Hello again everyone As I said in my previous blog post my next Quality Assurance and developer project was going to take a quick look at drone size, and in specific this means that I will look at the size of temporary drones across all levels – tech 0 to tech 22!

This is also a suggestion proposal open to all kinds and types of feedback and discussion, so you can have a large impact on what the final product will be!

The reason to why I find this important is that several drones are way oversized compared to player ship hull space, just take a look at the Mini Blue Alpha Drone, with 48 size at tech 4 you pretty much need a Bulk Trader to use these drones in a tech 4 ship if you want any leftover hull space for gear and loot And another example is the tech 2 MagCannon Drone, with its 50 size it is the same size as the tech 20 Armada Inferno Drone! This just screams of unbalance

Drones have never had a proper balance sheet so with the help of yclepticon I made a size formula that gives us some guidelines to what drone size ideally should be. It gives us the power of designing each individual drone with modifiers towards their tech level, source, type of drone and so on From levels 16-22 I added a small additional increase to drone size because it seems that size is more appropriate at these levels than the levels from 0-16. And for you seers – I made a special value that lowers size on mines so they come out at 30% of the size of a regular drone

Here is a chart showing the new drone size values according to the new formula I plan to use. Pretty much all drones between tech 0-16 will see a rather drastic size decrease and from 16-22 there will also be size decrease as well but not to the same degree.

The old sizes are shown in this chart above, where one can see that drones at tech level 0 started out at 15-20 size, and apart from a few exceptions, they normally ended up at around 30-40 size at tech 10. With the new sizes no drones below tech 10 will exceed 30 size, and drones between tech 0 and 5 will on average be reduced with 66% size. Drones between tech 5 and 10 will on average be reduced with 56% size, and between 10 and 20 on average 35%

Keep in mind that this is only a QA suggestion proposal, so I will more than gladly discuss this on the forum, and I welcome ideas and feedback

This week’s update is going to be a little shorter and will cover some more upgrades and changes coming with the improved Nexus.

One of the main goals in reworking the Nexus was to improve flow and really give a new player a much better handle on the game. Recently, I just finished up two more mission goals to further augment the starting experience. The first of these is the use item goal. This mission goal is rather self-explanatory; it lets us specify an item the player has to use. The primary reason I added it was to showcase the starting super item on a new player’s Zebucart. Super items are extremely powerful for the low level player and can make their life easier so we felt it was definitely important to introduce them early. With the new use item mission goal we can easily do that now.

Secondly, I’ve added a docking goal so we can explicitly state to a player where they need to go. We can tell the player to dock places in mission text, but having a goal means we can plant a giant mission indicator over the base for the player to make a it a bit more obvious. We’ve been trying to remove as much docking as possible from the Nexus, but when we do want them to dock, we want to make sure a new player knows it and more importantly, where!

Other improvements have been made again with the UI functionality. Currently when you complete a mission that rewards an item, the game automatically opens up your main ship inventory. During our testing we noticed that it was a little annoying to always have to close your inventory when undocking, so the game also takes care of that for you now. This will only happen if the dialog was opened up by a mission though (so it won’t automatically close the inventory dialogs you open up yourself!).

That’s it for this week’s update! I’ll be back again with another update next week. Until then, feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums!

This week’s update is going to focus on another new mission features that I’ve worked on the past week. Keep reading to find out more!

This past week I finally got to the Deep Space section of the Nexus. As I was going through the missions there, I came to the first mission in the Augmenter Tweaking chain. It requires that players find a Minor Docking Augmenter. This isn’t that big a deal outside the Nexus, but inside that’s a very, very specific request for a new player. Ultimately, I decided to move Augmenter Tweaking (and Focus Selection) outside of the Nexus, but it left me wondering a few things; mainly, why don’t we have missions that can take items from categories?

That thinking led to a new mission goal I have been working on, the Egg Carton, or a mission goal that lets you turn in any combination of items (or easter eggs)  from a set of items. With this mission goal content developers will be able to flag items with a set, for instance, Minor Augmenters, and then specify a ‘collect item’ mission goal that will accept any items from that set. This will let us reduce mission bloat a lot for turn-in type missions and make some earlier missions, like the Augmenter Tweaking one, a whole lot easier for new players to finish. A very good example of where this could be extremely useful is in Lyceum. Between the Honorary Mention and Diplomas, there are over 50 turn-in missions. With this new mission goal, I can reduce that number to 2, and offer the added benefit of mixing and matching blueprints!

