Jeff

Over the years, many have complained that AI never do anything interesting, they simply fly at you with the hope that whoever designed them gave them good enough weaponry to take you down. Recently, Lucien Slimebottle discovered some flies in The Nexus that will circle players and coordinate a burst attack together. This is the first in a decade, where AI will work together to take players down. Unfortunately, the flies were quickly hunted to extinction in an attempt to stop more of these coordinated AI from appearing. Fortunately, this new mechanic is spreading to other AI, but will only appear next universe!

Jeff’s been working on adding attack patterns to AI, such as a group of enemies circling around you and all firing at you at the same time for a quick kill. Check out the videos below for a preview!

Bursting Video – Circling Video (shown under this)

Hober Mallow

Hober’s been busy making new augmenters with the help of players on Discord (link to discord here). The new augmenters would work similar to currently existing combined augmenters (such as the Marksman and Rage augmenter lines), giving the player more choices in how they augment their ship. If you would like to see the current work on these new augmenters, check out the design document he’s written up. If you have any suggestions for new augmenters, or changes to some augmenters he’s already written up, you can add comments to the document or talk to him on discord.

Pixel

This section is probably the reason you’re here, Pixel’s been working on a huge list of various things:

• Pixel’s recently buffed up termites to once again threaten the universe, and a chance to find a legendary termite mound. These new legendary mounds will, once nearly fully evolved, begin spawning giant termites. You can find more information in the forum thread he’s made, link to it here.
• He’s also added a new Expedition Team Blueprint terraforming project, allowing you to send a team down to a planet/moon’s surface to discover various things, such as a cavern filled with gems, or floating islands in the sky (that you somehow didn’t see), or the Garden of Eden in the middle of a blistering desert planet. You’ll also find hostile creatures and pirates, who will make living on the colony much less safe, and may even lower the amount of resources on the planet or moon!
• He’s also made a BvB colosseum for players to fight in, with special kits and permanent drones available for purchase. Now you’ll be able to test out unique station setups and practice base vs base combat, maybe even recreate a historical base battle?
• He’s added some new capacitors for the Twisted Zone, which will be available next universe.

SunDog

Sun’s been continuing his work on the UrQa race, with a new and final message to translate:

- Uj’qi urQ’oj iiuqok -
Okara qiiQa, ur qua quu’oj, ur kii iq, kii iq’ bakoqaa… kusoQa uka ur quu’iq’.
Ur vo’ba urk’uu. Iq’uu ur’bakoqaa uku jiq’q'uka, kusoQa kii’oq qok akukoiii vo’koquii.
qiiQa qua qokuji’qii, iq urko qokuji’qii. Sunqa iq’ba, iq zurk ur sunqa iq’ba, urk’nik kur.
Ib qa’ik, kak vazuk nik iq’uu, kak jiq’qi koquii urk’qii ur. Iq UrQa.
- UrQ’oj iiuqok nik -

Some information on my work will be shown on discord in english, because none of you seem to understand anything I’m trying to tell you when I say it in UrQa.

MicroCapacitor

• Making repair kits not work until after 30 minute from the death of the base.
• Planning on a t19 Support Freighter based off of Lyceum.
• Adding calculations for terraforming of BonusShields and BonusRadar. This is for Pixel’s new terraforming blueprints, allowing you to create planet-side shield generators and radar sensors to buff your bases in orbit!
• Gonna work on having bots stop shooting below 1% of their energy so they will regen their shields instead of just only shooting. (This will prevent wild bots from somehow not regening shields if they are in constant battle).

Hello, everyone! I am pleased to announce some upcoming changes to bases that should really improve the game experience, especially for newer players. These changes are on track to go live with the next universe reset.

