New Ships, connection issues fixed, new Tech Tree, new graphics, a better tutorial... so much stuff has changed!
So we say this a lot but it's been a while since our last public push... but we think this one's been worth the wait.
We've got a TON of new features, tweaks, polish and bug fixes in for your enjoyment, and I've detailed the most important & interesting ones here, along with plenty of gifs and screens.
Connection/Stability Issues:
We've been working hard in tandem with the guys & gals at Improbable (the company behind SpatialOS, which powers the online infrastructure we use to run Lazarus), and this new version of Lazarus should be a lot more stable for everyone, as well as a lot easier to connect to for most of the people who were struggling to do so until this point.
We really want to hear from you if you still cannot connect, we're only able to track down and fix the problems if you help us diagnose them... but we're confident most of you should be a-ok with this latest patch.
Player Death:
When you die, you will lose your currently equipped Systems, as well as any loot crates or resources you’re carrying in your ship. Anything you’ve safely Banked at a Xenotaph is permanent and will not be touched, but there’s a risk in staying out in the dark void of space for too long, farming Drones for goodies.
If you die, you can still re-quip, but you’ll need to hope the Shop you’re docked at stocks what you have unlocked (via Loot crates, see below). This loss of loadout also occurs on you quitting or logging out, but we’ve got plans to save your loadouts across sessions, as long as you don’t die!
PVP is no more:
Friendly fire is now OFF. You can still shoot at other players, and they will still block your shots (so you have to keep aware of each other when co-operating against enemies) but you will no longer do any damage to each other. Lazarus is meant to be a PvE game and even though we never rewarded players for killing each other, the fun of it meant people kept trying.
This way we can push people towards fighting enemies and claiming territory, and really work on polishing that stuff. We may well re-instate PvP in some form in the future, but for now… just go shoot the bad guys :D
3 New Ships!
3 new Ships for you to play with, and more differentiation between all 6 now in the game. They each have different amounts of each System slot, so for example the default Sheherazade-15 ship has 1 slot for each of Core, Special, Active and Passive Systems, while the much heavier and tougher Scarab has slots for 2 Special and 4 Passive, but 0 Core and 0 Active making it a really interesting ship to pilot effectively.
The Mantis - Named after its peculiar wing formation.
The Dragonfly - Definitely not a 'Durgenflee'.
Le Bug - Small, fast, and an annoyance.
The Knuckle - A fast, punchy but brittle craft.
The Sheherazade-15 - A thousand and one fights. The ship that started it all.
The Scarab - The scarab was emblematic of life & death for ancient Egyptians.
Tech Trees & Upgrading!
New Xenotaph Menus - Tech Screen – upgrade your systems here. How? By unlocking them via Loot Crates, and then using Lazarene (also from Loot crates) or Upgrade Tokens (automatically awarded from duplicate Systems) to upgrade them – there’s a max of 10 levels per System.
Loot Crate Tweaks:
Loot Crates now drop from everything you kill (enemy Drones or Asteroids of all sizes) a lot more often. They contain Ships, Skins, Lazarene and Systems. Plus we've got a snazzy (but still not quite finished) opening ceremony:
Enemies:
We’ve edited the HP of various enemies. Most notably, the Drone Fighter which is much more easy to kill now; it’s lots more fun.
More:
- Quadrupled the maximum Asteroid count.
- Rammer Passive System now has levels 1-10 of upgrades (the damage it prevents, and the damage it deals).
- Deployable Turret Special System now has levels 1-10 of upgrades (rate of fire, damage, its own HP).
- All Blaster Core Systems now have level 1-10 of upgrades (rate of fire, accuracy, damage, that sort of thing).
- We’ve temporarily dropped the Heal Beam, the Damage Beam, Smart Bomb and Repulsor Systems, as they’re not in a position we’re happy with. Rather than have something of poor quality we want to focus in on what we know is do-able for the short term. They will certainly be reintroduced sooner rather than later.
- We’ve had a big visual overhaul. Everything now 90% done in terms of visual style, with all ships and asteroids - planets too – stepping a lot closer to the kick ass concept art and character art we’ve been working on. It’s somewhere between a Western cartoon and Anime, without being overtly ‘like TV’ or ‘retro’. Hopefully you like it - here it is on the giatn Drone Carrier:
- Tied to this, and on the same day, we addressed the bloom and lighting in-game, so it’s much clearer where you are and the various pyrotechnics don’t make the screen unreadable. We’ll be rolling this, and the other visuals tweaks, across all menus in the game very soon.