This mission goal has a few turn-in options as well. If you try to complete with exactly the number of items from the set the mission requires, it will take all of them. If you try to turn in with more items you get two options provided via a pop-up menu. The first lets you pick which items you want the mission to take. The second lets the server automatically pick the items until enough have been taken to fulfill the mission requirement.

Finally I needed a way to let players know what items belong in a set. For that I have my first solution, which is to put a colored field in the item tooltip as in the example image above. However, that is not finalized and I would like to get player feedback on that. I could change the tooltip text to be reliant on having the appropriate mission to be visible, or put it as part of the general tooltip text so it doesn’t stand out as much. Player feedback on this is definitely appreciated so I can come to a final decision on this.

So that’s it for this week’s update. I’ll be back again next week with another update, but until then, please post questions, comments or suggestions in the forums!

So things have been a little quiet on my end for a little while, so I thought I’d give an update as to what’s going on behind the scenes.

Class Rebalance Contest

We have our finalized list of winners but we’re doing final checks to make sure there are no duplicates. I said in a thread that people with multiple accounts would only have one account for the contest, and our final step is confirming the individuals getting prizes are actually different people. Right now it looks like there are 15 testing badasses among you that received 10 or more points! These people will be announced next week once I chase Jey down to help me with the final checks. Winners will be contacted by me to discuss your custom skins.

Compensation for Team Experience: 

Since team EXP was rather broken for a month, we’re giving one month of double team exp. Unfortunately we require a micropatch (a scheduled server restart) for this and we were unable to start the event on the first of the month like I wanted. I am scheduling a Micropatch with Jey and the 31 days of double team EXP will start immediately following. I am expecting the Micropatch to be no later than Friday, May 9th.

Monthly Events

The monthly event for April kinda didn’t happen. Things have honestly been a little chaotic back here for the month of April between various team emergencies and people moving around doing jobs they’re not quite familiar with. April’s Monthly event will actually start today and last through Wednesday at 12:00 EST! May’s event will start on time.

Skinning Contest

In between the chaos, Jey has been working on the new skinning system for ships! We are going to be doing a contest for this skinning system. The details of that contest will be announced in a post following shortly after this one.

Steam Greenlight

We were one of the first 30 games on Steam Greenlight, but unfortunately never got much in the way of traction on that website. However, the folks at Steam have been Greenlighting 75 games to go onto Steam regularly every two to three weeks. We are now in the top 75, but there is no guarantee we’ll stay there! We need your help to get on Steam! Vote for us today!

Much like the past month or so, this update is going to focus on more changes to the Nexus and low level game play. It will also address a few more features that are being added to smooth out the UI for newer players! Keep reading to find out more!

The Nexus is coming along very well. All the content on both sides, Cadet and Volcom, up to Deep Space have been streamlined to remove all the backtracking and pointless docking. They’ve also been rebalanced to make them easier with the new player in mind and all the galaxies have been reworked slightly to make the flow of progression through the Nexus a lot smoother. Most recently, in the past week I looked at the Contracosta and Honey Moon dungeon arms.

The content in both of these dungeons arms was significantly overtuned for the players we wanted to complete them. Contracosta received the bulk of the changes. I’ve moved the ‘stations’ that you have to destroy to ambush spawners so they don’t stick around after the player kills them. I’ve also turned the fight against the Ganglinite Research Gamma station into a mini-event similar to Whiskey Outpost. Instead of going it alone against an army of Micro-Zebus and defense drones, the player is now given backup in the form an allied Volcom army. Not only does it make the mission a lot easier to complete, it makes it a lot more fun and engaging. Honey Moon received a few changes for difficulty as well. Firstly, the AI in both Dagger and Cutlass Caprice were unteamed. Most of the difficulty in those areas were the fact a new player would get swarmed. I’ve also toned down Urzod significantly. Having him call for reinforcements just overwhelmed new players who don’t know how to handle AI swarms yet.

