We made Steambirds as a labour of love in hopes of bringing players together and building meaningful friendships between them. In some ways, we feel like we succeeded - we made an experience with significantly less toxicity and greater cooperation than many online games achieve. But in some ways we have to admit that we have failed, as the number of players returning to the game quickly dwindled post-launch despite our efforts. We tried to rejuvenate the game with two major updates (flocks together, and more together) and a number of smaller updates, but ultimately we werent able to achieve our goals. It pains us to say this, but we cant afford to keep working on this game. It has already cost us a great deal more than it has earned, and while we have plenty of ideas for how to improve Steambirds further, we have very little confidence that those ideas will be enough to turn things around. Spry Fox is a small, independent studio with no investors or wealthy patrons, and we can only do so much. Unfortunately, Steambirds is barely limping along right now and doesnt have the critical mass of players that it needs to be a compelling MMO. Fixing the issues that are driving people away and getting lots more players to show up will cost significantly more money than we happen to possess. Because of the aforementioned issues, effective immediately we are disabling IAPs for gold. We dont want players to spend more of their hard-earned money on the hope of a long-term place to play, only to have it disappear in a few months. We will continue to keep the game online and running for at least four more months, but after that time it is likely that we will shut down the game to avoid further hosting and maintenance costs. Thank you so much to everyone that has been part of this journey with us. Were broken-hearted to be announcing the end of the road, but we take solace in the fact that we at least met some wonderful human beings along the way. We'd like to thank everyone in the community who gave us their support during these years, and especially those of you who stayed around even when things seemed dire. Without you, we wouldn't have even been able to make it this far. We hope you had a good time and made some friends along the way. Good skies! - All the Spry Foxes

[ 2020-10-19 19:37:04 CET ] [ Original post ]

Todays update introduces a new endgame boss: the Urchin. The Urchin is quite elusive: to find it you'll need to craft a special item and then use it in a specific place. We recommend that you bring a full fleet of seasoned pilots with you, as the encounter can be quite a handful! The boss can drop a lot of the usual goodies, but also has a chance to drop 4 different URs and some other unusual items. Good luck!

Improvements & Balance

With this update we are also addressing some balance issues and general improvements, both for new and veteran players. Community-suggested changes are indicated with

• Leader changes on mission selection now let the new leader pick a mission
  
• Low level ingredients can now be crafted into tradeable bundles.
• Players in lower tier missions now get their damage downscaled by a tier appropriate %.
• Upscaling of low level players during missions now caps at a mission tier appropriate %.
• Revised nanite trading fees to be more consistent with the cost of 5 upgrades of the same type.
  
• Buffed Merlin's Staff from 12% to 15% dmg.
  

Bugfixes

• Fixed an issue where DK secondaries were missing supercharge/degradation stats.
• Fixed the XP Boost item description to properly show 90 minutes.

[ 2020-06-08 23:26:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

The team has been toiling away on a new major Steambirds Alliance update for the last few months. Weve taken the opportunity to take a step back and re-evaluate why we made this game, what were trying to do with it, and how well were achieving those goals. Weve written about this before - Steambirds is best when played with others. While weve tried to focus on this throughout development, our investigation revealed that a surprisingly small number of players were actually playing with others. Some of that can be attributed to lower-than-expected player numbers, but generally there were many ways that the game failed to bring players together. Sometimes, features inadvertently separated players. This goes against the entire reason we wanted to build Steambirds in the first place. The More Together Update includes a number of fundamental changes to the game. The majority of changes are designed to actively bring players together in the game and keep them together, but we haven't stopped there; weve also included a revamp of the crafting system, the new Boss Arena, and a whole host of other smaller changes.

Bring Players Together

First things first, we made changes so it is far less likely youll start playing new content alone. We asked What if instead of going on individual quests, players joined shared missions with a clear focus? As of this update, our revamped missions are multiplayer encounters a lot like dungeons. Each mission has a goal visible to everyone in the mission, shared progress towards the goals, and clear rewards. Youll join missions from the Mission Command in the Rebel City. This is a regularly-updating list of missions you can join, and a short list of some upcoming missions. Each mission tells you upfront your goal, the rewards you can earn, and how many other players are actively playing. When you join a mission, youll be teleported directly to a squad of players doing the same mission.
All the old great content youve come to love has been converted into missions accessed via Mission Command. This replaces the old system of getting missions from the Pilot Pub and then jumping into an overworld carrier. The pub is still there, but now its primarily for daily rewards and bounties. Well be looking at adding more bounties and similar content to the pub at a later stage.

Keep Players Together

Now that players are starting with others due to the new Mission Command structure, weve made more changes to try keep them together: squads, speed changes, and closing the power gap.

Squads

When you join a new mission from Mission Command, you are immediately teleported to a squad of players, all actively doing the same mission. One of the players will automatically be selected as the squad leader, generally the strongest or most veteran player. In most missions, if the squad is far away from a mission target, the leader can instantly teleport much closer, and any player that gets separated from the leader can quickly teleport to join them. Gone are the days of having to travel across a huge world to find that one distant target. Everyone within a squad will be pointed at the same mission target with the radar indicator. Your radar will only show the other players in your squad, and a prominent indicator of the current squad leader. You should follow your squad around, but if you get too far away from your squad, we start to zoom in your camera a bit, limiting your vision and reminding you that youre not with your squad. At the same time, we highlight that you can quickly teleport to the squad leader with a button press. If youre successful with your current mission, the leader can sometimes also pick some follow-up missions so your squad can stick together and take on more content as a unit!

Speed Changes

In our investigations we found that speed engines and other speed modifiers were a big contributor to player separation. If you dont know exactly where you should be going, you are instantly left behind. Even if you do know exactly where you should be going, players without the top-tier speed engines, upgrades and skills, found it very difficult to keep up with speedy players zipping around. Weve made the tough decision to remove the speed engines (existing speed engines will be automatically converted to damage engines) and nerf a lot of the other speed bonuses throughout the game. Weve compensated slightly by giving all players a +15% baseline speed boost. This is quite a significant change, so we ask that you please give it some time to get used to - well also be keeping our eyes on this and adjusting further as needed.

Closing the Power Gap

Theres a huge variation in the difficulty of different content in the game. Veterans are not only more experienced players, but their planes also have much stronger gear. This wide power gap makes it almost impossible for new players to join veterans, which is currently unsustainable unless we have a large number of active players. With this update, lower-tier players will get an armor and damage boost to bring them a bit closer to top-tier players. We hope this will make it easier for newbies to contribute and be more valued by veterans.

Boss Arena

This update brings the addition of the new Boss Arena. The core is that youll be fighting more than 100 different combinations of bosses and minibosses in a small locked room. Youll find this mission showing up in Mission Command. Check out the exciting new combinations and see if you can overcome the challenges!

Crafting

Crafting in Steambirds has always had some rough edges. Weve taken the time to both improve the UI and make crafting a more critical aspect of playing the game. The biggest change here is the addition of ingredients. Instead of having to juggle various crafting items - a rather clunky affair - most crafting now relies on ingredients. Ingredients dont take up any cargo or storage space, and can be stacked up to a limit of 100 or more. You can see your list of ingredients from an option at the bottom of the inventory menu.
One big change that crafting ingredients enables: tiered items can be upgraded with copper up to T8. Most enemies in the game now drop varying amounts of copper. Instead of hoping to get lucky and get that much-need T8 weapon, you can now rely on the much more consistent upgrade path to getting there. Weve also added many different catalysts that drop from different parts of the game and are needed to craft or fuse new SPEC or ELEM items. Were excited for more changes that the granularity of the ingredients allows us to do - we can slowly give you resources to craft a rare drop, instead of relying on a tiny drop percentage to create rarity.
The addition of ingredients removes the old hack of storing excess items inside crafting recipes, so weve removed this from most recipes. Weve also improved the logic for which recipes are shown/hidden so you arent inundated with a huge number of recipes that arent relevant. All of your old crafting progress should be maintained and automatically migrated into the new system. Other crafting improvements:

• Added a confirmation box to crafting
• Improved the crafting details panel
• Removed the confusing location goal from crafting recipes
• Fixed a scroll bug where details can move off the screen

Other Changes

This wouldnt be a major update without a list of other changes to the game. Community-suggested changes are indicated with

• 
  Tentative fix for the notorious chat bug
• Automatic skill loadout switching when changing planes, based on last one used on that plane
• Suggest another active flock if yours seems mostly inactive (maximum of once per day)
• Adjusted the default camera zoom to show 15% more
• 
  Improvements to the flock register
• Increased range of T0-T5 machine guns (for newbies playing the Quad)
• 
  Fix combat sim bug where stationary enemies spawned on 2 adjacent walls couldnt be killed
• 
  Siege Tank can use flak while in siege mode
• 
  When you are idle for too long, kick you to the RC selection menu instead of quitting the client
• Apex Military Academy mission is now more granular (more goals so you can see progress)
• 
  Prevent spamming of trade requests outside the RC
• 
  Fixed dungeon mod descriptions for AMA and HFSC dungeons
• Show the teleport effect on other players
• Fixed some more small bugs/issues
• Probably even more small changes weve missed here...

[ 2020-03-13 00:37:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

This week were shipping our last update of 2019. While it may be last, its still packed with some awesome stuff. Were introducing a new class, the Vampire, a new combat sim mode, and a bunch of other changes!

Vampire

The vampire class is making its appearance in this update. It uses sword weapons and comes with a new ability Bite and a new maneuver Redline. Bite lets you take a chomp out of a nearby enemy, giving both you and nearby allies some health. Redline lets you convert your armor into steam. It wont kill you, but if you play it close to the wire it can give you a big boost to your effective available steam! The vampire of course also has its own set of skills to select from. Give it a spin and see if you can figure out its secrets!

Combat Sim

Weve added a new survival combat sim mode with this update. It plays a bit differently to other modes - survival isnt about clearing waves - its just about surviving as long as possible. Killing enemies might help you survive longer, but its not required! This will be in the regular rotation of daily combat sim modes, and hopefully add some welcome new variation. Weve also made a number of other improvements and changes to the combat sim in this update, including:

• Make sure you always either get all DPS classes or all non-DPS classes (and a choice of single vs double stick if possible)
• Vary the number of builds you can choose from between 1 and 5
• Fixed a lot of weird/bad enemy behaviour in the combat sim, including: Mystic, Great Pooper, Mecha-Angel, Duelist, Disinfector, Bureaucat, Crowd Control, Retaliator, Poison Convoy, Husky, Augmentation Therapist
• Removed all 2-width walls in combat sim so enemies aren't unshootable.
• Fixed some issues with treasure chests

More Changes

Finally, theres also a whole bunch of other changes in this update:

• Founder can assign different roles to people in the flock.
• Clicking on another player's name in chat opens the friend list with them selected.
• Changed the Bomb Factory from T2 to T3, and the Laser Playground from T3 to T4
• Removed middle row of bullet belt on boss stage of Laser Playground
• Nerfed Meowzaghast shots during M2's death phase
• Revised trade fees
• Reduced plane xp thresholds for levels 16 to 20 (it's now easier to level up)
• Titanium rods have new graphics and aren't marked as rare
• Fix the broken siege animation
• Fix scrolling offset displays for quest-related menus
• Renamed "Cubic Gem" to "Arena Gem", so its not confused with the new Cube Gem item
• Adjusted some AI behaviour to hopefully fix some wandering units

[ 2019-12-17 13:43:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

We're shipping our first really big post-launch update to SBA! It includes a healthy combo of new content, new features, plus solutions to major pain points that the community has informed us about in Discord. I know this blog post is huge, so let me give you the TDLR: weve added: Flocks (aka guilds), a new combat sim daily activity, a new dungeon called the Military Academy, new Fox allies to help the birbs in their lonely fight against the cats, aaaaand weve substantially reduced how much SBA punishes you when you die. PLUS a bunch of other QoL changes and freebies (like free hangar and storage space) that yall have been asking for. Read on for details!