- We’ve implemented a bunch of tweaks to the Tutorial. Now you have to kill fewer enemies, destroy fewer asteroids and collect fewer resources to progress. Makes it a LOT simpler and quick to get through.
- Tons of metrics added so we can track things like how often players die to asteroids, or to enemies, or how many resources you pick up. All anonymous of course.
- We’ve added a new screen to the game, right after our lovely logos, explaining where we’re at and getting you some nice hot links to the Discord and our Twitter so you can talk to use about the game some more.
- Players will now spawn spread across the world on first entering the game. After that, you’ll respawn close to where you die, but this is an important step to getting the first few minutes and hours of the game in line with the flow we want to establish.
- Glob Walls in their hard state now have a new mesh, with straight line detail that more closely matches the Xenotaph’s shells.
- Fixed the boost trail (looks like we originally wanted now, with lots of cool particles zipping past) to give a better sense of speed.
- Improved the hit fx from Blasters.
- No more Missions, until we have a thorough re-design of that whole system. There’ll be more features being dropped temporarily as we get close to Early Access launch – we want to trim anything that is not a) absolutely critical to the game, or b) already brilliant.
- Tons of work done in the background on the Lazarus Wipe, which will be fully re-integrated in a future update. Won’t be long to wait!
- Before this update, you could teleport/warp jump into solid objects. This would be bad. Now however, we do a few things to make sure that doesn’t happen and if it does, you’re still able to move and get out of there and play as normal.
So there you go, a pretty giant update that we're really proud of. We hope to get anothe rone out this side of Christmas, so see you soon - and until then, hop into the game and tell us what you think!
HUGE concurrent player test, incoming patch
Hi all!
We just had our first huge player test, and hit over 350 concurrent players on one server. This is a huge moment for us and the game, so we're very excited. It's sad we couldn't invite ya'll in on it but we have some plans around making this happen in the near-ish future, so be excited :D
Meanwhile, we wanted to share some cool bits from the test, as well as some of what else we've been working on recently.
First up, this is what it looks like to clip inside of a planet during the test. We're all human, after all :P
And here's some footage of what it looks like to have around 50 players all at the same Xenotaph... the framerate we reckon is down to the client rendering rather than netcode, as it still felt pretty darn smooth!
And as for other work, we'd love to hear what you thik of the concept art we've got for each fo the 3 main races n Lazrus.
First up is Ki, humanity's best pilot:
Then we have a Drone piloit, along with its Slomp symbiote:
And last but not east an Oruobean, one of the race of interdminesional scientists/gardners who influence time and space in Lazarus for their own msyterious ends:
...and that's it for now - by the way if you had trouble with the public server at all today, that should be fixed too :D
HUGE update! New weapons, Loot Crates and more.
We’ve got a HUGE update this week - new UI, new menus, new gameplay systems, new graphics, new audio, stability fixes, bug fixes galore and all kinds of bits and bobs
It’s been a while (about 2 months give or take) and we’ve been hard at work not only on game features but also upgrading the tech behind Lazarus to its latest version. It took a long long time but we’re over that hill and back on track.
So then what is new for you to play with? Rather than go through absolutely everything, I thought I’d highlight the most prominent elements we’ve added to Lazarus. Believe me there’s tons more done, but these two main areas are what you’ll care about the most.
Gameplay Systems We’ve added and improved a whole bunch of new Systems for you to equip to your ship. You must collect Loot Crates, which when opened may or may not drop a system. Once it’s dropped, you can then equip it from the relevant menu in a Xenotaph by clicking on it, spending the MEV required, and the choosing a Slot over on the right hand to socket it into.
CORE SYSTEMS
Equipped to Left Mouse Button by default, these are you most commonly used weapons.
Heal Beam - NEW! Equip this bad boy and go around being a generally really nice, helpful person by healing other players :D
Damage Beam - NEW! Basically just a kick ass space laser beam that turns alive bad things into dead bad things. Looks really ace too. Vwoom!
Basic Blaster - improved with audio and gfx, and various bug fixes
Cross Blaster - improved
V Blaster - improved
Trident Blaster - improved
Lance Blaster - improved
SPECIAL SYSTEMS
Equipped to the Right Mouse Button, these are a little bit more diverse and interesting than the Core Systems.