I’ve also made a few other changes to help out new players server side, the biggest of which is that docking in an AI base will now refill 50 energy and 50 shields per second. This isn’t enough to be extremely useful for higher level players, but for the new player this kind of regen will ensure that if they dock because of low shields, they’ll be back in action a lot faster than they would have before.

On the client side I’ve made a few more improvements to the pop-up mission agent dialog as well as another change to station UI. For the pop-ups I shifted the typing animation from a frame based animation to a time based animation. This will make sure that jumping into a galaxy with a lot going on (which can lag your client and slow the framerate) won’t slow down the speed the text types out. I also removed the big close button from the agent dialog and made a few modifications to the accept button so it can handle all the usage conditions. It didn’t make much sense to have two close buttons on that dialog and it allows for the mission vendors name to be visible for all missions (which is a definite win for immersion!).

For the station UI, I am sure some of you have already noticed a button underneath the mission list that reads ‘Contact Agent’. This button when clicked will automatically open the first available mission at that station. It can also be used to avoid double clicking to open missions. Clicking on the mission you want in the list and then hitting that button is a bit easier to understand for a new player. The second change I’ve made that you probably don’t know about is that I’ve added a new button to the bottom of the ships tab in AI stations. This button is the ‘Buy or Upgrade Ship’ button and when clicked will automatically take the player to the hull tab of the trade bay. Again, this was done to help new players. Upgrading your ship is one of the most important power increases in the early game but it isn’t the most intuitive process. Hopefully this button will help alleviate some confusion — they can go to the ships tab to see their ship and click this button to easily see if the base they’re docked at has any alternatives.

So that’s it for this week’s update. I’ll be back again with another post (perhaps the final one!) on the Nexus! Until then, feel free to post questions, comments or suggestions in the forums!

In this video, I demonstrate two new convenience features that we’ve been working on: auto-targeting and auto-credit scooping.

Auto-targeting eliminates the need to select a target before attacking it. If you have no target already selected and shoot at an object that is either a mission goal to kill, something that you have hostility towards, or just an aggressive AI, then as soon as you shoot, that object will be automatically selected and your shot will track towards it.

Auto-credit scooping works in two ways. The first is that if you have a scoop equipped and fly near any credits that you would normally be allowed to scoop, then those credits get automatically scooped. The second is that for 5 seconds after you kill something, those credits will fly towards your ship. In effect, you can clear out a whole DG level or kill most guys at normal range/speed and get all the credits automatically without having to go and scoop them.

This will be on the test server in the next day or so and require a test client to use, so please check it out and give your feedback. In particular, we need to test the credit scooping in various squad type environments to make sure that nothing too crazy happens.

Much like the last few weeks, this week’s update will continue detailing changes to the Nexus as well as a few new mission features that will be coming with the early game changes.

I did a lot of work with the the mission system this week after some initial testing. The end result was two new mission goals that should make life a lot easier for newer players. The first of these is the new Proximity Goal. With this, content developers can specify any object in any galaxy as a location that players need to fly to in order to progress their mission. It will then require the player to be within a specified distance of that object and will put a mission marker above it. This pretty much lets us do ‘hey, fly over there and check out this nebula’ type missions that we couldn’t do properly before. An example of this is in the Fly Dungeon. Instead of vague mission text that says ‘go find the Maggot’, I instead gave a proximity goal to explore the sun he spawns near. When a player gets near, it completes that mission, auto-opens the mission to kill the maggot and spawns him. This hopefully illustrates how useful this goal will be for low level content. It lets us guide new players around galaxies to better help avoid confusion

The second new mission feature is a new mission goal called a Motion Goal. This essentially lets us check for thrust, break or turn actions that the player does and was added so we can further slim down the tutorial bot. Instead of getting the W, A, S, D key information from the tutorial bot when you start a new player, you’ll now get it from a mission. This makes it a lot easier for us to time the actual starting missions (killing a Volcom attacker if you’re a cadet, or proving yourself to the Volcom if you’re a pirate). It also is a little less confusing since you’re getting your information from one source (the mission dialog) instead of three (mission dialog, mission tracker and tutorial bot). Along with this I’ve added a new feature to auto-completing and auto-starting missions that lets us set a delay between the completion of the previous and start of the next mission. This gives the player a little time to breathe between the missions in the movement tutorial missions (and lets us give them mission completion text). Overall, I think the new mission based tutorial will play a lot better and be a lot less confusing for new players.