Flocks! (aka Guilds/Clans/etc)

You need a place to organize your peeps? Yep, we finally have guilds (which we call Flocks) in SBA. To be more precise, we have two kinds of Flocks: leaderless trainee Flocks which everyone will be encouraged to join soon after creating a new account, and professional Flocks which are created and managed by veteran players. You receive an XP boost when flying alongside members of your Flock, and your trading fees are lower when trading with members of your Flock (but you cant trivially hop between Flocks to abuse that discount for mercenary purposes theres a cooldown.) And best of all, you can join four other of your guildmates to participate in the daily guild Combat Sim (more on that below.) Weve also added a Flock chat system, which you can switch to and from freely while playing the game. You can be a member of up to 3 Flocks at any one time. One of those will be your default Flock you only get bonus XP and trading fees with people in your default Flock. But you can change your default whenever you wish (for example, if you want to participate in all of your 3 Flocks daily Combat Sims.) To create a new professional guild and become its founder/leader, you will need to find a Flock Founder Token. These are going to be rare, but tradeable, so worst case if you cant find one, maybe you can trade for it. We wrote and shared a big document on our plans for Flocks a while back; if you never saw that and are curious to learn more, I encourage you to read it.

Combat Sim!

New home of the Combat Sim in the Rebel City Ive personally been looking forward to this for a while. Theres a new Combat Sim building in the Rebel City, and once youve unlocked it, youll have access to two new modes of play: the Daily Solo Sim and the Daily Guild (5-person coop) Sim. Daily sims are randomly generated encounters with unusual conditions and constraints. When playing a sim, you are given a throwaway, virtual plane and equipment, so theres absolutely nothing to lose by getting shot down (its not real!) For example, you might be required to choose between playing with a Level 1 Assault or Level 1 Hog at the start of the sim. You might also start with a Level 20 Raptor equipped with Special Legendary equipment. Either way, its all temporary. Your goal is to survive to the end of the encounter, and to complete it as quickly as possible. The conditions of the encounters are, as I said, somewhat random, but weve modified things to make the pacing better (for example, in the Solo Combat Sim, you get a huge damage buff when fighting bosses, and you gain MUCH more XP than normal when starting at level 1, so you can level up extremely rapidly.) You only get one free play of a Sim each day, so you want to make it count! You get rewarded in two ways when playing Sims. First, you get a simple reward immediately upon completion of the Sim, based on how well you performed. Then you get a second, larger reward the following day, once the leaderboard has been finalized. The higher up you are on the leaderboard, the better that reward will be. And hey, those of you who have been asking for more opportunities to flex, your wish has been granted. Show us all what youre made of on the leaderboards. The closer you get to the top of the leaderboard, more likely you are to earn multiple trail gems for our two new trails:

And the closer you get to the top of the leaderboard, the higher your (still small) chance of earning one of our four new Legendary SPEC items:

• Sawed-Off Flakgun: Siege Tank secondary ability SPEC that spams much more flak than normal, but it spews all over the place. Also grants bonus DPS.
• Merlins Staff: Merlin secondary ability SPEC that has a smaller sized bullet wipe in exchange for +2 HP, +12% DPS, and +10% turn rate.
• Spiritual Oasis: Paladin secondary ability SPEC. Its effective radius is much smaller than normal, but it lasts a little longer, heals a bit more than T10, and stays where you put it, so your allies can use it as a safe place to retreat to. For making the sacrifice of not carrying it with you, you also get -10% maneuver cost and +10% camera view.
• Hunter Killer: Raptor secondary ability SPEC with a significantly shorter cooldown than regular mines, lower steam cost, and MUCH more damage. Best of all, it rapidly seeks out and blows up enemies like a heat-seeking missile. Downside: it does not slow enemies the way normal mines do.

Content-wise, right now, we have a few different scenarios baked into the Sim. In the future, we intend to add a bunch more, including, for example, a Pacifist mode where you have to survive as long as possible WITHOUT killing anything with your guns or secondary abilities. We look forward to adding this additional content in future updates not long from now.

Nerfing Permadeath!

This is another big one. As we discussed in detail over the past month, weve decided to seriously soften the permadeath aspects of this game. The reasons are pretty simple: a ton of users have told us they dont like the permadeath bits, and our analytics data show that people both new users and veterans alike tend to quit immediately after dying. This game was always supposed to be first and foremost about playing with your friends (and making new friends), but somewhere along the way we became too focused on making it really hard and punishing. Mea culpa. Were going back to focusing on what really matters now. So now, when you crash, you dont lose your plane. You lose some of your upgrades, and all your gear and cargo gets damaged, but your plane remains. The more times you crash, the more damaged your cargo gets. Eventually, it wont be worth using anymore. But you can repair it, and maybe even supercharge it if youve got the right materials, so nothing is truly lost anymore. How do you repair your equipment? You can do it in the Workshop. Itll require a bunch of materials, but most of all, itll require a new currency that you gain by recycling spare equipment that you dont need anymore. Weve called that new currency Scrap, because thats the perfect name for it, and weve renamed the old currency Iron. I know its a bit confusing hopefully everyone will get used to it soon!
How exactly do you earn this new Scrap currency? Easy. Instead of simply dropping your trash items like youve always done, now youll use the exact same command to recycle them. You can also select items individually and recycle them at any time. The more valuable the item, the more Scrap you get by recycling it. The most valuable items (T10, Elem and SPEC) are expensive to repair. Not only do they require a lot of Scrap, they also require an equivalent item (i.e. use a T10 to repair a T10) and several Nanites, which are things you can craft by fusing 5 upgrades together. Excitingly, nanites can also be used to Supercharge items, which gives them semi-random bonuses that make them even more powerful than regular, pristine equipment! Since you dont die anymore, we had to change the way we give out pilot XP (which was previously awarded ONLY when you die.) Now you get 65% of your pilot XP in real time, while playing. Which means you can rank up at any time. We know youve all wanted something like that for a long time, so we were happy to have the excuse to do it. You get the remaining 35%, plus Iron rewards, when you voluntarily choose to retire a plane, which you can do from inside the Hangar. Weve tested this stuff carefully, but I will be the first person to admit that its a huge change, with a lot of complex implications, and I would not be surprised in the slightest if we need to do a bunch more fine-tuning of the economy in the weeks ahead. We have already decreased the droprates of certain items in anticipation to compensate for the fact that people wont be losing items when they die. We have also reduced the loot drop multipliers for dungeon mods to 1x/2x/4x. And lastly, weve tuned the repair and supercharging costs of items to help consume many of the resources in the game that might otherwise become inflationary. But I doubt well have perfectly guessed what every number should be, and thats OK; these numbers are easy to change! Please play for a while ideally at least a week or so, to get a good feeling for stuff and not be biased by short term RNG and let us know what you think needs tweaking. Well be listening carefully to you, as always.

New Dungeon: Military Academy!

Wait, why do those drones have beaks?? Before Meowza became the god-leader of the world, she was a promising student in the Cat military regime. Much of her training occured in the Apex Military Academy, an old and well-respected educational institution whose instructors had absolutely no idea what Meowza might turn into someday. One of the core training rituals at the academy was an unusual sport in which teams of students were expected to capture spawn points while fighting off guardian mechs that vaguely represented combat class archetypes (like the sniper and the tank). Teams that managed to capture enough points would eventually reach the the Control Unit, a particularly tough mech that tended to humiliate less-prepared students.
Design-wise, the Military Academy functions a bit like HFSC. It is accessible to mid-level players, but should still represent a fun challenge (and opportunity!) for higher-level players thanks to some pretty stiff veteran mods. The Military Academy is also home to two of our newest SPEC items:

• Pet Turret: extremely powerful turret SPEC that follows the Engineer around like a (somewhat erratic but very loyal) pet.
• Sledgehammer Shield: Dagger Knight secondary ability SPEC that significantly improves your DPS even more than usual in exchange for much lower superSpeed during the times when you are shielded.

Foxy Allies!

It turns out that the Cats havent subjugated every race other than the birds. At least one other race has resisted Meowzas yoke. I refer, of course, to the Foxes! (Come on, you knew it had to be them.)


Yes, you can now select a Fox portrait for your pilot just dive into the Options Menu to bring up the portrait selector, and youll find 9 new portraits alongside the usual birbs. Youll notice that the Combat Sim building is staffed by a Fox as well. We look forward to doing more with the Foxes (lore-wise) in the months to come.

And yet more stuff!

Theres a bunch of other good stuff in this update that isnt covered above. And hey, weve got a new system for identifying and celebrating changes that were a direct result of community feedback any such change will be preceded by an SBA salute graphic:
It means a lot to us that yall are willing to patiently explain what you think the game needs and give us time to address those concerns. You deserve multiple salutes for that.

• 
  Major update to Elder Arena, in response to player complaints tha it was too long / too boring:
  • Made it so waves only go up to 15, with 2 miniboss phases
  • Shortened time between waves by 2 seconds
  • Spotters move faster after initial shot, making their time spent offstage a lot shorter.
  • Reduced spawn radius of enemies by 20% so they dont spawn far off-screen.
  • Improvements to harasser enemies that werent very interesting.
  • Fixed bug with miniboss battle ending prematurely
  • Art fixes: Updated VFX, added more warnings to enemy attacks, reduced art model overuse
  • Added 2 room variants to the encounter
  • Fixed issue where enemies would spawn over each other
  • Added basic aimed gun to boss
• 
  Damage boosts to the following weapons:
  • Almost all Blasters: +15%
  • Void Prism: +28% damage
  • Quantum Reach: +15% damage
  • Frost Dagger 1, 2 and 3: +18% damage
  • Tiger Whisker 1, 2 and 3: +5% damage
• 
  Now only half the rooms in the Crypt are locked (the setpiece rooms) instead of 100% of the rooms. Should speed up progress.
• 
  You can now earn cool new stuff when you hit certain pilot ranks.
  • For example, at rank 12, youll earn another free hangar slot, and at various ranks, you earn a free storage slot. This is on top of what you already start with for free.
  • You can see graphics representing stuff you have earned / will earned in the timeline on the left side of the pilot skills UI.
  • Were definitely planning to add more unlocks in the future; things like emotes and trails and other goodies that you cannot acquire any other way. We just ran out of time to do more in this update but we look forward to surprising you with more soon!
  • All unlock rewards will of course be granted to you retroactively if youve already surpassed any given rank prior to this update.
• 
  It is now possible to enter /t UserName to private message other players in game.
• 
  When you filter the Pilot Skills UI by class, we now condense the previously-huge blocks of empty space in between skill groups at higher ranks. No more pointless scrolling.
• 
  You can favorite items in your cargo, so they wont ever be accidentally recycled. (People have been asking for this forever; it seemed particularly worth doing now that drop has been replaced with recycle.)
• Weve rebalanced Iron (aka old scrap) rewards. You get less from things like the login bonus and beating M1 & 3 Brothers, and weve made that up via the Combat Sim rewards.
• There are fewer quests available per hour, but they give a LOT more XP than they used to. Weve also made copper rewards from quests more valuable by letting you use them to craft T9s and Nanites.
• 
  Weve also made collection quests less unpredictable/subject to bad RNG. (More improvements to quests will come in updates soon.)
• Various minor bugfixes not worth mentioning individually.
• Ongoing server improvements.
• A boatload of other minor changes that Im probably forgetting but what the heck, this blog post is long enough already!

