This weeks update includes some more class rebalance content and some work on the Tech 22 Alien Ships! Like last week, this will be a shorter update because again, I took a shorter week.

For the class rebalance, I have still been working on Seer content. This week I finished up a new ability for Seer that will be tied to Psionic Shrouding called Phase Shift. This is a passive ability that allows Seers to possibly avoid untargeted damage when cloaked. It scales with your level of Psionic Shrouding up to a 50% chance of avoiding untargeted damage. Hopefully this ability helps to get Seers into instances where they so often get completely destroyed by boss area-of-effect. Since it only affects untargeted damage, don’t expect it to upset the balance of PvP too much.

Other than the new Seer ability, I’ve made a small change for the rebalance that will mainly affect Gunners and Fleet Commanders. I’ve changed the functionality of Fighter and Missile Launchers slightly to facilitate salvo launching. Launchers will now ‘charge up’ and only launch fighters and missiles when they are charged. This won’t change the current functionality too much, you’ll still be able to queue normally, but it allows us to have a more strictly regulated cooldown on launchers when we implement Salvo Missiles. It will also allow instant launching since you can ‘charge up’ beforehand instead of having to wait for the launch delay. Charge up time will be reduced if you stack launchers, much like how multiple launchers decrease the launch timer now.

I am sure everyone has seen the proposed change to the T22 Alien Ships that I posted in the forums. I have started implementation of most of those changes and I have a few more details for you here. First, the Rajanicar’ayu, which wasn’t going to be getting any changes, is getting its superitem slightly beefed, they have more shields, do a little more damage and most importantly, now have a cloak. The fighters launched by the cloning pods weren’t powerful enough compared to the other T22 superitems. Also, I have added a special option for fighters to allow them to copy the name of the ship that launched them. This should make the Cloning Pods a little more useful in PvP.

Other than that previously unannounced changed (which I will update the forum post to reflect), I’ve been working on the Capital Ship changes; in particularly the new item for Vazi, the Nest Drone. It’s a special drone that will be able to launch and control a maximum of three special fighters that are unique to the drone. These fighters will be similar to Jovian Fighters and will offer buffs.

That’s this week’s update, as always, questions and comments can be posted in the related forum topic!

Here’s a quick update from the website front. One of the things I’ve been working on recently is a better team ranking page. Until recently teams were only ranked by total score. Now we have a new page that breaks that total down into its constituent parts, so you can see in more detail how well (or badly!) your team is doing.

The page was updated today with popup descriptions of each of the scores, in addition to some aesthetic improvements. You can see the result here. Hit CTRL+F5 in your browser if it looks broken or the button doesn’t work, you probably have an old version of the stylesheet or script cached.

I’d love to hear your feedback on this new design and, more broadly, any ideas you have for team and player listings, profiles and related functionality. What would you like to see?

This weeks update is going to be a little shorter (I took a short week) — but still filled with important information! For this week I’ll be covering a new type of overloader, a new kind of neurotweak as well as some massive bug fixing that went on post patch.

First, the bug fixing. This patch had it’s share of troubles and most of them were fixed extremely fast. Some issues with subspace instances were quickly squashed. The issue with deploying drones in instances? Found and fixed! Also, all the excess prospecting nodes created by the duplication bug have been removed (which was a time consuming and tedious process, but it needed done). As I have said in the past, I’ll be committing a fair bit of time to taking care of issues like these and I’ll keep doing it. It only makes the game better!

Some other miscellaneous updates? Prospecting Scanners will no longer show empty nodes and the Alien Ship Rebalance is well underway. Before it’s finalized I will post a list of suggested changes and let you guys give me plentiful feedback on it.

Now for the new item announcements! This week there are two. They might not be as epic as the Gunner Deathblossom, but they should prove useful to quite a few players.