New Base Kits

Loaded with a full complement of X gear (which now includes a Radar as well), these kits build off of the success of Junkyard bases but don’t come with augmenters installed.  You can purchase them at any AI base for an appropriate cost (2.5m at Tech 9, up to 500m at Tech 20).  The older types of base kit that do not come with gear are being phased out and will no longer be available for purchase.  Upgraded kits (i.e. Fortified, Adamantium, etc.) will now also deploy with full X gear (but still no augmenters). Also, Y and Z Upgrade projects have had their durations adjusted to 1 week and 2 weeks, respectively.

Miscellaneous Improvements

Bases have had their hull space increased substantially (100k at Tech 9, up to 500k at Tech 20). You should no longer need extensors for basic industrial activity.  Bases now deploy with a Trading Bay, 25 Rations, 25 Workers, and a sticky item that generates enough Rations to sustain those Workers.  This should eliminate most starvation-related accidents when setting up a new base.

Construction Mechanic

When deployed, Loaded base kits will be in “under construction” status for the first 10 minutes.  During this time, they will not be able to fire their weapons.  A construction animation that indicates the time remaining will play around the base.  This mechanic has been put into place to balance out the fact that bases now deploy with full gear, including a Laser.

Galaxy Assault Mechanic

Bases laid in galaxy assault (BvB) will no longer take up standard base slots. Instead, every player now has a whole new pool of slots for these bases.  Kits that are deployed into the new slots will automatically convert into standard base slots if room becomes available.  Otherwise, they will become abandoned 12 hours after deployment.  The player will receive periodic notifications about the abandonment timer.  This mechanic will help players who have fewer developed characters to compete, since they will still be able to assault galaxies even if they’ve already used most of their base slots for industry.

SunDog

For those working on translating the UrQa SunDog gave us last week, here’s another passage to translate:

“Okara QokujiQa Ooooqi! Kasa iiuqok qui ishi UrQ’oj, ishii urko…”
“P.S.S. Dawn’s Retribution urku Qi’uka, KoQuii banuii qua! KoQuii banuii kii suqqa sunqa qua ba.”
“Ishii niq, ib Qu’ishii qui uu’ko, ur-”

“Kak! Ishi qok urko, ish’kii. Ishi uka ko.”
“Qu’ishii kii UrQa suqqa. Ur’ Qu’ishii aku qua akuq Iq’ Bana.”
“Ur’ Qu’ishii urko? Ib kii ur.”

Pixel

Pixel’s been hard at work again! He’s made some new base missile models, more Twisted content, content fixes and much more! Here’s a screenshot of an early render of the new tech 22 support freighter player obtainable ship.

Jey

New patch is in early preparation stage, should be more details on that next week. Got some new client optimisation in progress which could give a pretty good performance boost all around (new compiler and threads support).

Blue Dwarf

I’ve set the Emperor system messages to instead use the notification system instead of spamming players every 5 minutes, it won’t be in the next coming patch but should be in the one after it (I still need to test a few things to make sure it’s all working correctly).

Blue Dwarf

A while ago Pixel made us some shiny new icons to use in our notification system (the server shutdown and alien invasion messages). I’ve added support to actually use these new icons and more things will be using the system soon!

SunDog

I’ll be posting information on what I’m working on later this universe, in the meantime here’s what I’m working on in the UrQa language:

KusoQa urk’oq uka bakoqaa! Kak qa’quu Oj’qiiQa sunqa ib’ ba! Bakoqaaiii’uq vo uk’urku…
Uj’qii ak’oj vo suqqa urko UrqaQa! Uka Qa’ik! Koquii Qa’ik!
UrQa uj’Qa. UrQa uj’qii Qa’ik kii qiiQa. Vazuk ur kasa, koquii ur ib’. ib’ qok ur.
KusoQa qok urk’qiiQa’oq vazuk. Qokujiii kur KusoQa sunqa akuq’ojj!

If someone can actually translate that and message me I might reward you, depending on how well translated it is.

Pixel

Pixel’s been adding even more drones to the Twisted Zone! Pixel has been hearing that people expected more than one boss so he will start making multiple bosses over time. Here’s a brief list of what’s been added:

• Twisted Blaster & Twisted Blaster Disaster
• TBFD 9000
• Twisted Travel Field Projector
• Upgrade blueprint for Death Striker & Death Striker+

If you wanna get involved join the SS community on Discord.