[ 2019-11-06 21:08:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello fellow pilots! Now that the launch insanity has finally quieted down a little bit, we're getting back to our regular schedule of weekly updates. steamhappy Here's what this update has in store for you:

Update to the Temple of Bast:

• The Temple now contains Altar Rooms. On your way to the boss, you'll find two new rooms with an altar, which will trigger a horde of minions plus an evil curse, such as:
  • +50% greater damage received
  • -90% steam
  • Zero health and steam regen
  • +50% greater susceptibility to burn damage
• New enemies: The Altar Rooms have several new unique enemies.
• Small improvements to existing enemy movement

Engineer revamp

Both the Engineer's turrets and skills have been significantly revamped:

• Turrets fire much more rapidly now, have higher base damage, and their bullets are faster too.
• The turret gun has a cooldown now; it fires for 2 seconds and pauses for 1 second.
• Engineer Skill 1A still causes turrets to lay down covering fire around you, but now the turrets turn more quickly and have MUCH more health when using this skill, in addition to +5% damage.
• Engineer Skill 1B eliminates the turrent gun's 1s cooldown (so it fires 33% more bullets - aka lots more damage.)
• All other Engi skills (2X through 4X) have also been altered significantly, in order to hopefully present more interesting choices.

Other changes

• Converted Blaster Skill 1A into a powerful stacking maneuver that can give you up to +60% DPS for a limited time.
• Blaser Skill 2B ice burst now has piercing.
• Rebel City anti-lag and anti-grief changes which include disabling maneuvers, projectiles and secondary abilities, both to speed things up and also to prevent hackers and griefers from attempting to use those things to harm an entire RC.
• Reduced visual intensity of new Epic Paladin VFX.
• Imperial zone Sentinel: Lower DPS, larger vulnerability window, and lower spawn rate will hopefully make these less impossible-feeling.
• Lowered DPS of all elemental swords by 10%.

Engineering

As you can imagine, the vast majority of our engineering time just went into making sure the servers were working OK. We look forward to doing more polish/feature engineering work (plus bugfixes of other types) in the coming weeks! By the way, in case you were wondering if its "simple" to create and operate an MMO like this one, I thought I'd share the engineering dashboard that we built from scratch in order to help us monitor and improve server health. While we were getting rate-limited by Amazon AWS last week and going nuts trying to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it, we ended up enhancing this dashboard a bunch to help with the troubleshooting process (which it did.) Check it out:
This dashboard is just one of approximately half a dozen tools that we use to maintain this game's backend (others include our database administration system, our anti-cheat system, etc.) The backend to Steambirds has cost us, conservatively, at least several hundred thousand dollars in addition to a few years of our lives. So, yeah, it's not easy. The next few weeks will have similar updates to this one with nice new (not huge) polish / feature / balance improvements, and then at the end of September we'll do a major update. The contents of that update are still a secret but you can be sure it'll include some exciting, entirely new content! And then, a month after that update, we're hoping to be able to ship the guild system (Flocks) that we've been talking about for a few months now. Thank you again to all of you who played this week; ya'll are the best! steamhappy

[ 2019-08-28 22:52:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

We are launching Steambirds Alliance out of beta today (August 22). After almost six years of development, it has become a full-fledged MMO with lots of polished content, unique bosses, and a kind ofheavily-cooperative gameplay that is rare in todays world. We couldnt be prouder to see it finally, officially released! OK, so thats what Steambirds is. But this post is about why we made Steambirds. Specifically, why this game? Spry Fox has been making games for a decade. Heck, Daniel has been designing games for over 25 years. We could have chosen to make any number of games, including many that would have been significantly less effort. So why?

To encourage friendships

Steambirds was born from a very basic belief: Games can bring people together. An online game like an MMO is more than just a brief consumed experience like a book or a movie. Its a shared space where like-minded people can meet up, get to know each other, and ultimately form meaningful friendships. The truth of the matter is that in this modern world, there are a lot of people who could use a friend. Or even if they have enough friends, they could use a place to spend more time with them. Theres a ton of research demonstrating that lonely people often suffer from poor health, depression, and/or anxiety. Friendship is the antidote. So it occurred to us: what if we made a game that was all about connecting with and cooperating with others? A game with only two teams, and all the players are together on the same side. Many years ago, we had the opportunity to explore that very idea when we co-developed Realm of the Mad God. Our experience making RotMG only strengthened our interest in cooperative games. But then we were forced to walk away from RotMG, well before wed fully explored all our ideas. And we werent prepared to give up just yet. Thus came Steambirds Alliance.

Design challenges

Making SBA a great game where everyone can enjoy time with friends is easier said than done. Online games can easily become toxic places dominated by trolls and cheaters if you dont make enough effort to prevent that. So weve spent a lot of time building pro-social mechanics and tech into the very foundation of Steambirds. Things like:

• Jump in and play: Theres no minimum amount of time you need to play Steambirds per session. You wont ruin it for anyone else if you pop in and out in 15 minutes. We want Steambirds to be like a club room (or the bar Cheers, if you remember that) where its easy to hang out for 5 minutes or for an entire evening.
• Shared XP and Loot: No kill or loot-stealing. No dividing up limited XP everyone gets 100% of the pie. We dont want this game to make you angry at others.
• Ad Hoc grouping: Teleport instantly to other players. Theres no real waiting and arbitrary gating.
• Better together game balancing: You almost always benefit from playing with another player. Even if they are playing selfishly, theres a decent chance that they will end up helping you accidentally. And eventually, theres also a decent chance that they will realize theyll be more successful if they stop playing selfishly!
• Trade: You can trade most of the things you can find in the game. You can even trade gold, the games hard currency. Trade has brought people together for thousands of years it shouldnt be a surprise that it can do so in games as well.

This is just the start. Weve got big plans to expand the social features of Steambirds in future releases. Well be experimenting with new ways to have fun with the people you care about. Helping people build and enjoy friendships is the most important point of the game from our perspective.

What does success look like for Spry Fox and SBA?

You often hear a common complaint on forums across the Internet that game developers are greedy; that they just want to make money. But money isnt what defines success for us on this project. For us, it goes back to the why of building Steambirds. Every single member of the Steambirds team could be earning a lot more money doing something other than making games. You dont become an indie game developer because you love money (unless you really dont understand probability!) You become an indie game developer because you love games, and hopefully the people who play them too. Weve funded Steambirds out of our own pockets. Theres no evil publisher. Theres no venture capitalist demanding a return on their investment. Its just us and our life savings. We could have taken our earnings from our previous games and put them in the stock market and retired a little earlier. Instead, we took that money and we made you this game. Because we want you to have a fun place to be with your friends. We want to reduce the loneliness in the world a little bit if we can. For Spry Fox, success to us means achieving three big goals:

• Earning enough to pay for hosting and ongoing development. We want SBA to keep running for a long time. In-game purchases go towards making SBA self-sustaining. There is very little chance that it will make us rich, but we hope that it will at least pay our bills, take care of our teammates, and let us keep this game alive for you.
• Entertaining our players for years to come. We want SBA to be a joyful place for you to hang out! You probably have a lot going on in your life. SBA should be a place where you can take a break, have a laugh and feel welcome. And maybe blow up a giant cat mecha while youre at it.
• Helping players build and enjoy friendships. This also means well try to have low tolerance for toxicity.
  • Please help us with this. If you see someone being toxic, ask them politely to cut it out. If they wont, you can report them. Spry Fox will do everything we can, but were just a handful of people and we can only do so much.
  • In general, try to be the best and kindest person you can be. Everyone has a bad day (or week, or month) sometimes and they could use our understanding and support too.
  • TLDR: if we want this community to stay awesome, we have to work together to do it. Everyone plays their part!

A long journey

Weve been building towards a game like SBA our entire careers. From the very first day we started Spry Fox, weve tried to live up to our motto of Making Happiness. And part of that is making a fun game. So weve spent a bunch of years learning to make polished, fun games. Games that at this point have been played by tens of millions of people. But that isnt enough. We also want to make the world a better place. Not just provide a few minutes of hedonistic pleasure, but an actual, positive change in the world. We learned how to build MMOs. We started with RotMG, and Steambirds is built off a similar design philosophy. But building MMOs, especially real-time bullet hell MMOs, is very hard. Probably the hardest type of game development by an order of magnitude. The sort of thing that big companies like EA or Bungie still struggle to pull off with teams and budgets massively larger than ours. MMO development can kill a company. It took us much longer than we thought it would, but we persevered. We dont always get everything right, but we care enough to at least try as hard as we can. And we are going to keep trying, and keep improving, for as long as the world allows us to. We can imagine no better way to spend our time on this planet than growing a positive, low toxicity community with all of you. Because you matter to us more than you can possibly know. So here we are. Steambirds is on the verge of launch. Lets see what the future brings! With all our love, Spry Fox

[ 2019-08-22 12:25:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

The moment has arrived! In the next couple hours, we will be shipping our first major update of the open beta. You already know about some but not all of it we wanted to surprise you!