The first is an Aura Tweak. It is a hybrid of an aura and a neurotweak. This means we can now make tweaks that can buff your party for a limited time without the need of having an aura equipped. Some examples where this might be useful are things like an XP tweak that you could pop to make your squad level faster, or an area-of-effect heal-over-time tweak that a Shield Monkey could pop to keep the squad up in a sticky situation. We can also use them to debuff an entire group of enemies. There are a lot of possibilities to a tweak that works like this so expect to see a slew of them in the near future.

The second item, which personally I find more interesting, is a new type of Overloader called an Charge Overloader. This special variant of overloader charges up, and on your next weapon fire after it’s charged, it’ll do tweak effect on your target. This is useful because it unties tweak effects from specific weapons; that is, you can get the tweak effect from any weapon if you are using a charge overloader. Charge Overloaders, like normal overloaders, can only have one equipped at a time.

The first uses will be for new Seer items called ambush modules. These items also have the added restriction that the effect will only take place if you backstab the target. If they are used successfully though, they will apply a powerful debuff on the target. There are other potential uses for these items though; consider special Shield Monkey variants that add a heal-over-time tweak to their healing target regardless of which shield transfer they are using. Or we could add special Berserker variants that debuff the target if they’re taking it head on. Like the Aura Tweak, there is a lot of potential for this new item class.

With these two new items that use the tweak system, we are also looking at expanding the maximum number of tweak effects to include some buffs that have been added since the tweak system first debuted. Some possibilities are tractor power tweaks and electric tempering tweaks. This is actually not a trivial change, so it might come a little later.

So, that’s it for this week. As always, sound off in the forum post associated with this post!

This weeks update focuses on some changes coming to the alien invasions, some new skill availability, a quick transwarp update and another brand new item that will be making its way to the game soon.

It’s been a rocky first universe for Alien Invasions, there is no denying that. Difficulty has varied wildly and we’ve not been able to find a good balance. Hopefully, this weeks patch will get us a little closer. There are two major changes to the invasion mechanics coming. Firstly, attacks will not be localized to a single galaxy. This means during the 3 hour attack window the layer will be swarmed, something many of you have told me you miss. Secondly, alien bases are getting stronger. In addition to extra shields and damage, they have been given a few new abilities when they level up — mainly in the form of some dangerous new fighters. The miniboss AI you fight in instances have been adapted to work as fighter AI which will be launched by the improved bases. This should definitely increase their difficulty as they cannot be killed while they have other aliens in the galaxy.

I have a few more transwarp details as well. Transwarps will require you to explore the galaxy with the beacon before you are allowed to warp to them. Also, you will not be allowed to use transwarp devices inside instances. These are necessary restrictions and will help keep people on equal footing during universe resets as well. For instance, a player with a transwarp would have a better chance of getting Biologique than one without if they could instantly warp to someplace like Iq’ Bana. It also keeps everyone on an equal footing when it comes to exploration, which is something we keep track of.

As part of the class rebalance, we have decided that moving forward, we are going to add new levels of Remote Control — but with the following caveat. New levels of Remote Control will be locked to your piloting level, minus two. That means you will be required to have Piloting 21 for Remote Control 19 and Piloting 22 for Remote Control 20. The new levels will be available from T21 and T22 content. Expect to see this sometime in the near future.

As for the new item. Again, a screenshot of the tooltip for the announcement!

The Deathblossom device is a special type of Gunner item that will enable them to quickly and efficiently take out large groups of smaller enemies. When equipped it increases their damage output significantly as well as starts firing the weapon currently in use at nearby additional targets. Nearby targets are randomly selected from those that are enemies, in range, visible, etc. The number of targets and energy costs is determined by the item. Here is a brief demonstration.

As you can see in the video, I cleared Rumble 2 extremely fast and with minimal effort, and in testing I could clear Rumble 3 with similar results. Overall, this item is meant to give Gunners a bit of extra firepower they can leverage in situations where there is spawn to clear (and I am sure there are a few alien galaxies where this item would be amazing).

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed yet another look at what’s been going on behind the scenes with me this past week. As always, comments are appreciated! Sound off in the forums if you have an opinion!