On a side note he hope you all enjoy the new base holoprojectors added to The Junkyard and the ever watchful Dragon’s Eye in Fortress galaxy!

Ryan

Ryan is still working on some behind the scenes stuff for our new ingame store.

Jeff

Working on finalizing all the numbers for the class change. Found a bug with Seer that they aren’t currently getting the +20% crit chance when not ambushing, and fixed it. Reformatted my hard drives and reinstalled everything after a Windows 10 related debacle.

Ryan

Ryan has been doing more work on our upcoming ingame store, so that we can have discounts and live edits to items for sale in it without having to patch the server.

Jey

Jey’s patch (which we seem to mention every week) is now Very Soon™. Jey will be writing up a blog post and giving out patch notes along with a new beta client later tonight.

Hober Mallow

I finished going over the Earthforce Nexus experience, and cleaned the feeling of progression up nicely. The enemies in the Nexus are significantly easier to kill, and the chance of dying is greatly reduced. As long as you keep up with the upgrades to your ship you will be able to do all of the missions in a decent amount of time.

So, what are you supposed to do with all that free time you have now? Well, that’s what those two extra Wormholes around Voyager’s Last Stop are for! Those wormholes lead to The Building Academy and Arctia, and the player is directed to those areas with introductory missions that push them towards those galaxies. Arctia pushes you towards grouping up with other players, and teaches you about Remote Control. The Building Academy teaches you everything you need to know about stations. This will surely address the issue of new players not having enough to do.

I will move up the level range, addressing content between level 30-100 next (Blue Outpost/Vulcan/Mira come to mind). Expect more from me in the future.

I have also pushed for Tier 3 Commods to drop in crates in Perilous Perilous Space, along with a Dementium Locker that gives a few Dementium Fragments when you open it. This should be in the upcoming patch. I haven’t yet decided on a system for getting Honorary Diplomas from Subspace, but when I do that will be shared with you all.

I have a lot of other little things I’m working on, the most interesting I would say is the implementation and redesign of Class Super Items. I created a post in the General Discussion Forum, come lend your voice! I’m always on Discord and I’m always reading the forums, feel free to contact me about any concerns you have!

Blue Dwarf

More work on the event system, although it’s really not far now (he says). I’ve also taken steps to remove the emp spam and instead use the notification system.

Pixel

Pixel’s been working on skills! Here’s a sneak peak, this is all subject to changes:

Pixel would also want to mention that a lot of current existing players are on Discord now with active developers on the voice chat always able to help, take suggestions and often posts of development progress is presented within the Discord chat.

MicroCapacitor

MicroCapacitor has been working on rebalancing Base Missiles to be worth using and giving some love to low tech blueprints/weapons that people don’t use much.

Blue Dwarf

I’ve been working on more of my event system stuff, I’m now working on support for us to add, modify and delete events from our game admin panel so we can administer them without having to do any server restarts.

Hober Mallow

Class Revamp is steadily moving forward, I’ll have a bit of information to share about a community contest soon. Jeff is working on the Pirate side of the starter area, I’ll take a look at the Earthforce side of the starter area. I also plan on looking at low to mid game items that are clearly either useless/out of place or have obviously better/strikingly similar alternatives and see what can be done to make them useful. That’s about it for new player directed updates.

For the other spectrum of the player base, I’ll also be looking into making Perilous Perilous Space and other Tech 21+ content relevant for Wild Space, this will almost certainly look like an additional chance to drop Tier 3 Commodities/Dementium Chunks and other useful and highly sought after content relevant to Wild Space. I may also add a way to get Honorary Diplomas from doing Subspace bosses.

