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Blade Symphony
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Read about it and Sign up for the Open Beta here!
The Harmonious Prelude update is delayed
I’m typing this out after two days of no sleep, so please excuse if my stream of consciousness is not very well formed.
The Harmonious Prelude update is the pre-cursor to Blade Symphony going free-to-play. It is intended to be an update that will transition the existing game toward the goals of the free-to-play release, by including a Mac and Linux version, more translations, a separate SDK, management of all items through the Steam Inventory service, and many new features that will strengthen the release. Unfortunately, it will not be coming out today.
I won’t make excuses and state that this is the result of somebody else’s work or lack of it. This is my fault. I have not done a good enough job at prioritizing my work and those that work with me. I have not hired a large enough team to reach this ambitious milestone in a timely manner. I became involved in feature-creep. I became complacent with our progress. I underestimated our remaining work.
This is an extremely embarrassing blow for not just me, but this entire company. In my 9 years of helming this studio, we have never had to delay a significant release in this matter. This is also something that is demotivating and depressing, but I am going to do my best to not let you down.
Over the next three weeks, we will set out to accomplish our original goals as we had put them together, by doing the following:
- Finding an additional programmer to assist with source development.
- Having a release quality candidate available on the Blade Symphony Beta;
- Windows 32-bit game, dedicated server and SDK, 64-bit game SDK, OSX 64-bit game, and Linux 64-bit game and dedicated server.
- Open up the testing of this release quality candidate to a wider audience. Those active in our Discord and on our forums.
- Completely re-compile shaders and solve crashes preventing full re-compiles.
- Finishing the summary screen (end round,) to a degree that matches the original concept and offers a positive experience.
- Recompiling all maps and fixing brush related issues.
- Fixing sword, character and item materials that were broke due to the engine migration.
- Integrating the proper translations for the game.
- Transitioning the workshop into a vote-based system for item curation.
- Transition specific quality workshop items to curated items.
- Implementing item pictures for color items, emblems and unseen character masks.
- Properly testing the free-to-play API and backend.
- Properly testing the Win/Linux dedicated server and shipped tools.
- Properly testing the game client across all platforms.
- Complete the Harmonious Update release trailer.
- Finish the Discord RIch PResence integration.
- Properly market this update.
While I am ashamed to admit that this has been a colossal failure on my part, I am committed to releasing this update and seeing its success. Please join us on our Discord over the next three weeks as we work to tackle these issues. On or before three weeks from today, we will know when the release date for Harmonious Prelude is.
Blade Symphony's Future of Free-To-Play
What Hasn't Changed
Let's re-iterate some points from the last post, because they're note-worthy, or particularly difficult for some to stomach.
What's Changed
Here's an update on the new things we've put in since the last update:
What's Left
The game is finally stable, but needs lots of bug fixing. The last feature to work on is something to better communicate level progression, which is incredibly important for all games that have a leveling system. We're scrapping the idea of an overlay, and instead creating a familiar experience similar to the Customization Screen. At the end of a round, this new Summary Screen will display information experience gained. This is just a concept, so no notifications for gaining new items or going up a level, yet.
Release Plan
To get over the funk of working on this update for so long, we took a break to release an update to our first game, Dystopia. After enjoying the game with so many old friends, we decided it would be best to shift our release plan to release our work sooner, rather than later, and iterate on it (like we did with subsequent Dystopia updates.)We are going to modify our release plan, so that we have a better strategy for the game going free-to-play in 2018. All of the work from the last year will be released in what we're calling the Blade Symphony: Harmonious Prelude update, which will also see the price of the game drop significantly. Doing so will enable us to:
Community Help
I'm going to say it again, we really need help with translating the game, so please jump into our Discord and find out how you can lend a hand.Release Date
This release wouldn't be difficult unless it had one more final obstacles; conferences. In late March and April, there will be some big game trade-shows/conferences going on, sure to have plenty of large announcements and releases. It's suicide for an indie developer like us to release during that time, so we're pushing out the date for Blade Symphony: Harmonious Prelude to Thursday April 12th, 2018. Friday Halloween Gather!
Connect to the server here: 95.172.92.168:25017 to meet up and play with other gud-bois!