This weeks post details my last weeks work including some more details on Transdimensional Warp Devices, some bug fixing and a few changes for the upcoming class rebalance.

Once again it’s Monday! I’ve had a pretty busy week and there is quite a bit to talk about! First, I am sure most people are wondering how they’ll be able to get their hands on a Transwarp device. Players will be able to get their first Transwarp, a tech 0 device, in the Nexus. After that, every five equipment levels a new device will be available in Beta Antares for a modest fee. These devices will be available to everyone and will offer the following jump locations; The Nexus, Sol, Lyceum, Free Market, Kumari, Iq’ Bana, The Mausoleum and The End of the Universe. Keep in mind, you might not be able to access all of these locations from everywhere as devices have a limited number of jumps.

If you are in a team and your team decides to build their own Warp Beacons, those beacons will also be available as destinations for the entry level devices. These beacons can be placed in Wild Space and Celestial Garden. Blueprints for them will also be found in Beta Antares.

If you use the ticket system, you may have noticed that I am now handling some support tickets. We also have recruited someone to make sure the bug forums get better developer attention. As such I’ve been doing quite a bit of bug-fixing — I’d give you a list but it would make this blog unreasonably long! Expect to see me squashing more bugs going forward.

If you have been following the Dev Notes forum, you should know we are planning on a class rebalance. Since my main character in game is a Gunner, I’ve taken on the coding changes required for Gunner. Apart from some minor skill changes, the biggest project I’ve taken on so far are additions to missiles and launchers.

In order to help reduce the clicky-button spam that Gunners have to do in order to do reasonable damage in combat, we are changing missiles so they fire in salvos. These will be determined by the missile and better missiles will fire stronger salvos. There have also been some launcher changes. Apart from enabling launchers to fire the salvo of missiles, launchers will be able to give the missiles they fire augmenter stats. This will allow us to create some extremely interesting options when it comes to gearing up your Gunner. This change also allows us to give all missiles a bit of extra speed and thrust, something I’m sure everyone would agree they’re lacking.

So, that’s this week’s look at what I’ve been up to. Feel free to post comments or questions in the magically generated discussion post!

This weeks dev blog is looking at an extremely exciting new feature that will be headed to game soon.

Another Monday means another update from me filling everyone in on what I’ve been up to the past week. It’s been a pretty big week and I’ve been working on an exciting new feature that I am sure everyone will be looking forward to! Once again I’m going to let a screenshot do the talking.

We are finally working on adding teleport devices! Known as Transdimensional Warpers, these new items will allow players to teleport to distant galaxies based on a few factors. First, warping distance which is controlled by the device. If the warp requires more jumps than that, it’s a no go. Second, each Warp Device has a shield and positioning requirement. If you are not at full shields and far enough away from nearby solar bodies (suns, moons, planets), it’s also a no go. Finally, you may only warp to a special Warp Beacons. There will be some AI controlled warp beacons scattered around the universe in special places like Sol, Lyceum, Iq’ Bana, etc, but the real draw is in player controlled warp beacons.

Player controlled warp beacons come in two varieties. First, there are permanent beacons. These can be built and placed in any team owned territory. Once placed, they function as a warp destination for the player who placed it, his squad and his entire team and can be used by any class of warp device. Second, there are temporary warp beacons. These are beacons that have the same placement requirements as normal drones, with the exception that they are unable to be placed in instanced or owned galaxies. As with permanent beacons, they will act as destinations for for the player who placed it, their team and their squad. The difference is they can only act as destinations for specialized transwarp devices.

Fleet Commanders (and maybe Seers) will gain initial access to the specialized devices capable of warping to temporary beacons. Even more interesting  though is the other feature of a Fleet Commander Transwarp drive. These capital ship devices will allow a player to teleport an entire squad to any warp beacon. This means you could have a speedier player scout ahead to your instance entrance, place a temp. beacon and an FC could bring the entire squad there!

Finally, for those wondering, Transwarp Devices will bring slaves along for the ride. If you have any non-stasised slaves set to follow in the galaxy with you, they’ll jump as well.