Auxilium has authorized me to share some interesting information with you all: SM21 and 22 are in the testing phase! How long will they be in the testing phase? That’s not for me to say. But the content exists, it is real, and work is being done on it. You can stop pestering me so much now *cough*-13-*cough* anyway… That’s not the only cool new thing.

The Emperor system is being reworked! Implementation has been approved and should be starting soon. I can’t share everything with you, but expect a system much more interesting and fair than the current one. The current iteration is a sort of King of the Hill style galaxy defense in order to claim the imperial throne, with rewards only being handed out after you’ve claimed the throne… and we want it to be directly linked with Wild Space! Look out for more information in the future.

Pixel

Pixel’s been adding even more content in relation to the mysterious Blanco galaxy! Three new bosses have been added and will be in next universe. Green looking ship is one of the new ships from the Twisted Zone!

We are making changes to the method of acquiring and the power provided by class skills, so that they are relevant to low level players without feeling like a skill point trap.

We will make sure that there is still plenty of variety and choice in how you build your character! I want to stress that we are looking to make these changes as endgame neutral as we can. We may end up having to adjust outliers, but our goal throughout this entire revamp is to avoid taking power away from end game players. 

This is going to be a rather long post, so buckle up and get ready to Focus!

Current Problems

Before we begin, I think it’s helpful to explain our understanding of the problems with the current system. We’ve identified three core problems:

• Low level class skills are not worth getting because each level has such marginal effects, and the costs go up exponentially. The “bang for the buck” just isn’t there.

• Having a ton of class skills that each do very little isn’t fun.

• Players don’t find their identity or play style until later, since class skills are hard to find and you don’t get them until later in the game.

With this in mind, here is how this blog post will be ordered.

• Explain the current system for class skills, and the goals for our revamp.

• Provide the general overview of our revamp and how skill levels will work.

• Share our intended path of progression.

• Wrap up the post.

Phew! Without further ado, let’s dive in!

Current vs New System

Once you’ve maxed out all of your class skills and advanced class subskills, the class has reached the peak of its power via its class skills and every class is properly scaled with each other. The skill system was designed with the end game in mind, but because of this the lower levels have been unbalanced for quite some time. This was further compounded by the strength of AI relative to the player and their assets, which would mean that certain playstyles breezed through AI without worrying about the skills. Other classes struggled even more and were caught in a situation where they were spending valuable skill points on skills that did almost nothing for them. If you were an endgame player making an alternate character, you could power through most of this frustration with game knowledge. New players, however, were immediately faced with an unreasonable power disparity.

Our goal is to ensure that all classes feel fun and exciting to play at all points in the game, and that players have access to constant progress. The current system of Focus and Class skills going to level 22, and Class Subskills going to level 20 will be removed. You will be allowed to level your two Advanced Class Subskills at any point during your class advancement.

In order to make sure this transition does exactly what we want it to do, we are keeping 5 clear goals in mind that we will refer back to during and after the skill revamp.

• Allow meaningful class skills/class picking at a low level (within the Nexus), while taking up an appropriate number of skill points.

• Reduce the number of levels of class skills, so that each additional level is more impactful.

• Have all the class skills sum up to the equivalent of what they currently are at endgame.

• Make class skills more accessible by putting them in a character tab, rather than hidden in random AI bases.

• Give big chunks of class bonuses for free at specific points of character progression, and smaller bonuses through expensive class zen skills to get the rest of the class bonuses.  The zen skills will be class locked, but not considered a core class skill.

So… what does it look like? Good question!

This may be confusing, allow me to explain.

How are you changing Focus Skills?

Current Focus Skills will be broken into two skills, with the new Focus skill being 50% of the old Focus skill at the new max level of 3, but its bonuses will not be restricted to ship type. The other 50% of the power from the Focus skill will be restricted only to the correct ship type in the form of a Zen skill that stops at level 50. You will have 100% of the old Focus power at [Fleet/Combat/Recon/Support] Focus 3 and Zen of [Heavy Fighters/Light Fighters/Freighters/Capital Ships] 50.

How are you changing Class Skills?