Deployable Turret - NEW! These stay in place and automatically track and fire on any valid target. If you get in the way, that’s your fault.
Limpet Booster - improved with audio and gfx, and various bug fixes
ACTIVE SYSTEMS
Spacebar fires these off, and they’re even more special use case than everything else.
Shield - NEW! While this is on, shots fired at you will explode harmlessly on the shield rather than in your face. Does not stop ships and asteroids moving inside to collide with you, though.
Big Bomb - improved
Repulsor - improved
PASSIVE SYSTEMS
These, when equipped, are ‘always on’. No button presses required.
Rammer - NEW! While you have this equipped, any incoming damage resulting from collisions is reduced, and you even deal a little bit of damage out in return.
HP Recharger - improved
MEV Siphon - improved
Energy Efficiency - improved
NOTES ABOUT SYSTEMS:
All of these systems are unfinished, but a lot of fun to play with. They’ll all eventually be upgradeable along a tech tree, and will have more wonderful sound and visual effects, as well as bugs fixed to do with their functionality. Enjoy them while they’re so easy to come by!
LOOT CRATES
Loot Crates drop from enemy kills and also from the smallest Asteroids. Once collected you need to get back to a Xenotaph to open them, but once there you’ll be able to grab any number of cool rewards from each one you open.
Skins - you’ll need to Breach and then Dock again to get them to turn up in your owned list, but you can preview and equip them in the Ships screen once you’ve done that.
Ships - yup, get new Ships from Loot Crates! There are currently 3 Ships in the game, and they all handle differently and have different basic stats.
Systems - yay! New toys!
Duplicates - Ignore this! It’s an incoming feature to deal with duplicates of any of the above in a cool way that lets you still get something ace out of it. Non functional at the moment.
MENUS/UI
We’ve had a big look at our Menus and UI, and the whole thing’s been undergoing a revamp. The revamp is still in progress, but we’re pretty happy with where things are stylistically and we’ll be following it through all of the menus in the game.
The Front End menu hasn’t changed, but as soon as you boot into the world, you’ll see lots of new elements and tweaks. My favourite part is what happens when you try to drag your mouse over your ship in the Xenotaph menus…
So what’s next? Well we were at EGX this weekend, and we’re aiming to be doing much more regular updates again, ideally weekly. We’ll be bringing more polish into the game, adding a tech tree and upgrading system to all Systems, and rounding out the Loot Crate experience. Also 3 new player ships are on the (event) horizon, and all of them will have different counts of different Slots into which the Systems plug… so you’ll be able to experiment and figure out your favourite builds.
New Update LIVE 0.10.57 - BUG DETECTOR :D
We've done a thing.
The issues everyone's seeing (asteroids spawning on top of you. AI, asteroids & shops not working properly or at all) are all related to one issue which is in the process of being fixed, but until it is we're hoping this patch will help.
1. We've reduced the size of the world to about 40%. This should hopefully just reduce the chance that you find a 'bad' zone where the bugs are occur.
2. We've added a HUD element that will tell you if you're in a 'bad' zone or a good one. Simple rule - if you're in a bad zone, try to find a good one!
3. We've added some more connection issue fixes but we're not sure how many people they will help.
This should help you enjoy the game more till we implement the full fix, and also means we won't get swamped with bug reports that are all ultimately the same thing :D
We're launching it today - on a Thursday - because the Two Andrews are showing the game at Norwich Games Festival tomorrow and Saturday... so if you live nearby come and have a play - or join the server and see if you can find the NGF players :D
As usual, update the game on Steam to enjoy the benefits!
Enjoy!
NEW PATCH 0.10.37 - Connection Issues Fixed?
Well then.
We think the connection issues are fixed.
To be as clear as possible; the team in charge of the tech have fixed what they believe are the causes of the connection issues we've seen reported by you, and so... fingers crossed!
The catch is as ever that the issues we can see might've been hiding issues we couldn't see. But there's only one way to find out!
CHANGELIST:
- Connection Issues fixed
- New audio for presence, hit, and destruction of Asteroids.