Meowza Herself

Lets start with what you already know: the Meowza 2 (M2) encounter. As previously announced, when Meowzas infamous mech is defeated, there is a large (but not 100%) chance that Rebel spies will successfully lock onto Meowzas signal in her inner sanctum. If this happens, a special Rebel carrier will appear which leads to Meowza herself! (Note: it is not currently possible to proactively increase the chances of the special carrier appearing, but in a future update it will be possible to actually help the Rebel spies lock onto Meowzas signal. Wed love to hear your ideas/suggestions for how this could work, please share your thoughts in our Discord!) Sarge will not allow pilots onto the special carrier unless they have sufficiently upgraded their planes or have reached a pilot rank of 90. This is to prevent over-eager Rebel recruits from throwing away their valuable aircraft in a completely futile (if courageous) assault against M2 in her ultimate place of power. Inside the M2 encounter, you will first be confronted by upgraded versions of the Three Brothers. Some of their individual attacks have been upgraded to be more deadly, and they also have new joint attacks that they inflict at key moments in the battle. Those who survive this battle will need to fight their way through a hallway filled with elite unites before boarding a final carrier, which takes you to Meowzas secret temple. Youre not fighting a remote-controlled mech at this point. Youre fighting Meowza herself, wholl be wielding ancient technologies against you that are so powerful, they might as well be magic. I could tell you more, but you might as well just watch the encounter play out: [previewyoutube=b4gWDXcqDxs;full][/previewyoutube] Meowza currently drops one new Special Legendary weapon (at the usual very low rate) and has a guaranteed T10 drop. There is a small but significant chance that the T10 drop will be a modified T10 armor, called M2 Armor, that is stronger than normal and/or has special stat buffs.

Dungeon Mods

This parts the surprise! In addition to M2, weve also added what were calling dungeon mods to this update. These mods are being applied to all of the hardest (T10) dungeons in the game (except The Dig, which will also be getting mods of a slightly more complex variety in the future.) Mods can be normal, difficult and lethal. 60% of the time when a dungeon spawns, it will spawn as a normal dungeon, which has mods which are intended to make you play a bit differently than you normally do, not necessarily to make the dungeon more difficult. For example, the normal In Your Face mod, which significantly reduces the cost of your maneuver but also makes you take a bit more damage from enemy bullets. 30% of the time that a dungeon spawns, it will be a difficult dungeon. Difficult mods definitely make a dungeon harder, but also reward you with double the upgrade drops as well as **3x** the drop chance for all other major rewards from the boss. For example, the rare Nearsighted mod significantly zooms in the camera, making the dungeon feel claustrophobic, while the Rush Hour mod increases your superspeed by +50% while making you take +30% more damage from enemy bullets.
10% of the time that a dungeon spawns, it will be a lethal dungeon. Lethal mods make a dungeon extremely dangerous; unprepared players should probably bail on them immediately. Those who brave the dungeon are rewarded with double the upgrades and a **7x** drop chance for all other major rewards. For example, the lethal Dead to the World mod completely disables your Steam so you cant use maneuvers or abilities while also increasing the damage you take by +20%. At the current time it is not possible to intentionally spawn a lethal dungeon, but in the future we intend to make crafting lethal dungeon keys a possibility. Other Changes There are quite a few other changes in this build as well, some of them quite significant:

• Menu buttons have been shrunk a bit so that you dont have to needlessly scroll a lot.
• Teleporting to a player who subsequently enters a portal will leave you at the spot right outside the portal instead of nullifying the teleport or putting you inside a dungeon without warning.
• All new Meowza battle music!
• Pilot Skills UI can now be filtered by aircraft class.
• Grand Lion is no longer susceptible to water damage and no longer drops T9s but its Stiffener drop rate has been increased to compensate
• Machine Gun skill 4B (aka Social Agility) has been changed to: +20% turn rate, +5% superspeed, and +5% camera view
• Hog skill 1B (aka Stoic) has been renamed to Fast Exit and changed to: On maneuver: +30% superspeed for 3s duration
• Sword skill 3B now uses postAdd instead of Add math.
• The max distance you can be from a quest target or a boss when it dies in order to qualify for quest completion and/or XP has been increased by 50%. This should eliminate the complaints weve been getting about not getting credit when you should.
• Reduced the delay on teleporting to the Rebel City from 3s to just 1s. (The delay for player-to-player teleport remains 3s.) The old 3s delay didnt seem to impact veteran players, it just hurt new players. Not much point in that. Also, a 1s delay will make M2 a little less terrifying.
• The Re-ed dungeon miniboss no longer shoots misleadingly tiny, deadly projectiles.

And of course, we did a lot of work on the servers and our backend tools, as usual. That never stops. Last Word We hope you enjoy this update! We look forward to your feedback on it and will plan to address any bugs or balance issues that may have escaped our attention in testing over the next couple weeks. Aside from that, well be focused mainly on improving server performance and stability for the next several weeks, plus any balance changes that are needed to the game overall, as we prepare to officially launch SBA on Steam in the very near future.

[ 2019-08-01 21:30:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi folks! Sorry its been quiet on the blog; weve been focused mainly on communication via Discord, but will try to be better about communicating here as well in the future. That said, if you havent already joined our Discord community, you really should. We even have a nifty vanity URL now! This upcoming beta build has a first rough pass at rebalancing elemental attributes. It is *NOT* complete, but is a large part of the way there and we figured might as well start testing it sooner rather than later. Whats missing is a rebalance of several elemental dungeons (mostly the fire and lightning ones). What we *have* rebalanced is: Frozen Owl Monastery, Super Secret Base, Temple of Bast and Venom Compound. Things that have changed for the aforementioned elements & dungeons:

• Halved the # of elemental upgrades to max. Applies to both damage and defense.
• Decreased the droprate of upgrades by something like 40% give or take across all sources.
• Doubled the strength of elemental attack upgrades.
• Tripled the strength of elemental resistance upgrades.
• Enemies in rebalanced dungeons no longer do combo elemental/physical damage. Its 100% elemental now.
• Enemies in rebalanced dungeons are inflicting 50% more damage.
• Enemies in rebalanced dungeons effectively have 50% more health.

Other, unrelated changes: Content:

• Assaults bash now reduces damage from enemy bullets by 40% for the duration of the maneuver
• Quad/Paladins maneuver is shielded (temp for Paladin, as we hope to change its maneuver someday)
• Dusters base health reduced by 10%
• Dagger Knight: Shorter shield phases on T0-T9 Shield Blasts (lasts longer as you tier up)
• Bomb Factory: Many new rooms (which wont all spawn in any given run)
• Bomb Factory: New bomb fuse unit, tweaks to enemies to make them work better with bombs
• Reeducation Camp: Many new rooms & new heat vent traps
• Reeducation Camp: Added anti-rushing barricades in various places.
• Removed XP farm exploit on Soul Collector quest
• Made requirements for Vault quest less error prone.
• Raised Prison Box quest item drop rate
• Removed all T2-T6 dungeon keys from store

UI:

• Show item info when you mouseover an item in the trade screen
• Only show damage number fly-ups for the local player
• Added option to control whether clicking a radar icon initiates a teleport. Defaults to disabled.
• Tweaked visuals of item equip popups
• Raw dungeon names no longer displayed in friend locations.
• Fixed item info panel sometimes sticking around after closing Storage.
• Immediately join friends on different servers via the Friend List or /tp or /teleport command.
• Mini friends online list displays correct number of online friends total.
• When you accept or try hand-in a giver quest, make it your active quest
• Dont show events and news in new user flow

Other:

• Debug information now has a graph for memory usage (managed memory, assets and similar are not included)
• Optimized plane outlines; should look nicer and impact perf less
• Added graphics settings option to override antialiasing level
• Combined mouse and keyboard controls into one keybinding menu (finally!)
• Fixed binding modifier keys (CTRL/Alt/Shift) as solo inputs.
• Can now bind individual modifiers + keys (CTRL + A, etc.) Note: some existing bindings have been reset.
• Gamepad controls only show when a gamepad is connected.
• Extend initial connection timeout to 1s to avoid some unnecessary reconnection attempts.
• Minor bug fix where some dungeon room orientations werent considered
• Lots of random little bugfixes and changes to help future development
• Better logging for quests, to help diagnose crafting cancellation bug

ART EXPERIMENT:

• Higher tiers of machine guns (up to T10) shoot cooler-looking bullets, but only you see them; other players still see the less-noisy versions were all accustomed to. If this seems cool, well do this for all the other guns too.

Last but not least, were finally starting to showcase our character art more! Check out this sweet new keyart that were using as the Discord banner.

[ 2019-05-17 16:37:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

Whats happening in those birdplane filled skies? Lets talk turkey. The long foretold moment is nearly upon us, the server wipe. But fear not, those of you with keys to the Steambirds Domain, all is not lost; your gold, hangar slots, RC storage, unlocked planes, and stored crafting materials will not be wiped. Be sure to store items you want to keep in your RC storage! What will be wiped is your planes, your Pilot XP, and scrap. So you better spend that scrap! This wipe will be happening tomorrow, THURSDAY, so prepare yourself! (originally posted here) Following the wipe we will be having weekend (Friday - Sunday, starting 10 AM PST) closed beta tests to keep the game in tip-top shape and make sure that everything is well tested when we finally open the servers to the world at large! If you have a key, thisll be your chance to explore the skies before the rest of the flock arrives, and gain the knowledge you need to help the Steambirds Alliance defeat the hordes of evil cats lead by Meowza. Eventually, the weekend beta tests will become open to the public, but thats at least a few weeks away.
In the land of patch notes, here are last weeks changes: Art:

• New Icons for quest items

Weapons:

• Shotgun: -10% DPS at long range, and up to +55% DPS when fired point-blank (closer to +20% DPS at mid-range). Has not been applied to URs yet.
• Phantom Curtain (Nerf): DPS -25%
• Scythe of Zed (Nerf): DPS -5%. (Oh, yeah... some items have been named after the Oct Competition winners!)

Skills:

• Hog 1A (Nerf):
  • Armor below 50%: Cooldown: -42-50%, Secondary Steam Cost: +10%
  • Armor below 20%: Secondary Steam Cost: -60%
• Medic 4A (Buff): Now only -20% armor
• Arc skills (Nerf): Reduced range boosts by roughly -15%
• Blaster 2A (Buff): Now only -50% damage
• Blaster 2B (Buff): Now only -10% armor
• Blaster 3B (Buff): Now only -40% turnrate
• Blaster 4X (Buff): Now only -10% armor
• Machinegun 1A (Complete rework): Range -10%, Cooldown -21-30%
• Machinegun 1B (Complete rework): Range +36-45%, Cooldown +10%

Other:

• Nerfed Chariot Judge's race track damage

Weve also had a few mini-patches since the last blog post, so if youre not in the SBA discord and missed those details, this is all that happened since the last blog post: Misc:

• Bigger island: Landmass increased by +50%, setpiece boss population +35%. This is in preparation for open beta, when servers will be fuller.
• Super Secret Base: Made non-boss versions of Omega squadron, spawns as normal enemy in.
• The Vaults: Removed outdated warnings about X-Mines.
• Lowered tier of Drill Sgt to fix cat skull showing bug
• Fixed units that were talking too much in Catipede Nest
• Added 'return home' states to non-boss Overworld enemies
• Updated some crafting material descriptions to include instructions for use
• Fixed chat / maneuver exploit.
• Fixed more of the keybinding bugs.

Difficulty updates:

• Difficulty parameters tweaked. Intended result is, brand new players find the game a bit easier, and ultra-pros should find the game a bit more difficult.
• Negative difficulty scaling nerfed; should in theory stop giving unneeded help to veteran players with lots of skills and items.