The above system will be modified slightly for Class skills, but there will not be any ship locked bonuses for them. The first level of the Class skill will have ~33% of its total power in the current system, another ~33% will be provided by the second and third levels combined, and the last ~33% will be provided by the Zen skill at level 50. You will have 100% of the old Class power at [Berserker/Sniper/Fleet Commander/Gunner/Engineer/Shield Monkey/Seer/Speed Demon] Class 3 and Zen of [Berserker/Sniper/Fleet Commander/Gunner/Engineer/Shield Monkey/Seer/Speed Demon] 50.

How are you changing Class Subskills?

Class Subskills will not require you to level separate Zen skills in order to obtain your old levels of power, they will simply be 33% of the current level of power per level and will stop at level 3. You will have 100% of the old Class Subskill power of each of these skills at level 3.

Class Zen Skills?

Class and Focus Zen skills will take increasing amounts of skill points up to level 50 in order to obtain the full power of your Class. They will take 510 levels worth of skill points in order to fully max them out. This should push the scaling of your total power to roughly the same point that it is currently.

How am I supposed to level my class skills?

Great question. Gaining Focus, Class, Class Subskills, and Advanced Subskills will all be locked to level. When you get to the appropriate level, you will be given a special skill point that can be spent on any of the available Focus, Class, or Class Subskill skills. There will be a notification that will alert the player to the ability to gain a new class skill, and gaining the skill will be through a new class tab in the character dialog.  Gaining the skill will not cost regular skill points or credits, and can be trained anywhere. Zen Skills will be trained in your Focus and Class base in Lyceum.

Players will get their full class skills by level 1000, which is a further increase of power to low-mid level players. Our tentative path of progression would see players receiving class skill points at levels 5, 10, 20, 40, 65, 100, 150, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, and 1000 for a total of 15 of these skill points.

Closing

We want to move away from punishing players for making wrong choices before they understand how the game works, and adjusting class skills is the first step. We will determine whether or not more steps need to be taken at a later date. Again, here’s our plan.

• Focus and Class skills are being split into 3 levels, with the majority of their power being distributed throughout those 3 levels. The rest of their power will be shifted into Zen of Focus and Zen of Class skills.
• Class Subskills will be split into 3 levels with all of their power distributed into those 3 levels.
• Players will gain their full class skills by level 1000, with class skill points being awarded at specific levels.

With all of this happening, we understand that things can be a bit confusing and you will have questions. Feel free to post questions, comments and concerns on the forums.

Stay tuned, there are more things yet to come!

Ryan

I added the UI for team skill resets, so that project is finished up now. I continued work on our new ingame store for our existing microtransactions, and added support for a new one that we’re working on.

MicroCapacitor

MicroCapacitor has been changing Olympus Expander Blueprints to be more consistent with eachother and changing the expanders themselves to be a tad bit useful.

Jeff

Jeff has been working on lots of fancy ideas, I’m not sure what to tell you about it because he hasn’t told me what to say, so I’ll just say it’s Fancy Tuna fancy.

Blue Dwarf

I’ve fixed another bug with Sniper Analysis, but I need to do testing on it before it can go live. Testing been withheld because I’ve working on the database support for the automatic event system. Once this is done, the first version can go live and start running the weekend bonus events for us.

Hober Mallow

Updated the Delquadrikamdon, you can check this link to see what I’ve done and provide feedback. There may be some minor tweaks as time goes on, but I should be able to get it out to you guys in this upcoming patch.

We have come to a decision about how to deal with class scaling, and are putting the finishing touches on it. I will be sharing the overall vision on the forums shortly, we plan on being as end game neutral as possible. We do not want to disturb the balance as it is at present.

I will be actively engaging in discussion with the playerbase in the coming days about specific low and mid game content, look out for that as well. Other than that there’s nothing big to report! Stay tuned for the patch!

Pixel

Pixel’s been working on a new twisted zone!