This is a really big gameplay feature that I’m extremely excited about and I’d love to hear your feedback on it. I know there are going to be a lot of questions so sound off in the forums and let me know what you think!

Once again it’s Monday, so it’s time for a Calypso update! I’ve done quite a bit in the past week so here is a run down of the bigger things I’ve been working on.

First, I’ve been doing quite a bit of bug-fixing. The Nexus is working properly now (and with the new starting missions), and a bug allowing people to un-neurobind and un-mod items that were neurobound and modded using the new feature has been squashed. I’ve also been pretty busy taking care of a few bugs with Subspace and am pleased to report that AI from different leaves of the area will no longer roam where they are not supposed to (and subsequently murder their comrades). I’ve also managed to track down a bug with the alien invasion reinforcement timer which was keeping their numbers low. It’s been fixed and when it’s patched, the aliens will be back in much greater numbers.

Secondly, new features! I think one that people might find most exciting are Subspace Tunnels. Subspace Tunnels are similar to Juxtapositions and the Subspace layer will feature six of them. Each one contains a very powerful alien and I am considering locking the higher DF exit (the one that would take you to your instance), until the guardian is dead. Naturally the exit to the lower DF Hub galaxies would remain unlocked so you could get out if you needed to. In case you were wondering, normally a change like this would require a universe reset to go in — however, I have also worked on some back end admin features so I will be able to add in the Subspace Tunnels without a universe reset.

A lot less exciting, I’ve been doing quite a bit of testing on all of the mod changes I talked about last week. With expanding the mods available on some items, adding some new items, and letting entirely new classes of items get mods, there are quite a few code changes that needed testing to make sure all the new functionality is working as intended. For those who aren’t aware, we’ve added mods for tractors, shield chargers and hull extensions. I’ve also added two new mods, Reinforced (reduced durability damage) and Angelic (lowered visibility and hostility).

Finally, the Bindomite event! It’s coming to a close today and I hope everyone enjoyed the chance to stock up on the commodity. When we released the Neurobind and Mod feature we weren’t able to add in all the sources of Bindomite that we wanted — only Prospecting. Hopefully the event has alleviated some of the demand. Keep in mind that prospecting won’t be the only source. DG Bosses will be dropping it sometime in the near future as well.

So, that’s this week’s look at what I’ve been up to. As always, feel free to give me feedback and you’ll hear from me again next week!

While researching the strange properties of a newly discovered resource (and seeking a way to further monetize it) a team of researchers from the Universal Mining Corporation, the Blue Photon Manufacturing Corporation and the Lyceum has stumbled upon a frightening discovery!

When exposed to extremely rare radiation found only in the depths of Subspace, strange things happen to Bindomite. Individual crystals align and combine, eventually coalescing into larger sentient beings!

Unfortunately… they are hostile. Seizing the entirely radiation supply the creatures have multiplied. The research base where they first took form has been destroyed. They have escaped!

This weekend only (Sept. 13 to Sept. 15), help the research team destroy the crystal abominations. The reward? Bindomite!

Another week, another update! This update will focus on a few new things I’m working on as well as a few of the things that went in with the patch.

First, last weeks patch and what was supposed to go in. I had quite a few features that I’d been working on pushed live in this last patch– the biggest being prospecting changes, a new Olympus daily, neurobind and mod, and scooping changes. To quickly recap; the prospecting change give nodes a lifespan, when it’s up they die and are reseeded elsewhere in the universe, the new Olympus daily, the Tidepool, neurobind and mod is a new right click feature where you can neurobind an item in exchange for random mods and the scooping changes allow you to hold down your scoop key to continually scoop items.

There was a change I was working on that wasn’t entirely ready that made its way in, those were the new character creation options — and it did created a bit of confusion with the Nexus. Rest assured, those changes have been disabled and we will be pushing a new client shortly to enable the fix.