Player class/weapon updates:

• Skill: Buffed Old Faithful 3-A and 4-A
• Skill: Buffed Machinegun 3-B, now adds steam instead of armor
• Skill: Nerfed Machinegun 1-B
• Duster spin attack: Now works with Elementals and Ultra Rares. Duster spin attack: Raised low tier damage, lowered high tier damage.
• Buffed Engineer's turrets. Stays alive for 50% longer
• Fire Orbs I and II: Changed color
• Arc guns: Skills that increase arc range have been nerfed by roughly -15%
• Engineer turret: Bullet speed increased 2x (range unchanged), turning speed increased +33%.

Boss updates:

• Meowza: Added new attack phase "nuke strike," removed final nuke attack after death
• Doomsday: Made it so nuke kills all minions
• Overseer Charles: Fixed hitbox
• Rei: Nerfed grid nodes that were dealing too much damage
• Bomb Maker: Slight buff to armor
• Noble Politician: Slight increase movement speed
• Phoenix: Adjusted gun mounts
• Buff to tutorial bosses armor, added fanfare on kill

[ 2019-04-15 22:01:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

Were back for the third week in a row with another update! This update is primarily focussed on more polish and bug fixes to help you with your all your Steambirding needs. We hear Parker over in the pub is looking more snazzy than ever and keen to see you again!

• Fixed Paladin sword issue (hotfixed)
• Fixed Dagger Knight cooldown shield issues (hotfixed)
• Fixed some more issues with cooldowns (hotfixed)
• Unique art for each dungeon key
• Optimized meshes to improve event boss and dungeon performance
• Skill balance: Wasp 2B: Changed on-kill reward from health to steam
• Skill balance: Medic 2B: Lowered health penalty
• Skill balance: Raptor 2B: Lowered DPS penalty
• More updates to VFX / polish improvements: Venom Compound, The Vault, Temple of Bast, Super Secret Base, The Dig
• Added new attack phase to Bast Statue miniboss
• Fixed bug where high-tier Shield Blasts and Flak Cannons were considered common
• Reduced Tesla arc range by -16%
• New NPC poses for conversations in the Rebel City
• A few more plane variant names/descriptions
• No longer possible to double-interact with items in storage.
• Reordered friends list context menu.
• Fixed issue preventing players from being unblocked.
• Teleport to Rebel City defaults to back/share on controllers.
• Secondary fire now on right bumper/R1 on controllers, as well as face button.
• Modifier text on keybinding is more visible.
• Fixed double keybinding bug
• Fixed some issues with healing after death resulting in powerful undead players ;-)
• Fixed issue with portals spawning on top of each other
• Fixed some crafting bugs
• Fixed some inventory bugs where items might disappear or become inoperable
• Fixed exploit where fizzling items skills are still active
• Cap Paladin heal auras so they don't stack (only the strongest aura will apply)
• Fixed Medics "on heal ally" skill trigger

[ 2019-03-13 05:11:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

Last week we rolled out a nice big update, with a huge collection of big and small changes. This week were hitting you with a much smaller update, including a number of polish and bug fix updates from the feedback weve been getting. Were still working hard to get more of the bugs and polish items fixed, but we didnt want you to wait for these. Note: we havent finished all the fixes for the controls menu, but if youre experiencing weird issues with that, we ask that you try reset controls to default and see if that cleans things up for you.

• Changed base storage from 12 to 16 spaces, so theres a more storage space for everyone. All current players should get another 4 free spaces.
• Added all variant skins to the store - grabs those Dagger Knight and Siege Tank skins now!
• Fixed friend list lockup/crash when opening menu
• Fixed navigation getting stuck in small inventories.
• Fixed bug causing friend information to show on other button hovers.
• Quick Heal added to shared controls.
• Moved fire, secondary, superspeed and maneuver out of shared controls into separate plane controls.
• New conversations in the Rebel City, for the first time you visit the various buildings.
• Fix some bugs with guns on skills - no more missing or delayed bullets from skills
• Add cloud triggers for remaining Medic skills
• Add more secondary mods for remaining Duster and Bandit skills
• Nerfed DK and sniper skills that lowered gun reload times to fix broken DPS
• Nerfed Bandit 4-B skill to not be so OP
• Range mods from skills also affect Arc ranges
• VFX/polish updates: Ancient Arena, The Dig, Reducation Camp, Temple of Bast, The Vaults, Super Secret Base, Venom Compound
• Ancient Arena wave 10: You fight 2 of the same miniboss simultaneously
• Fixed flak cannon being basically free
• Added flak cannons T1-T10
• Balance change: Merlin: Increased health by 10%, increased turn speed while speeding
• Balance change: Medic: Decreased health by 10%
• Balance change: Engineer: Increased health by 10%
• Fixed some spawning bugs (hotfixed already), and make the system more robust so small errors in the future.
• Added small safe zone on islands near spawning point
• Make sure you cant fire a death gun more than once per plane - once that fires off, its tickets for that plane.
• Some other smaller bugs and minor crashes.

[ 2019-03-07 22:11:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

Were back! Weve rolled out a big new update and opened up the servers again. There has been a lot of changes since our last update, definitely too numerous to list them all, but lets have a look at some of the highlights...

New Classes

This update brings two new classes, the Dagger Knight and Siege Tank. Both of these are dual-stick classes and both bring new ways of playing the game. The Dagger Knight can pop a shield and dive in to do some quick short range damage. The Siege Tank can use its flak cannon to wipe bullets, or change into siege mode to get extra damage and a lot of extra range at the expense of being immobile.

Updated Class Unlock Progression

Since the addition of dual-stick classes, weve noticed a lot of players prefer to play these classes, and for many players they offer a more forgiving way to get started playing the game. So weve updated the progression of unlocking new classes, putting a focus on the dual-stick classes in the early part of the game. New players will always start with the Quad, but can unlock the plane-control classes as they progress.

Pilot Skills

When we first rolled out the new pilot skill system, we got some good feedback on the new system, but we werent able to get in skills for all the classes and equipment at the time. With this update youll find that weve rolled out almost all the skills, with just a few gaps here and there (sure to be filled in the coming updates). This brings the total up to 185 skills, ranging from some that fire extra bullets, to others that let you equip weapons you wouldnt normally be able to. Weve also added the rank badges and class unlocks to the skill tree, so you can plan ahead a bit easier. Weve done our best to balance all of this while keeping it as exciting and fun as possible, but there are undoubtedly some weird and wonderful issues, so please let us know if you find any broken builds. You're also welcome to suggest new skills that you'd like to see; we're not done adding them.

Friends System

Weve put in a lot of work to bring you a nifty new friends system. Youll find the friends list has been completely revamped, so now you can see nearby players, friends, and players youve recently played with. It should also be much easier to interact with these players now, teleporting or trading with them as you need. Along with this, weve also migrated the friends lists over to be stored on the server; unfortunately your current friends lists will get wiped with this update, but from now on theyll be much more robust to any issues. Having them server-side means we can do some more exciting stuff with this in the future. Watch this space!

Conversation System

Weve introduced a new modal conversation system. This is designed to give you a much richer lore experience - discover the story behind Steambirds Alliance as you play! Its currently just in the tutorial and a few select places in the Rebel City, but it will get rolled out to more places in the coming updates.

Content Polish Galore

There has been oodles of content polish revisions and tweaks across the board. A very large percentage of units in the game were touched up and tweaked. Many of the dungeons also received some significant polish passes. There are way too many changes to list here, but we hope you like exploring the world with fresh eyes again!

Art

Art didnt miss the polish train, also receiving its fair share of revisions and new visual effects. Youll find many new visual effect and models in the game - hopefully exciting to discover again and witness. We also trimmed down many needlessly-high-poly models, which should help performance on lower end devices.

Lower Trade Fees

Were greasing the economic wheels with a big reduction in trading fees across the board. Get busy trading! Our goal is to eventually make the trading fees dynamic so that they never represent more than a small percentage of the total value of a trade, but we need a lot more users and data to do that, so for now we'll keep making adjustments manually as needed.

Controls

Weve worked hard to polish the control settings and make them much more usable. Weve unified many of the controls shared across dual-stick and plane-control classes, added some new defaults we think are slightly better, and give you the ability to bind modifier keys like shift and alt for actions.

Other

• The aiming line now shows your gun range
• Crafting workshop improvements, including categories to make it less overwhelming.
• Radar improvements, including highlighting players that did rally to me emote recently, to make teleporting to them easier
• Large bonus damage when a stun bullet hits a stun-immune enemy
• Weve moved the website hosting
• Many other smaller changes, too numerous to all mention here
• Also probably a bunch of new bugs to join all the new stuff, but hopefully none that stop you having a great time!

[ 2019-02-27 15:35:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

As the end of the year fast approaches, many of the team members are taking some vacation to spend time with family and friends, so this will be the last big update of the year! As Steambirds Alliance gets closer to being ready for a more public release, weve decided to take down the servers again for a couple months. This will help us focus on making the game as awesome as possible for when everyone returns (and also enable us to take some much needed break time during the holidays without having to worry about maintaining the beta). So from 21 Dec onwards, the servers will be in maintenance mode and the game will not be playable. This next week is your chance to get in as much play time as you can good luck! Weve tried to pack this update full of improvements to cap off 2018 nicely! And when you return to the game sometime in Q1 of 2019, SBA will hopefully be even more stable and beautiful, and should (at minimum) have several brand new classes for you to explore and enjoy. Plus some other nice new features and polish that youll simply have to wonder about for now. ;-)

Art

• Iterated and tuned the teleport visual effect a bit
• Bunch of new skins, trails, decals, etc. - check the store for these!
• New premium versions of the secondary attacks for most classes (excluding the Engineer, Merlin, Raptor, Bandit)

Content

• Paladin skill balancing
• Fixes on Meowza dungeon
• Booby prizes for DPS treasure boxes
• Nerfed the "Undertaker": reduced the aux gun mount's dmg by 50%

Polish and Bugfixes

• Fixed issue where skills were spamming the chat log (already rolled out)
• Fixed an issue where the consumable health boost item was broken
• Fixed a timing issue where sometimes players might not be able to join a dungeon within the last ~10s of the portal
• When your connection drops, it will try reconnect to the same server again a few times. Sometimes it will also be able to reconnect to a dungeon.
• Mouse works with the radar now (hover to select, click to teleport)
• Drag n drop items in storage
• Fixed: drag n drop items to world
• Fixed: cannot select buttons in some error popups with a controller
• Fixed issues where escape would not work or break some UI
• Return key works as generic accept/click/confirm
• Fixed: UI bug reporter popup position broken in some resolutions
• Add bug reporter to bottom of options menu
• Fixed: UI input text issues in login process
• Fixed: WASD and DPAD did not work in menus
• Mouse hover is not delayed anymore
• Fixed: purchase popup menu highlights were broken sometimes
• Fixed: chat from options menu did not work
• Clicking somewhere in the world closes the chat
• Fixed: broken try-on feature in store
• Fixed: storage does not show the item info panel
• Navigation in the generic menus on the left now wraps from top to bottom
• Fixed: quest popup was not working correctly
• Clicking on an item in the inventory while the context menu is open, opens the next context menu
• Clicking on the small inventory on the left opens the full inventory. Clicking in the world closes it.
• Gun switch cooldown no longer affects all plane slots
• Hide radar when the UI is faded to black, like when going to the tutorial
• Filter out /die from chat history to prevent accidental use
• Fixed: skill requirements might have been slightly out of date on death
• Fixed issue where the pub was empty after completing the tutorial quests
• Regularly pulse mission radar indicator a bit
• Fixed: some times we didn't clear the quest guidance target correctly
• Storage: current sort can be applied to re-order entire storage (with confirmation)

[ 2018-12-12 16:34:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

This weeks update brings more big changes! From an update to our input system, to the oft-requested ability to apply variant skins to existing planes, we have a lot to share. Lets get to it!

