments, etc, in the forums.

Super items are super awesome, that’s why they’re super items. They let us do really cool things like this new item:

This is a super item I polished off earlier. For Fleet Commanders this superitem amplifies the power of their aura projector for extra energy usage. This isn’t energy your ship uses in total, or a negative energy tweak, it increases the energy the aura uses itself, something we haven’t done before quite like this (weapons and electrical tempering can do it, but that’s it). The power benefit from this superitem works exactly like the Fleet Commander skill bonus and adds up with it and we can also use the item for it to affect the range of the aura projection.

A great thing superitems can do is deploy drones which don’t count to your normal drone slots (next patch), so they make nice for superitems for classes that both do and don’t use drones. Such superitems would be the Sniper’s Blind and Super Thunder Drone for Engineer.
For those of you who remember the days of pre-beef Sniper, Sicuro had this idea I always liked of Sniper Blinds and now or soon you will have them. They’ll help conceal you and friends by decreasing your visibility, increasing your radar and giving you some offensive bonuses like damage.
The Super Thunder Drone for Engineers provide a nice energy regeneration aura for your allies and a chaining laser inflicting negative energy recharge against your enemies. The drone is also equipped with something a little extra for that extra little punch.

Speed Demons get an Overdrive device which temporarily frees them from negative effects like gremlins and critical hit side effects to allow them to get away from sticky situations.

That’s all for now, more to come soon.

This week’s post is primarily going to detail some more class changes that are coming with the rebalance; specifically changes relating to Sniper and Sniper Analysis.

First though, I want to discuss a few more changes coming to transwarps! This past week I’ve found and fixed a few issues. One, you will no longer be able to transwarp to non-player-vs-player galaxies when under the effects of the PvP timer. You can’t use a wormhole to get into Earthforce Space after you’ve initiated PvP; you won’t be able to use a transwarp to either. Two, if you are warping to a galaxy that is flagged as ‘non-slave’, for instance, the Nexus, slaves will not be warped along with you. Both of these issues were oversights with the original implementation and the fixes will be live with the next patch.

Now, Sniper Analysis. As it stands right now, Sniper is overpowered primarily due to Analysis. The damage bonus it gives is absolutely massive, and worse, players can also use collision code to deal the analysis bonus damage to targets other than the one they’re analyzing. This was never the intended function. It’s also not a very exciting mechanic. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen people sit around in a boss room for ten minutes to build analysis so they can just unload on a boss and kill it immediately; again, not the intended functionality. I know not everyone agrees, but it is definitely time for a change… and changes are definitely coming.

Perhaps one of the biggest is that your analysis will be toggle-able via a new item, the Sniper Analyzer. When equipped the Analyzer enables you to build SA on your target. If you put the Analyzer in your hotbar it will display a charge bar on the icon that shows how much analysis you have on the target. This means instead of having to constantly check your Event chat channel for Analysis messages (which are being removed), you can simply check the visual in your hotbar. It will also be useful to keep in the hotbar for hotswapping purposes.

How you build analysis is different as well. Currently you just keep an enemy targeted for a length of time and you passively build analysis on that target. With the rebalance, charging analysis will require that you fire on and hit your target. Each projectile and laser hit on the analyzed target will add to your analysis timer at a rate equal to the following formula; time added = recoil / # of bullets / MF level. For instance, if you are multifiring two Excommunicators with a 1.5 second recoil (1500 milliseconds), each bullet that hits the target would add 150 milliseconds. Bullets that hit incidental targets do not count towards building analysis.

This is because you won’t want to hit incidental targets anymore; bullets that hit incidental targets also no longer grant bonus damage. Currently you can sit in a galaxy with the boss targeted using something like a Hot Glue Sprayer and also clear spawn because the analysis bonus you have on the boss applies to all the bullets fired. With the rebalance, individual projectiles will check the target they hit against the target currently under analysis. If they don’t match up, they don’t grant bonus damage. Finally, analysis will have its bonuses cut in half, but it will also only take half the time to build; instead of 10 minutes to build analysis, it will only take five.

These are some big changes and I know not everyone is going to be entirely happy with them, but they need to happen to bring Sniper damage in line with some of the other classes. Sniper will still be the damage king when it comes to PvE, but the gap is going to be a lot smaller than it currently is. Hopefully this is going to encourage squads to bring along more than just Shield Monkeys and Snipers. Also keep in mind that as we make these changes we will be rebalancing existing content so it doesn’t require the insane damage output that we currently are forced to require to make things difficult. Overall bringing Sniper more in line with other classes will make all content more accessible for everyone.

So that’s this week’s update. I’ll be taking a half-week this week due to the holidays so I will either be posting a shortened update next week or taking the week off. I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving! Feel free to post comments and questions in the forum post!

This month is all about STUFF, and getting that STUFF and making it better STUFF. Okay, I’ll be serious. This weekend you’ll see a 25% increase in bindomite drops from dg’s, 50% increase in workers speed, and 25% increase in experience!

The event will run from Friday at 1:00pm EST to Monday at 12:59pm EST.

Hey Star Sonatians! This is the first of hopefully a fun series of posts from your dev team where we answer your questions about the dev team, certain policies, etc. If you want to ask us a question for it to get answered in next week’s post toss it over to this topic.

This week’s questions were directed to me, Bageese AKA Marty by the player Starwyrm.