Autumn Tournament Grand Finals live stream!
Big thanks to everyone who has put this together and volunteered to cast over Twitch! Congratulations to all participants and winners!
Click here to check out the live stream!
Friday Play Session!
Come join their game and check out their group here!
Blade Symphony is going Free-To-Play
When We Started
There has been some confusion about when development on the Free-To-Play effort started; some people think that we started as early as mid-2016, or earlier. That's wrong. We've been talking internally about Blade Symphony becoming a free-to-play game since as early as 2013. However, after implementing achievements in December of last year, we did not start development of Free-To-Play until March 11th, 2017., as illustrated by the number of changes per day from the middle of last year to the middle of this year:
Who's Working On It
I've detailed this in a Puny Human blog post, but we're not the 15 person team we used to be when developing this game. There's 6 of us working on some other games for another studio, full time, and only one person working on Blade Symphony Free-To-Play part time. I first engaged this developer in late November of 2016, and he's already done some amazing stuff. Let's get into it.
What's Changing
Engine Upgrade
One of the first thing's that was done, was that we upgraded the engine version from the Portal 2 version of Source, to the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive version of Source. Doing this was a no-brainer, as it meant we wouldn't need to write code for things we wanted, like porting to other platforms, better optimized maps and lighting, etc.
More Platforms
Our goal for Blade Symphony Free to Play is to have more players, not make money. We've received quite a bit of feedback from people who would like to play Blade Symphony on their Mac or Linux computers, so we put in the time and effort to ensure it runs native on those platforms!
Blade Symphony on Mac
Blade Symphony on Linux
More Languages
We're positive there have been people who refunded Blade Symphony because it didn't support their language. Who wants to learn through a tutorial, when you can't read one of the three languages Blade Symphony supports. So in addition to English, Russian and Japanese, we're going to translate Blade Symphony into as many European, Western Asian and Eastern Asian languages as possible. We're crowd sourcing this effort, so if you'd like to help, stay tuned.
Better Performance
The engine upgrade allowed us to get some better frame rates on our maps (omitting duel_box.) This should also affect overall performance of the game, in menus and popups.
Level over Rank Progression
This was a contentious point for us. The system of giving people a global rank based on ELO, placing them into a ladder on global rank, and prescribing a league based on their ladder position will have to go away. This system is powered through this pretty expansive website that communicates with the game. While we love this website and how it can do that for the game, it's a pretty big dependency that is showing it's age. I detail more about that here. Replacing it, is something that 90% of can be managed by Steam, a level system.
It's simple; as you play a character, you gain experience points (XP.) You get a big XP bonus based on whether you won the duel or if you won any round at all. You also get XP modifiers based on a grade we give you in areas such as Stance Diversity, Tier Usage, Mobility, and Hit Redirection. This is to encourage use of the breadth that Blade Symphony's tactical sword fighting gameplay offers. Finally, we'll be handing out some bonuses based on whether it's your first time playing of the day, the week or whether a special event is running.
A concept for an end-round screen.
Progression Rewards
It wouldn't be much fun to progress in Blade Symphony if you weren't given rewards for doing so. As such, we're going to reward players based on their level by unlocking things like swords, masks, armor attachments, capes, sword glow types, intro backgrounds, foot step colors, sword glow colors, armor colors, scoreboard name color and in-game chat colors. Sword glow color, armor color, scoreboard name color and in-game chat colors will be specific color items that you unlock such as Phalanx's sword glow color Greater Wing Royal Red, Pure's armor color Hokuten Assassin Recruit Green, or Judgement's armor color Murai Knight Executor Blue.
An example of the 'Pulsing' Sword Glow.
Marketplace Content
In addition to rewards based on your level, we're also going to sell some content on the new Blade Symphony marketplace. Everyone who owns the game will get all of the in-game developer-made swords, masks, attachments and skins, and any capes unlocked with notes. This does not include capes given to those who won them under special circumstances; that's exclusive to them. In addition, we'll be adding intro backgrounds (named above, also unlockable,) and potentially intro emblems.
What's Not Changing
Understand that the list of the following is not set in stone. Instead of having a third 'maybe changing' category, I'm putting everything into two bucks of "definitely changing" and "maybe or not changing." This is the latter bucket.