Inputs

Weve done a refactoring of our input system! What does that mean? Weve restructured how the UI works weve improved our mouse support, most notably you can now drag-n-drop in the menus to move items around! This includes the ability to drag and item from your inventory to the world to drop it, you can also right-click an item to drop it. When youre not using the mouse the cursor will no longer affect your selection as you move through the inventory with the keyboard or controller. These changes should make it easier to switch between controller, mouse, and keyboard, and they should also increase the individual functionality of each of those accessories! With every big change like this there is a risk of bugs! If youre an alpha player let us know about any weirdness with the in-game bug reporter (ctrl+r), or in our discord!

Art

• Added a transition effect for when you teleport
• Icons for ranks improved

Content

• Increased spawn density in the overworld; there are more enemies to fight!
• Added a system that migrates obsolete and legacy items to current versions. For example, outdated non-upgradeable ultra-rares will become the maxed out version of the current upgradeable items
• Updated Meowza Dungeon entrance. It now includes a nexus carrier, and added an enemy that attacks after 60 seconds so you cant camp the entrance
• Refined Mecha-Deer Behavior, now they run away while shooting, and increased their loot/xp
• Added variants of Chuck in bomb dungeon that gives increased XP
• Increased damage on Laser Gates in the Dig

Audio

• Volume adjustments for better overall balancing
• New sounds added
• Updates to minion sound effects
• Fixed an audio looping bug, can now have multiple audio loops playing simultaneously

Polish and Bugfixes

• Increased default radius in which a quest encounter will be triggered, and added functionality for unit-specific changes
• Increased experience reward radius when you defeat an enemy
• Fixed bug where you couldnt superspeed with 0 energy
• Removed XP limiter for level 20 planes
• Players now must have reached level 20 before entering the crafting workshop
• Tutorial quests only begin when the first tutorial dungeon has been complete
• Dropped loot now slows down more over time so it doesnt drift as far and get lost
• Added functionality to improve name display on units; we can now independently toggle the visibility of health bars and unit names . For example, destructible walls should no longer show names.
• Fixed bug where bullets were queued twice
• Fixed item-switching exploits, prevented similar exploits in the future with item cooldowns
  • If your previous weapon was in the middle of a cooldown and you switch to a new weapon, the cooldown of the old weapon will remain in effect.
  • Fixed exploit where Paladins could stack auras via item switching as well as similar item-switching exploits; added functionality to prevent similar exploits in the future.
• Fixed random smoke particles appearing in Rebel City
• Added modifier to dynamic difficulty for low player counts; boosts damage to bosses
• Dynamic difficulty added to some minion bosses
• Skills bug fixes: XP modifiers fixed, maintaining health/steam on changes fixed
• Skills with stacking effects are now capped at 3 stacks
• Hotfix: Fixed missing carrier in first tutorial dungeon
• Disallowed symbols and numbers in player name registration
• Unlocking variants gives you the option to automatically apply the variant to your plane.

[ 2018-12-04 18:55:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

Last week was a huge update where we rolled out the new skill and trade systems. These big new features also came with a healthy dose of bugs and issues, so were moving up the next update to this week to deal with some of that.

Skills

• Hotfixed an issue where the wrong level number was used for skills
• Improved the interface for multiple skill loadouts
• Some minor skill balancing/tweaks
• Fixed issue where some stat mods (like max steam) could affect others (like xp)
• Fixed some other minor skill-related bugs, like lasers not working with reduced range, or skills not doing what they say they do

Trade

• Improvements to text, layout, notifications and navigation
• Knob icon on the fee toggle buttons to show they can be adjusted
• Add trade related labels to the item info popup

Dynamic Difficulty

Were also rolling out a more general-purpose dynamic difficulty scaling system. As with the previous system, the new system adjusts the effective health of enemies to compensate for more players. The adjustment is fairly gentle, so itll still always be better to have more players, but you (hopefully) wont just be able to steamroll the bosses with a very large group. The old system was an experiment, limited to just bosses, whereas the new system rolls this out to all enemies (with different parameters, depending on the enemy). Over the coming weeks well be tweaking these parameters, adjusting them to be a better experience all round. Let us know if you notice any enemies that seem unpleasantly or drastically stronger or weaker after the update.

Storage Warehouse

• Fixed an issue with equipped from storage
• Fixed issue with storage filtering/sorting
• Fixed issue when double clicking on the grid
• Fixed toggle buttons losing clicks on toggle area

Content

• Elemental weapon balancing:
  • Buffed: Life Ender I / II / III
  • Nerfed: Wattson's Fury I / II / III
  • Buffed: Poison Pulser I / II / III
  • Nerfed: Lightning Laser I / II / III
  • Buffed: Railgun I / II / III
  • Nerfed: Ice Spear I / II / III
  • Buffed: Sprinkler I / II / III
  • Nerfed: Lightning Bug I / II / III
• Basic wasps T1-10 rebalanced so strength increase is more linear

Polish and Bugfixes

• Store: Variants, paints and trails now have an additional layer of options after purchasing to instantly equip or put into storage.
• Optimized an issue that was causing significant server lag and lots of memory allocation (up to 1GB!) when some players with very large inventories joined the server.
• Fixed objective complete sound playing every second for item quests
• Remove a debug dialogue bark from Meowza
• Reduce damage threshold to qualify for loot, so its easier to get loot when youre not able to do as much damage.
• Fixed some more smaller errors and exceptions

[ 2018-11-14 19:35:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

This update is a huge one, with 2 new large features: a completely new skills system and a secure trading system. Lets have a look at what those are about and what other changes are abound

Pilot Skills

For quite some time, weve had a placeholder system for pilot skills. We are in the middle of replacing it with a new skill system that should lead to far more interesting plane builds! We have a bunch of things we want to accomplish with this revamp: 1. Make each death part of a bigger journey: For many players, each plane death can feel like a complete loss. You play an little action game, you die and start over from scratch. What we want is for you to feel like each plane is part of your bigger journey and dying in a good plane gives your pilot a leg up the next time around. 2. Give players something to plan for/around: The previous skill system randomly gave you skills so there wasnt really any ability to look ahead. You should be able to say Hey, that skill looks cool. I really want to unlock that. And then go for it. 3. Chunky, meaningful skill decisions: The old +1% bonuses just werent very interesting. Wed love people to pick skills that make a substantial impact on how they play the game. Our first pass on Pilot Skills So, weve removed the old upgrade interface you get when your plane explodes and replaced it with the entirely new Pilot School interface. Heres whats different: The Timeline: Along the left hand side the screen is the timeline of your pilot career. This part is still WIP, but it will eventually show every date youve achieved each rank. These will be actual time, so you can track your progress over the entire period you play Steambirds. Skill groups: To the immediate right of the timeline are the skill groups. A skill group is a cluster of multiple skills, but you can only ever pick one skill out of the group. A skill group must be unlocked by reaching a specific pilot rank so you wont be getting access to everything all at once. Skill groups can have addition requirements like reaching level 20 on a specific plane class, so theres a good chance that eventually well move the requirements for plane unlocking into this UI as well. Individual skill info: The details of a skill are shown to the right of the skill groups.

• Requirements: Many skills are only activated if you are flying a specific class or have equipped a specific item. For example, theres a set of skills that are active when you are flying the Hog. And a different set that are active when you have equipped a shotgun.
• Powers: Most skills buff the plane in some way, boosting damage, reducing cooldowns, increasing shielding, etc. Some are only active in specific situations like right after a kill or if your health gets low. Some skills involve trade offs where they buff one area, but nerf another.
• Skill level: You can spend skill points (that you earn by ranking up your pilot) to learn and incrementally upgrade a specific skill. Skill points are limited and you cant upgrade everything, so choose carefully.

Pilot Rank and other info: All the way to the right is your pilot name, rank and info on how much more pilot XP you need to attain the next rank. Respecing: Right now respecing which skills are active is completely free. We may change that in the future, but this is the current plan, and we hope to stick with it unless we observe that it is negatively impacting the game in some way. Accessing the Pilot school in the Rebel City: If you have spare skill points to spend or you want to respec your pilot skills, theres a new building in the Rebel City that will bring up the pilot skill UI. State of the new system: A steampunk contraption just rolling out of the garage The Pilot School is incomplete and experimental, but we are sharing it early so that you can give it a try.

• Due to the magnitude of the change, all pilot ranks are wiped. So you can start again from rank 1 and climb the ladder. Weve significantly increased the frequency of ranks, so youll be ranking up and getting those skill points much faster.
• Not all the skills are in: We plan to roll out new skills for each plane class and each weapon in future updates.
• Existing skills are not balanced: We only have a first pass on skills implemented, and were trying to explore the system and be creative (as opposed to being conservative and rolling out something less exciting that is more likely to be totally functional on the first try.) Some skills will be OP. Some will just be annoying. We need your help identifying broken combinations of skills, and skills that are just plain bad. We also want to hear from you which skills are amazing and make the game better!
• UI feedback on when specific skills are active is weak: Right now we have some icons that show up when a skill is working. If it is confusing to use, please let us know.
• Multiple skill loadouts: you can purchase additional skill loadout tabs (from the store). These will let you save various respecs and quickly select them when choosing to fly a different plane. We see this as a nice-to-have convenience feature, similar to options available in games like League of Legends.

Future plans Our next big effort is balancing the current skills and fixing discovered issues as they come up. Well also be slowly adding new skills categories. Please dont get attached to any one specific skill since theyll likely change a bit as we have time to live with them and react to feedback. What wed love to hear from you:

• Overall impressions: What do you think of the new skill system? Does it hit the goals we were aiming for?
• Balance issues: Tell us where the system is broken.
• Ideas: What would you like to see for new or improved skills?