Finally, a few of the bosses in the Nexus are going to be seeing some changes, specifically, Rattie Moe and Vorian the Rogue. Both of them were extremely difficult for new players. Vorian was extremely confusing, so he will no longer jump around the galaxy and force you to find him. It was a good boss design, but not for a level 15 player. Instead he will do a new super item translocate. This keeps him moving around, but not in a way that can get players lost! Rattie Moe just did way too much damage for a new player to handle. That’s being significantly toned down.  Between these two though, perhaps most importantly, Rattie Moe is finally getting the robotic-space-rat squeak he deserves. Even doing less damage he’s more terrifying than ever!

So that’s it for this week’s update. I’ll be back again with more progress on the Nexus (and a lot closer to completed). As always, feel free to post questions, comments or suggestions in the forums!

This week’s update is going to again continue discussing changes to the Nexus. It’s also going to discuss a few new features for the new Ally AI type announced last week as well a some more changes to mission pop-up dialogs.

As I announced last week, I’ve been working on a new AI type known as Ally. From the base concept, I’ve expanded Allies quite a bit. One of the biggest changes was the addition of Faction Allies. Faction Allies are like regular allied AI but with a few special exceptions. Firstly, they’re aligned with either the Earthforce Cadets or Volcom Pirates (for those of you who don’t remember, the faction you choose from when you create a new character). Secondly, a faction ally will still attack players of the opposing faction but will never attack players of the same faction. Thirdly, a faction ally will only assist players of the same faction. Finally, a non-attackable faction ally can still be attacked by players with the opposing faction.

This leads to some really interesting stuff we can do in the Nexus now. For example, we are adding a roaming Cadet and a roaming Volcom that are both faction allies to the Nexus. These allies will automatically help players out! They’ll no only help you kill mission AI, but maybe even more useful, take care of those pesky flies outside Janitor’s Outpost. It also let me rework Whiskey Outpost so that you can never shoot ships on the players ‘side’ — but still allows players from either faction to participate in the missions at the same time! This fixes what was perhaps the single biggest issue with trying to do an epic space battle mission — so you can be sure that you will see some more of them in the future.

I’ve also quite a few other changes to improve mission flow through the Nexus; the biggest of which right now is the removal of Cadet Academy. During testing it was noticed that nothing really happens in Cadet Academy at all. There are some drone training missions, which are kind of lame by the time you get to them but really, all it served as was a mission hub and an extra jump to get places. So it’s been removed. We’ve renamed the initial galaxy on the Cadet side to Cadet Academy, and Earthforce Trading Outpost to just Earthforce Outpost now. This enables us to have a very nice mission flow where players get guided from their starting galaxy into the Nexus with no backtracking.

As for the pop-up dialogs that I am sure everyone hates at this point (due to the bug this week)! I’ve made a few more changes to the way they work. Firstly, the annoying space at the top that used to only read ‘MISSION AGENT’ has been revamped. Instead of the static image, that area now contains the title of the mission. This has let me move that title out of the text box on the dialog. I’ve also changed the animator that ‘types out’ text for the pop ups. You can now click on it to instantly finish the mission text. This will be extremely useful for those who don’t feel like waiting. The typing text animator also now autoscrolls if the text is too long for the text box to make it easier to read.

That’s it for this week’s update! Progress on the Nexus has been great so far and I’ll be back again next week with another look at what’s going on with the revamp! As always, questions, comments and other feedback are appreciated!

Hello everyone! As promised on the forums I have been doing some QA work on high end missile launcher and fighter bay balance. The tech levels that might see some small changes are tech 18-22

This blogpost is a suggestion proposal, which means that everything in this blogpost is proposed suggested stats, and I would like to hear your opinion Any suggestions and ideas are welcomed!