Ryan

Ryan is back from his honeymoon! He has been taking it a bit easy since he got back, and finished up the team skill / team xp revamp that was started awhile back. There will be a blog coming up detailing the changes as soon as they are up on test server.

Auxilium

Auxilium has reduced the shieldbank of Ancalagon the Black by 40%. The fight was very tedious already and with the recent change to the Sniper analyzer it got even worse.
Additionally, Timotheus the Red has had it’s shieldbank increased by roughly 350%. The boss mechanics for this fight were often completely ignored and players focused on bursting the boss down as soon as possible.
Finally, the Bana King has received a 15% decrease in shieldbank because the nerfs to the burst series of weapons indirectly made this boss harder.

He’s also increased the spawners for the Earthforce AI ships that players need to kill for Piracy gear after some players were unhappy about the availability of these AI.

Jeff

Changed animation loop code so that effects can loop over longer periods than 32 seconds. Working on changes to Matura Scrapyard in pirate side of the Nexus.

Blue Dwarf

I’ve been working database support required for the automatic event system and making it so that wild bots will enter stasis instead of blowing up when inside arena galaxies (e.g., The Colosseum).

Hober Mallow

Hi, I’m the newest Developer!

I joined with the intention of improving the early and middle game experience for players, here’s what I plan on doing this week.

Support Focus and Fleet Focus are much better at engaging with solo oriented content due to how powerful Drones and Bots are at the lower end and the innate survivability these classes bring to the table from jump. Fleet Commander’s gain bonuses to Bots and Fighters, and have tools that augment those Bots and Fighters as they progress, so at lower levels they are effectively always in a squad. Gunners scale with Missiles, which are already potent before any bonuses and allow them to efficiently combat multiple targets before being overwhelmed. Engineers and Shield Monkey’s don’t scale as hard offensively, but they make up for it with good defensive scaling and efficiency with Drones and Bots. They both can use Bots and Drones, and their class skills (just like Fleet Focus) encourage them to use ships with ample hull space and solar panel slots. They get to use tools that other classes can’t necessarily fit. I’ll be looking at ways to mimic that flexibility for the other classes.

As you can see, these 4 classes all have a lot of wiggle room and allow the player to adapt themselves to different situations with a bit of intelligence. I plan on looking at ways to level the playing field for the Recon and Combat focus classes (Berserker, Sniper, Speed Demon and Seer) at the low end in order to encourage players to explore those classes the way they are played in the end game without feeling penalized for not using Bots and Drones. This may involve reworked super items (I really want to do this anyway), it may involve altering the progression of class skills (Something me and JeffL are going to look into later this week), or it may involve light touches to AI that were balanced with 1v1 combat in mind. More than likely, it will involve a combination of these things.

I’m also in the process of hashing out a rough outline for solo players to acquire Tech 20 skills via Daily Missions without being forced to group up, think Weaponry 20 and Shielding 20 “Dailies” of sorts. I really like the daily system and think it can be used to prevent players from feeling brickwalled as they make their way towards the end game.

I also plan to look into some of the underutilized Class Super Items. Class Super Items should be meaningful, and if they’re not being used then they are probably lacking in some way. I’ll see if I can get the OK to share some tentative ideas with the player base at large for feedback purposes by next week.

That’s all for this week, sorry for being long winded!

Jeff

Working on rebalancing the untanglers. Wormholes will now be smaller when they’re locked and animate nicely back to normal size when they unlock. Wormholes will temporarily pulse a little larger whenever anyone jumps through, and they will play warp sounds when anyone jumps in or out of a wormhole instead of just hearing yourself warp.

Pixel

Pixel has been working on new shiny planets for next universe! Click here to find out more.

Jey

Server code for the patch has passed all my automated tests. Livetest blog post alongside patchnotes will come up soon™

Blue Dwarf

I’ve removed the levels some people had gained from a mission XP exploit, I’ve also done some behind the scene code stuff to reduce possible future issues with missions and help track down issues involving missions.