Secure Trade

We are also adding the first version of a secure trade system in this release. It also isnt complete, but heres what we are aiming for: 1. Fun negotiation between friends and strangers. Trade should be a small conversation, not just a transaction. 2. A secure, stable part of the game. The game should handle the security and every transaction should be reliable. The economy shouldnt explode due to bad economy design, real money trade (RMT) or duping. 3. Social gifting. You still should be able to help a friend. Money isnt everything. Our first pass on trading We listened to your feedback (you can read the previous discussion here: https://community.steambirds.com/forums/threads/261) The result is something that looks a lot like a traditional barter window. With a couple key adjustments:

• You can trade gold for items. You can still trade items for other items, but if you want to top off the trade, you can also include gold directly in an offer. Our hope is that players who play for free will be able to sell goods for gold and thereby gain access to gold they may not have been able to afford.
• To minimize scams and RMT there is a transaction fee. This is only on high-value goods and can be paid in either gold *or* scrap. Well be actively tuning the fee as we balance the economy. I wouldnt get too worried about the exact numbers were using in this update since it is likely that they will change (possibly many times) in the future.
• Most common goods (Tier 8 and below) have no fee. You can still gift useful items to your friends. And gold itself has no fee when gifted to another player.

How to use the trade system Initiating a trade:

• Type /trade . You can also select the other player from your Friend List and select trade from the menu.
• The other player will see a trade circle emerge around you signaling that you want to trade with them. This isnt visible to anyone else. If you leave the circle, the trade request is canceled.
• Only if the other player chooses to enter the trade circle, will trade request be accepted. Hopefully this is a bit less spammy than your typical trade request pop up.

Making offers

• The trade UI appears and you both can now add up to 4 items to your offer by selecting one of the empty + squares. You can also add gold as part of your offer.
• For high value items, youll see a trade transaction fee calculated. Either player can pay this fee. Or you can split the fee. The fee can be paid in either gold or scrap.

Accepting the offer

• There are two accept buttons, once for each player.
• Both players must hit accept for the trade to go through.
• If anyone makes a change to their offer, the buttons are deselected to prevent mistakes or fraud.

Those are the basics of trade. Give it a shot and tell us what you think.

Content and Art

• Duster uses standard armor and abilities like spin attack are now inherent to the plane.
• Patched small XP farming vector with Brother Bomber
• Removed Phoenix health regen
• Fixed Geckelston wandering
• Fixed Ambassador wandering
• Nerfed Ambassadors unshielded phase
• Light vfx polish
• Alternate backgrounds on some bosses

Polish and Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where you could not fly until you pressed escape (connected to application focus)
• Fixed dungeons generating overlapping rooms
• Fixed visual popping of enemy units by extending the network cutoff range
• Fixed some minor errors
• Minor performance optimizations

Music & Sound

• Quest dialog audio for new mission, cancel, fail, complete
• New overworld area sting
• Boss death dialogs play boss defeated sting
• Music ducking. Various effects turn down the music so the mix is clearer.

[ 2018-11-07 13:27:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

This weeks update delivers on the usual swathe of big and small improvements, including many tweaks and changes to bosses and some music to listen to while youre fighting them! Were also introducing a very bubbly new alpha trail, as with the other alpha trails it will be dropping for a limited time only! Unfortunately we wont have a livestream this week, but not to fret: well be back to our regular schedule next week.

Art

• Polish on the lowlands environments
• Some new portraits for the Pharaoh, treasure, and radar
• Fixed bug where blue paint had the wrong icon

Content

• Lots of boss changes:
  • High Priestess Tiffany: Added new final phase move where Tiffany will inhale nearby mice, added some smoky swarmer enemies as general harassers and counter-attack.
  • Doomsday: Added angry airhorn animation during nuke attack and death for dramatic effect!
  • Dr Geckelston: Added final phase where he charges at you and sends clones of himself.
  • Phoenix: Lots of edits to fire patterns to make more interesting, removed an awkward shield state, made the forward guns less useless, added "fire beak"
  • Notra: Added counter-attack that is triggered by shield phases, changes to bullet patterns and signalling
  • Ambassador: Made weakness-period evasions take up a larger space
  • Noble Politician: Made Bribe minions more aggressive
  • Pharaoh: Made laser pyramid look cooler
  • Ra Mechanism: Big changes to movement patterns. New large planet that shoots shock waves
  • Poison God: Made body longer on phase 1 and 2.
  • Frozen Horror: Minor fire pattern changes, improved visuals.
• Fixed broken Vault quest objective
• Fixed Cyclopus sniping exploit

Polish and Bugfixes

• Improved events and news list by only showing recent news and adjusting the ordering
• Change bandit maneuver to teleport forward instead of into aim direction.
• Fixed a bug with rank badges/stars, where the wrong star might sometimes be shown
• Added missing outline to tutorial instructor
• Fixed storage keyboard issues and input capture bugs
• Made storage mouseovers behave more like players expected.
• Added item swap functionality to storage

Audio

• Boss music!
• Audio pass on bosses: Ambassador, Poison God, The Frozen Horror, High Priestess Tiffany, Cyclopus, Lobbyist, Lazer the Host, Dr Geckelston, Phoenix, Noble Politician, Doomsday

Other

• More improvements to the build server and processes
• Improved monitoring of some weird/anomalous situations
• Work continues on the skill system, and if everything goes according to plan you might see some exciting news next update.

[ 2018-10-24 21:47:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

A notable change this update: weve added an alternative weapon slot to every plane! If you have a favourite secondary weapon for a plane, you can now equip it in this slot and quickly switch to it by pressing Q (rebindable). This slot is attached to your plane, not a part of your shared cargo. But thats certainly not the only change in this update...

Art

Progress on the trailer continues, and is just waiting for some features were working on to get in so we can show them off too. The big update in art this week is that many of the bosses now have custom portraits! Now you can put a face to the pilots of those boss planes that haunt your nightmares; the brothers Rei, Jinn, and Kai, Doctor Notra, High Priestess Tiffany, the enigmatic Meowza, and more will be staring you down in game whenever they have something to say!

Content

• Updated boss and group leader item drop rates for low to mid-tier areas:
• Bosses are now guaranteed to drop next tier items, while enemy group leaders no longer drop next tier items.
• Increased rewards on the Vault/Dig quests (since they take longer to complete):
  • 2 additional boss UR gun drops - "God Beam" and "The Spitting Cat"
  • Higher chance of getting T9 items
  • Better overall rewards
• Updated White Spider's fire patterns
• Chariot Judge: Added new attack phase for final racer, cleaned up some movement issues, lots of minor tweaks to make it more interesting
• Improvements to mission start and complete conditions for The Vaults
• Fixed broken Riot Ender hitbox

Storage Improvements

• Side-by-side view for storage menu, with your cargo and storage in one view.
• Robust position persistence through special case item swaps.
• Buy more storage button re-added with side-by-side view.
• Basic item move functionality.
• Prevented item info popup conflicting with context menu - context menu no longer strangely positioned off to the right.
• Other fixes:
  • Item info not showing
  • Removed discard option
  • Backend communication errors
  • Menu stack bugs
  • Issue with plane inputs being captured after menu is closed via mouse

Polish and Bugfixes

• Added pilot rank to chat and a few other places. Now you can proudly display your rank to others
• Additional key binding slots for emotes - you can bind more emotes to keys! Remember to select the emote you want from the emotes menu and change the relevant key binding to suit your setup.
• Chat input improved, and added more useful help commands /help` and `/help_all`
• Small improvements to currency buying menu
• Fixed mouse wheel behaviour in a lot of the UI

Audio

• Audio/VFX pass: Kai, Jinn, Rei, White Spider, Chariot Judge, Doomsday
• The Arena and The Elder Arena now have horns signalling waves and crowds cheering
• Music now plays in the Overworld and dungeons! (Boss music also coming soon!)

Other

• Removed extra old news
• Improvements to our build server to better support our 2nd-tier beta servers (coming soon)
• Pilot skills are still in development, but progress is coming along and itll be in an update before you realise it...

[ 2018-10-10 16:02:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

Were back this update with a bumper number of content tweaks and changes. Youll have to dig into the list below, but hopefully theres something for everyone! Behind the scenes, work on the new skills system is still underway. Well have more info on that coming up soon, but right now you can come hang out on the weekly stream and hear more about skill and what were working on next. Another exciting thing weve been working on is a new 3rd tier of servers. Once this is completed, well have the production set of servers that normally everyone plays on; a set of test servers, only accessible to devs, where we test new features in secrecy (cant have the cats seeing what were up to!); and a new staging or beta set of servers. This last set of servers is where well start testing new updates before we roll them out to production. We cant guarantee itll be stable, and it will almost certainly break in some interesting ways, but this will be the way to get access to the bleeding edge of Steambirds Alliance dev. More details on this coming soon!

Content

• More exclusive limited-time trails. Get them now, before they disappear forever!
• Added Saturday Special Missions for Dark Steel
• Added new dungeon quests for the Vaults and the Dig
• Slightly increased drop rates for some dungeons and bosses
• Added DPS treasure boxes to lower tier dungeons. These drop better loot based on DPS output in a time period, so youll need to be stronger than the baseline to qualify for the special loot.
• Added dynamic difficulty to the Dig
• Improved XP rewards for lower level dungeons
• Fixed daily events so theres no missing days in 5-week months
• Added a spawn room to the Iron Lair
• Added poison resist to the White Spider
• Removed attack from White Spider that could force players out of loot range
• Fixed Thief Idol direction
• Fixed bug where beach text was blank
• Fixed Undertaker I icon
• Removed level 1 drops from the Dig
• Fixed Life Ender and Frost Dagger fire patterns
• Fixed Damage On Tracer Bubbles III
• Fixed Elemental Sword Rarity Display

Polish/Bug Fixes

• Polish: storage menu is now grid-based! Were still working on some more improvements to this interface, but its already a whole lot better than before. At a glance you can see a lot more items in storage and theres a nifty filtering menu so you can really narrow down to just the items you need.
• Dungeon starting should be improved a lot now, so hopefully no more issues there! But if there are some weird issues, then youll get a refund once-off dungeon key you can try use again later.
• A variety of server performance improvements

Other

• Made it easier for admins to fix things for players if something goes wrong
• Bomb dungeon audio pass

[ 2018-09-26 03:50:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

This update were releasing some exclusive new content for players in: Septembers Alpha Treasure Hunt. Were planning on making this a habit - having some special content that is only available for a very limited time, and then never again. If you want it, youll have to come play and get it! This month were dropping a fun new trail, the elusive "Alpha Ion Trail". Fortunately, most bosses and strong enemies will drop it, so you just need to play the game normally to get it, but it is quite rare. The item is tradeable, but it wont ever be dropped again after this event, so dont miss out! Were also moving the regular stream time to Wednesdays at 3pm PST, starting with this week. Same thing, just different time. Come join us and hear about what were working on and coming soon. Still cant get enough of us? Wanna hear our birdy tweets? Well, we have a nice surprise for you! Weve made a new twitter account, exclusively for Steambirds awesomeness! Come follow us and join in the fun here

Art

Lots of polish happening in the land of art! In icons, the variant icons have been updated, and the weapon icons have been iterated with new bases, numbers, and rarity colors! Theres been some various VFX updates, including one to indicate damage on Meowzas drills, an update to the raptor mine explosion, new trails, smokes trails in the rescue dungeon and tutorial dungeon, and emote updates! New emotes have been added, Greet and Rally, and the existing ones have been updated to match the art style. Lastly, on enemies, the sweeper quest has new art, and the war horse event enemy now sits upon its trail of bullets, instead of in them! Outside the game, art weve been working on a trailer that is nearly complete! Were excited to show it to you, so keep an eye out for that!