A player pointed out that tech 22 launchers weren’t properly balanced, so the more rare alien launchers had worse stats than the entry tech 22 launchers. The same player also earlier pointed out that there were no freighter fighter bays between tech 16 and 22, so I am also adressing that issue! Thank you for the reports Johnston, I hope my suggestions can close this gap Keep reading to see the exact suggestions.

There will be four overall restructures, which are as following:

• All tech 20-22 capital fighter bays and missile launchers will gain some increased weight, at a maximum of 100,000 (previously weight was a decreasing trend instead of a stable condition)
• There will be 2 new tech 21 fighter bays, as there previously were none apart from the Zeus Throne built-in
• New tech 18, 20 and 21 freighter fighter bays
• Small revamp to fighter/missile launch amount

Let’s start with the list of tweaks to current in game launchers and missile bays :)

Old stats:

New suggested stats:

New fighter bays:

So as you can see, only one fighter bay had a decrease in launch amount, and that was the tech 22 freighter fighter bay. Ideally we want to keep these at a maximum of 2 fighters We also want to keep heavy fighter and freighter launchers at lower weight and size to encourage the use of missiles and fighters across other hull classes as well.

All fighter bays and missile bays are balanced around the tech level, launch amount, launch speed (fighter bays only), size and weight. If you want to suggest any other changes than what I have proposed, then head over to the forum and I will gladly discuss it with you!

This was all for now, my next combined development/QA work might take a look at fighter and drone size across all levels, so keep an eye out for that in the near future

This week’s update is going to further discuss changes to the Nexus. It’s also going to detail a few new features for auto-started missions and a new type of AI!

One of the big things I’ve done this past week is adding a new AI type known as ‘Ally’. An Ally has a few unique features that make it extremely different to any other AI types we currently have. First, Allies will never attack a player or player owned property. This means even if you shoot them, they’ll not fire back. Secondly, Allies will prioritize attacking other AI that have been attacking players. Finally, Allies can be set as non-attackable by players. All three of these features make this new AI type extremely friendly for low level players and it’s seeing a fair bit of use in the new Nexus changes.

For examples, consider Whiskey Outpost. I’ve changed the spawners there so the AI that help the player fight the opposing faction are now Allies. This means you no longer have an accidental shooting of the players ‘team’ leading to all the AI turning on them. It also means the the AI that help the player better prioritize attacking the enemy instead of docking or being otherwise useless. For a second example, I’ve added an ally spawner to Ur Ziq Bana. I know many players have complained about the difficulty of the missions in that galaxy. Now, when you enter, if you have the mission Zobitan himself spawns to assist you! Not only does it greatly reduce the difficulty but it feels appropriately epic! This new AI type is extremely useful and  will definitely be seen in other mission content or boss fights.

Since I am talking about Ur Ziq Bana, it might be obvious that I have completed streamlining the Cadet side of the Nexus. Less than half the mission require docking to complete them now, and the ones that do are mainly focused on training skills or receiving and equipping items. Overall, the entire Cadet side of the Nexus flows a lot more smoothly and guides players galaxy to galaxy instead of always forcing them to go back to base between missions. I think when we have it available for play testing everyone will agree it’s a much quicker and overall more friendly experience.

Other than that, I’ve put a bit of work on making the pop-up dialogs for missions a bit more exciting. Missions that automatically start now have a customized dialog with a few new features! The mission agent portrait will ‘flick on’ similar to an old television. The text for the mission will ‘type out’ as if you are receiving a text transmission and we now display the mission agent’s name! These new additions might not seem like that big a deal, but the help with the immersion quite a bit.

In addition to this change, I’ve pared down a lot of the mission text in the Nexus so it’s more succinct and readable. As much as I love the story aspect of doing missions, having to read a daunting wall of text every few minutes is kind of annoying and definitely detracts from the new-player experience. Instead we’ve placed an increased emphasis on the summary text to make sure new players know what they need to be doing and how to do it!

So that’s it for this week’s update. Expect to see me again next week with another update detailing some more Nexus changes as I’m ready to start work on the Pirate side! As always, questions, comments and suggestions can be directed to the forums!