New or Changed Moves
Sadly, new moves (attacks, blocks, emotes, bows, rolls, shuffles) mean new animations. We don't currently have a developer that can animate and implement these. In addition, we would need an animator to properly balance the gameplay related moves (attacks, blocks, rolls and shuffles,) for each character. That's a lot of time, a lot of expense, and nobody to do it.
New or Changed Characters
Some of the characters have some obvious graphical issues, and our sixth character was never completed. Because new characters in Blade Symphony aren't as easy as making a new model, and adding it to a list, a sixth character would only happen if Free-To-Play does well or we get some kind of Kickstarter for it. Changes to characters are equally time consuming and expensive, because any time we change the mesh of a character, the UV map, texture, mask and attachment points and animations all either have to be modified or re-exported. That's a chain of three different people right there.
New Maps
We don't have any level designers that are free to work on Blade Symphony. Even if we did, creating a new map also takes a few months. It's unlikely we would do a new level at all, and it's more likely we will touch up the ones we have for performance (stated above.) I've given thought into having a mapping contest, in the past, but when we did these for Dystopia we ended up having to significantly touch up the winning maps to meet the quality bar of the developer made maps.
When's It Releasing
Hopefully, with Blade Symphony's price being $0, it being available on two more platforms and in many more languages, our hope is that this will drive more players. As I said earlier, the goal isn't to make money, but it helps things go faster.
There is no easily predictable timeline for Blade Symphony Free-To-Play, but we're going as fast as we can with a single developer working on this. We're going to shift one of our previous artists to help us with some much needed art related tasks on a part-time basis, and I hope that means that we can meet our current target. Our current target is End of January 2018.
Playing Free-To-Play Early
We need to be able to support the one, soon to be two, developers that work on Blade Symphony. In exchange for certain rewards like in-game icons, your name in the credits, a weekly live-stream from the developers and access to what we're working on, you can support our Patreon here. Doing so will get you a key to the Blade Symphony Beta. As more people play the Beta, the more we can find and solve critical bugs, and release on time.
How You Can Help
We could really use some talented level designers or artists to help us make some new items, touch up our levels, animations or characters. I already know the perfect candidates for most people, because they're the people who did it for us in the past. However, I can't pay them in wishes and dreams. If you've already bought the game, and want to help out, consider telling a friend that we're going Free-To-Play so that they may purchase it.
Lastly, if you can't support us financially, consider joining our Discord and be a part of the community. There are weekly active pick-up games, some upcoming tournaments and a pretty chatty bunch of players.
Blade Symphony is 80% off with new achievements!
Blade Symphony Steam Store Page
Expect to hear much more from us during the next two months, as we plan and implement more changes that you've been waiting a long time for.
Patch 4026 Released
Patch Summary
2016 was a very quiet year for Blade Symphony development, so we hoped to end it with an update. What will hopefully be one of numerous updates, entering into the New Year and beyond, we have brought achievements!
Our plans are to add more achievements, to honor those on Kickstarter that backed us at that level. However, what better way to get the ball rolling then to add a handful to begin with! In addition, we hope that we’ve tackled some good quality of life fixes that address some glaring issues.
EDIT: We've pushed a few fixes affecting how Bad Sportsmanship, Two For One, and Touchy Feely are earned.
Achievements
- Added 25 new achievements.
- See the complete list and descriptions.
Capes
- Added Summer 2016 North American Tournament cape (Created by Jester)
Fixes
- Fixed infamous “air stance” bug. Please let us know if you see this again.
- Fixed bug allowing a listenserver host to be kicked
- Fixed bug allowing player to feint twice.
- Fixed bug causing players to not block shurikens when facing attacker.
- Graphical fixes to loading bar on the loading screen
- Graphical fixes to buttons on the main menu
Misc
- Added convar sv_one_hit_kill to allow deaths in one blow.
Blade Symphony is -85% off in the Humble End Of Summer Sale!
ːbsymː: ːkabukiː ːninjastarː ːriotː
https://www.humblebundle.com/store/blade-symphony
ːbsymː: ːkabukiː ːninjastarː ːriotː
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