1. Hours of SS played weekly?

I don’t really “play” Star Sonata anymore, unlike the rest of the dev team who are very active in game. The reason being is that I am responsible for making some really tough decisions that directly affect the players, where other devs create cool stuff and you see it much later than when they made it. I don’t play actively because I don’t want to develop biases towards or against any groups of players, so I can be as impartial and fair as possible. However I often enjoy making new characters and trying out the nexus or exploring around, but I don’t play on my main character much aside from little bouts of dging or dueling in colo. So in direct answer to your question, on my main I might play an hour a week (duel me in colo!), whereas I play on alts for maybe 5 hours a week. Before I became community manager I think I played 20-30 hours a week.

2. What recent content have you at least influenced?

Jeff called me the planner at one point in my SS career. While I don’t directly influence content, I like to make sure the dev team has larger goals in mind and we’re working towards those goals. I LOVE organization and action based on being organized. In late 2012 we had a lot of unhappy players calling out some specific issues that we were not addressing, Jey, SI and I organized a meeting that all developers were invited to where we addressed specific concerns that the players were unhappy about. We’ve been continuing this trend of large team meetings every 3-4 months since. A lot of what I influence is more like game code oriented stuff, like PVP, BVB, economy, etc. Content isn’t really my forte. I DID redesign Sol at one point and used fancy math to make all the planets actually have distances reflective of their actual distances in our Solar System.  That was fun.

I tend to be a big voice on Solo Berserker game play, and a supporter of all classes having a solo role and a squad role. I love talking about that one time as a zerker where I fought a 10 man squad solo… no one died of course, but I held my own… People couldn’t decide if I was a sniper or an SD and then freaked out when I multi fired five weapons… Good times. My setup is horribly outdated, so if you’re in entry level t21 gear, toss me a pm and we’ll duel in colo! Or you could toss me a pm anyways and most likely annihilate me.

3. What is your position on the dev team and what does that involve?

My official title is “Community Manager” or “Community Admin.” In the dev team we don’t have an overall hierarchy. Jeff, Jey and I would be the “admins” or the decision makers in regards to major issues, with Jeff being content, Jey being server, and me being player affairs. Basically we make the final call and have the most access, but a lot of decisions are made by the team as a whole with discussion furthering progress.

Above I said I’m a community manager, and then I am the decision maker in regards to player affairs. So I like to say that I work on everything that’s not actually making the game. I am in charge of the moderation team and with developer, player, and moderation team feedback, I edit and create the rules of the game. Any time someone gets a ban, or a mute longer than two hours, I am the one directly behind it most of the time.

I am also responsible for the customer service and quality assurance teams and setting policies regarding their operation. I currently oversee five AMAZING volunteers that help on the forums, support tickets, and general feedback for developers.  I am also the primary responder on all tickets not related to bugs, with assistance from Jey, Blue Dwarf, and SI depending on the nature of the ticket. Support tickets currently take up about 25-50% of my current work schedule, and I do anything from assistance with account recovery, to billing issues, refunds on slaves, gear depending on the issue, combing through activity logs, etc.

Working with Jeff, I also am trying to direct our marketing, and while marketing an indie game is incredibly challenging it’s also a ton of fun. The trick of marketing an indie game is to figure out how to promote your game without spending any or spending little money, since that money would best be served improving the game. I’ve been researching conventions to attend for indie games, youtubers to contact, and marketing strategies. With WinterWind, The Vert, and The Suit’s amazing assistance I was able to put together the 2013 survey that I’m using to figure out who plays Star Sonata currently so our advertising going forward is targeting the right people.

And finally, I’m responsible for overseeing player relations, whether this be mending relationships with players that haven’t had an ideal experience, social media management, and events. I try to be fairly active on the forums, reading and scouring topics to find what sorts of things are plaguing the community so I can highlight those in meetings with developers. I try to be the bridge between the Dev world and the Player world explaining to Devs why they need to change, implement, or improve something, and explaining to the players why something can’t happen (bonus points if you caught my subtle reference in that sentence).

So to conclude this exceptionally wordy post, I do a lot of little and different things, instead of focusing on one major task.

Hi guys.  Today I’d like to show a preview of one of the new class super itemsunder development called a “Large Field Hospital”.  It’s a non-sticky, class locked super item for Shield Monkeys, and is tech 17.  There’s a smaller, cheaper tech 5 version called simply a “Field Hospital”.

This item takes 90 seconds to charge up with a total energy cost of 9000. In addition to the energy charging cost, it requires an instant consumption of 12000 shields in order to use.

Upon use, the Shield Monkey and all allies and their possessions gain a 75% resist all aura that lasts for 5 seconds. A drone called a Large Field Hospital Drone is deployed with a 30 second lifetime. This drone has high resists, and has a shield transference on board that heals targets for 1000 shields every 2 seconds, and imparts a 3 second shield regen aura on the target that regens shields at 4000/s.

The drone is created partially with the Shield Monkey’s own shields, and you can see a center concentration of shield in the middle of the drone. This shield shrinks to nothing over the course of the drones 30 second lifespan, so there is a visual indication of how long this drone has before it disappears.

In the following demonstration video, you may notice that I deploy my 3 temporary drones, and then use the super item to deploy this as a 4th drone.  There is new code that’s going in that causes all drones deployed by super items to not count towards your personal drone limit.  This means that using a super item that creates a drone will not diminish your normal ability to use drones.  This change should be especially useful for Engineer who is getting some new super items that deploy drones, since using these won’t reduce his normal DPS.