The past week I have mainly been working on a new spawner type, the Wave Spawner. The Wave Spawner is similar to an Ambush Spawner (spawners that only spawn when a player gets ‘caught’ in their trigger area), with the main difference being it spawns multiple, predefined waves of AI. Previously, we ‘faked’ this functionality with multiple Ambush Spawners (think the UrQa vs. Mzungu battle in the Enigmatic Sector, Whiskey Outpost in the Nexus), but with this new spawner we will be able to do similar content much more easily and with much greater control.

This control is enabled with some key new features. First, there are the spawn features. We can set a wave to automatically spawn after a set duration, when the previous wave is cleared, or a combination of both. Secondly, there are enhanced mission control features. Each wave can be assigned a different mission requirement and the spawner will skip to the highest wave based on player missions. So for example, we can have missions to skip the first 10 of 20 waves for a spawner if you have the required mission. Thirdly, unlike traditional spawners, we can set individual teams and extra skills for each configuration. This affords us greater variety in the kind of AI we can spawn, ie, we can do a wave with Gunner and Sniper AI, etc, as well as letting us make AI that are hostile to one another with the same spawner. You can expect to see this new kind of spawner used quite a bit going forward to hopefully make some epic space battles.

Perhaps more exciting since it directly affects player, well, I’ll let the screenshot explain.

I have been working on some mod changes, including adding two all new mods. The first, Reinforced, will make your items take less durability damage when you die. The second Angelic, reduces hostility and visibility. Along with these two new mods, we are also expanding the number of items that can have mods to include Tractors, Shield Chargers and Hull Expansions. Finally, we’ll also be adding new functionality to some of the old mods so we can add them to items they couldn’t be on before — for instance, Amplified on cloaking devices to increase their cloaking power, or Rewired for engines where some turning is traded for thrust.

So, that’s an update on what I’ve been doing the past week. As always, feel free to give me feedback! Until next week!

It’s been another week so it’s time for another Calypso Update! As you all know I’ve been making some changes to the Nexus but that’s not all. Over the past week I’ve done quite a bit of bug-fixing and iterative development on some of the new features heading your way. Perhaps the most work though has been with the Neurobind and Mod feature.

So, firstly, the Neurobind and Mod feature. In my current iteration of the feature I’ve added a few new things. One, when you neurobind and mod an item, the output text in your Event channel now displays a list of the mods added to that item. This should make bulk modding items for a very specific combination much easier.

As you can see from the screenshot above, I’ve also done a few changes to the way the client and server handle displaying the Neurobound property to the user. Previously we handled letting players know an item was neurobound by using an item’s stat string in the tooltip. This means when an item was neurobound by default, (for example, Olympus Chargers), the client would display ‘Neurobound’ in the tooltip. This won’t work for the new Neurobind and Mod feature because the stat string text in the tooltip is identical for all instances of an item — which led to the above solution. The new neurobound tag in tooltips will apply to all neurobound items, so get ready to see pretty purple text on stuff like Shards too.

Secondly, concerning the Neurobind and Mod feature.

During preliminary testing of the feature, we came to the realization that every single time an item was NB + Modded, it was always getting the [Miniaturized] modification. After a little investigation, I realized it was quirk in the way we randomly roll on mods. As probability of getting a mod approaches 1.0, so does the probability of getting the [Miniaturized] modification (as it’s the first modification to be rolled on). Unfortunately, the only way of guaranteeing a mod was passing in that 1.0 probability… however, that has been addressed. We can now specify that we want an item to get at least one additional mod, no matter what, and the function will continue to roll until a new mod has been assigned. This gives us much greater flexibility when using the mod system to assign new mods to neurobound items — that is to say we can use the same probability parameters as DG, ship-dropped items or ruin items to determine the mods that your item will get using the feature. It also allows for us to create a parameter to control it for a new bonus weekend event if we want to!

We are currently prepping for a patch and this feature is on the test server, if you have a beta client, feel free to test it out! I’ll be adding Bindomite, the commodity required to Neurobind items for sale in Sol.