Content

• Weve rolled out the difficulty scaling we discussed last update to more content. All the dungeon bosses will now also scale up slightly, like Meowza, when you have more players fighting it.
• Low level items are available in the store to purchase with scrap. This is intended to give new players who have invested time (and gotten scrap) a way of recovering from their deaths a little faster. We are not selling items for gold.
• Updates controller configs for assault, medic, hog, and raptor so they work better with absolute controls.
• DPS locked treasures added to T2-T5 dungeons. Get better rewards by bringing more firepower!
• Phoenix hp buff: 2nd and 3rd phases have more health
• Elemental armor improvements: Armor values match basic armor, fusion improves elem protect from 15% => 20%
• Lowered overall item fusion costs for most items at Crafter building
• Raised usable chance on T2-T7 enemies
• Fixed: Daily event's now give proper increases to item drops
• Fixed: Bandit EMP cooldown syncs properly
• Tesla UR damage nerfed by 55%.
• Added rocket pod spawning in The Arena
• Reduced occurrence of Duster item drops for non-Duster classes

Polish and Bugfixes

• Fixed health/steam exploit when quickly equipping different items
• Fixed bug with more than 255 cargo slots (for, ahem, a lot of storage)
• Fixed bug where rarely players incorrectly appear as others and lose all items
• Fixed some situations where the game uploaded extra data and caused lag for all those without the beefiest of upload speeds. Less beefy internet required now.
• Fixed a number of server stability related issues
• Polish: damage bars on/off option in interface menu.
• More logging to help catch some bullet bugs (hopefully!)
• Fixed some issues with dungeons starting.
• Polish: if it fails to spawn a dungeon from a key, it should now drop a replacement key.
• Polish: added target enemy level to territory labels

Other

• Hidden unsupported hotkey: Shift+F10 to hide all UI for trailer and screenshots.
• Lots of new music: dungeons, crafting workshop, and loading screen.
• Some new explosion sound effects.

[ 2018-09-12 19:15:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi folks! This update has some pretty major changes in it that were excited to finally roll out, starting with:

Shared Cargo

Todays build includes a substantial rework of plane cargo. The old system had some long-standing problems:

• Difficulty moving items between planes: Players would store items on spare planes and then would need to engage in a time consuming dance in which theyd swap planes and move items to storage on a regular basis.
• Confusing pricing on storage slots and plane cargo: It was hard for us to come up with a fair price for additional plane cargo, which weve always hoped we could sell to help support the games development, since the old system effectively encouraged players to buy hangar slots and use planes as storage, which is not (as noted above) very convenient.

So we are trying out a new and hopefully simpler system. Now all planes share a single cargo container. When you switch planes, the cargo container is detached from the old plane and automatically bolted onto the new plane. Our feathered engineers assure us this is perfectly safe. Heres how this plays out in practice:

• Simplified inventory management: There are now only two places to put items: Rebel City Storage and Plane Cargo. If you want to transfer items between storage and plane cargo, you no longer need to constantly swap planes.
• Expanded default storage: This change will make players want to put even more stuff in Rebel City Storage, and we know that many players already feel that the free storage amount is insufficient, so we've upped the default free storage to 12 spaces. All players will get their extra storage immediately - it is in addition to any storage you may have already purchased.
• Expanded default cargo: We've also increased the default plane cargo to 12 spaces, from the current 8, which is something weve wanted to do for a while anyway since some players have been very vocal about how cramped their current amount of plane cargo feels. (Reminder: If your plane goes down, you still lose *everything* in the shared cargo. Expanding it is, in that way, a bit of a mixed blessing!)
• Plane cargo expansions for sale: It will now be possible to purchase plane cargo, beyond the 12 spaces that everyone receives for free. Four cargo spaces (one full row) will cost 7000 gold, with a nice discount of that price the first and second time you purchase it (just like how we discount the first few purchases of Rebel City Storage.)

What happens to current players who have items spread across multiple planes? We really didn't want to wipe your collected items in the middle of this beta test. So instead, there's a one-time migration process that will occur in which items are incrementally filtered out of old plane cargo and into the new shared cargo. It is a little weird, and might have some odd edge cases that we havent identified, but we figured it was better than simply doing a wipe. [olist]

First, all of the items currently stored in all your various plane cargo holds will be temporarily transferred into a hidden list. These items are not deleted! You just cant see them.

Next, when you log on, we then take the first items from the hidden list and put them into your shared cargo until it is completely full.

At this point, you can move the items from your plane cargo to storage if you want to keep them.

If you drop items, or otherwise empty out your plane cargo, the next time you log in or switch planes, we will magically fill up any empty cargo space with more items from the hidden list. This process will continue until your hidden list is empty.

Youll know your hidden list is empty when you login or switch to a plane in the hangar and there is at least one empty slot. From that point on youll never need to worry about the hidden list again!

After a few weeks, well remove the hidden list system from the game in order to eliminate unnecessary edge cases that could hinder future development, since the hidden list serves no purpose other than to help us avoid a wipe in this one and only situation. [/olist]

Difficulty Scaling Experiment

Another long-standing issue weve had in the game is that bosses become almost trivial if you have a very large group of players. When large group hits a boss, it previously would die so quickly that many players were not even able to qualify for loot. That feels bad. So in this update were also experimenting with some dynamic scaling, where a boss will become a little more difficult with more players. Our goal is that more players will always be better, but you should never be able to mindlessly steamroll a boss. Right now the system scales difficulty along a curve; if you have 10 players instead of just 1, the boss might have just 50% more health. Not 10x health, because we always want you to be happy that you have your friends around. The scaling is dynamic and will adjust automatically if players join or leave the boss fight. Were still playing with these numbers, and for now were testing this only on Meowza. Our suspicion is that difficulty scaling will be especially important near launch when the servers will be a lot busier. Let us know if you think this scaling works well, were eager to get some feedback!

Art

Theres a totally cool trailer happening behind the scenes, the bird rebels are looking their coolest, we cant wait to show it to you. Not so behind the scenes, the raceboss has new art and quest enemies are getting shined up as well!

Content

• Added Copper and Dark Steel to quest drops
• Buffed Meowza health a bit
• Buff arc guns
• Buff to bandit fire (+15%)
• Fixed broken daily event loot
• Fixed trail DPS
• Fixed Goose mission
• Fixed Greater Pooper mission
• Fixed treasure sniping exploit/troll
• Fixed loot drop holes
• Added engines to basic recipes

Polish and Bugfixes

• Polish: new inventory item move menu
• Polish: setting to disable red near-death bars
• Fixed Ol Faithful tutorial bug
• Fixed bug with plane color conversion (prevented some old accounts from logging in)
• Fixed bug with overridden quest goals (for special quest goals that dont follow the regular format)
• Fixed self-friend bug: it was possible to self-friend.
• Fixed local ip/port issues that might affect joining servers Invisible bullets have more logging and one potential cause fixed.
• Fixed more causes of duplicate bullets
• Fixed bug where you could 'equip' quest items from storage, which would basically throw them into the aether
• Fixed bug where inventory items are vertically offset if you try use an unusable item
• Fixed bug where planes wouldn't undock from buildings sometimes
• Fixed health/steam exploit with quickly equipping different items
• Polished automatic quality adjustment to be more robust and (hopefully) less likely to cause undesired downgrades. Should only be in effect for the first 5 minutes of play.
• Fixed leak with bullet particle emitters.
• Players are no longer able to teleport to themselves.
• Fixed some missing sound bugs.
• Fixed an issue with analytics, where we would potentially lose up to 90% of them in some situations.

Other

• Audio: lots of new sound effects!

[ 2018-08-29 00:13:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

Its been an exciting 2 weeks. Weve had a significant influx of new players (and some returning old faces). Welcome everyone, we hope you enjoy this world weve been making! With all the new players joining at almost the same time, we had a few rough patches at the start (sorry about those!), but we think weve ironed out most of the big issues now (crossing talons!) If you missed the opportunity to get a key this round, the weekly stream is the best way to get a chance at one. Come join us and answer an easy question to get your shot!

Art

More polish shines across the game; bosses are getting upgraded including the escort boss and the berserker boss being animated and four new boss environments added and existing ones being polished. Some more props have been added to the Rebel City and you should keep an eye out for the helicopter using that landing pad! In addition to this icons are being polished in the background and new emotes have been added; Charge, Disco, and, Warning.

Content

• Added elemental properties to Ancient Arena
• Added tiers and upgrades to elemental armor. They now drop at T8 and are upgraded via fusion to T10
• T10s no longer drop from Dungeon entrance set pieces and minions in The Dig.
• Added Copper, a material used to craft basic T8. Copper is rewarded for T8+ daily quests.
• Added crafting recipes that allow players to craft basic T8 weapons, engines, and armor using Copper.
• 2 new Sunday bounties ("Meowza" and "SN-Z"). Rewards Dark Steel, which can be used to upgrade Boss Untiereds

Zoom Changes

Weve selectively zoomed out a bit during regular overworld interactions and a bit more during boss fights. You should now be able to see more around you than before. This is something that weve wanted to do for a while, but we were held back by performance concerns. But with all the recent performance optimization work that we did, it was now feasible to attempt it, so attempt it we have. We'd love to hear feedback on the change!

Polish and Bugfixes

• A bowl of nice piping hot bug fixes to keep the servers up for all the new players
• Plane inventory context menu
  • Equip, drop and move are now actions in a submenu in the inventory
  • You can re-order the items in your inventory to make better use of hotkeys
  • Hopefully fewer mistake drops of items!
• Show item panel for quest (or crafting) reward if its just one item
• Fixed bounty quest scheduling, so bounties should now be up for a full 24 hours, as per the writing on the packet. Good luck with your bountifying
• Automatic performance adjustment. If youre getting a low framerate, this will try lower your graphics settings and hopefully make things more playable. Can be disabled from options.
• Bugfix: prevented unused bullet pools having thousands of idle objects
• Improvements and polish to the store previews and paints. Try on all the colors at the same time!
• Slightly more verbose LNCxx error messages, so you have a better idea of why a problem might be happening
• Polish: show nexus in background during events and news on login
• Polish: add more reminders to use the 'drop trash' key
• New Whats Early Access? popup on login (can be disabled in options), to remind players that changes are still coming in fast and hot.
• Fixed an issue where broken game servers could pile up and clog the system
• Polish: trails in the store now have a proper preview
• Added defensive approach to dealing with bullets having extra particle emitters - hopefully these should be resolved now.

Other

• Some simple monitoring to try detect server outages
• Bug reports include a mini GIF (to help debugging) - this was improved a bit.
• More logging for dungeon key uses, so we can hopefully better diagnose any issues
• Moved a bunch of config text to localizable files, for the future

[ 2018-08-16 03:27:54 CET ] [ Original post ]