- Screen Transitions
Let us know how the new stuff sounds, and ESPECIALLY holla if you're still getting connection issues!
xoxo
New Public Build Live - 0.10.23b
We’ve made a tons of smaller fixes and added a bunch of tiny wee things in preparation for the next few months of dev, but here’s the three things that will affect you most:
- no more music overlapping itself!
- you can skip the tutorial by holding X (and also re-enable it through the Esc menu), so no more getting stuck!
- out of bounds now comes with a warning, a countdown, and kills you if you ignore it!
Meantime, behind the scenes, we've been working on some pretty cool stuff that'll sneak in next week with any luck:
Enjoy :D
New Public Build for Easter! 0.9.64
Seeing as it's a Bank Holiday weekend over here in the UK (we're getting both Friday and Monday off) we thought we'd push for an update that'll last 4 days.
NEW
- A whole bunch of new Xenotaphs are in, so you should see plenty of variety in those alien behemoths.
- Skybox! This has been part of the game for a few smaller updates, but specifically we've added procedurally generated planets, a giant blackhole and lots of new elements to give deep space the right sense of... depth.
- Audio has been added across the board.
- Added a text string to the ingame hud that shows current build number (bottom right of the screen).
- Added a Ping counter (also bottom right of the screen).
- Teleporting! You can teleport via a button in the Map screen, but only to territories the player faction controls, and even then only if you can afford it.
FIXED
This is where the lion's share of work has been done.
- The player's Bank-ed MEV shown on their first time teleport was always shown as 250, but now it shows the correct price for the teleport.
- Your HP bar now updates correctly on choosing Dragonfly
- Player ships are now removed from the game world when docked
- No more invisible enemies
- No more invisible pickups
- The Limpet Jet now gets destroyed when its host is destroyed/blown up
- The last stage of the tutorial no longer replays
- The Map no longer breaks on client-scene reload
- The redeem key screen (in the pause menu) no longer gets stuck on 'Processing Key..' after trying to submit it with the default XXXX-XXXX key.
- Players no longer spawn with a free loot crate.
- You can no longer use 2 loot crates in 1 go.
- Players cannot get their Loot Crate counter down below 0 anymore.
- Loot Crates now get Banked when you dock.
- Opening a Loot Crate actually increases your resources immediately (rather than having to wait till you next logged in).
- Resources granted from Loot Crates are now kept if the player quits and reopens the game.
- The Loot Crate pop up window no longer stays overlaid on menu under any circumstances.
- The keyboard focus on the 'redeem key' dialog box has its input locked to the box only (no more docking underneath).
- Audio volume sliders (sfx and music) are loading correctly between sessions.
- Unlocked ship skins are being saved properly between game sessions.
- There used to be a Xenotaph creeping into the play area. There isn't any more :D
- When a player tries to launch Lazarus without Steam running, we now show a dialog to instruct them to run Steam dammit!
OTHER
We've spent some time spring cleaning our dev processes too, all the better to make the game more amazing over the coming months. Included in this process, we've now got an automated build pipeline so we can iterate more often and not spend so much time waiting on builds/locked computers.
And finally, we've been working up concepts for new enemies and AI creatures to inhabit the world, some of which can be seen here:
Say hello to the Drone Pilot (and his little friend!):
The Basic Drone:
The Miner Drone:
The Alpha Drone:
The Queen Drone:
NEW PUBLIC BUILD LIVE - 0.9.19
Loads more fixes, loads more polish - and a bunch of cool stuff to buy in the shop!
Heal Beam!
Smart Bomb!
Health Regen!
Limpet Booster!
Oh, and a tutorial from everyone's favourite robotic sidekick, Robopug! Don't worry, you only have to do the tutorials sequence once... unless you die.
In all seriousness we think we've addressed most failed connection issues too so please do have a go if you've not been able to connect in the past.
New build is live!
V0.9.01 is live!
We've sneakily been updating the game a lot recently, you may have nticed, but this is worth shouting about.
We've fixed TONS of bugs over the last weeks (been to GDC too!) and the game should work a lot better for more people than ever... but (more?) importantly we've had a pass on the graphics.
Get stuck in! Can you find the black hole?
The First Stand - Livestream, play with the devs, unlock exclusive skins
We're very excited to announce not only the first Dev Livestream of Lazarus, but also a bit of a special event we're running to celebrate it!
We've named it "The First Stand", and we're hoping you'll help us make it an event worth remembering. Heck, we're so excited, we went and made a trailer specially for you:
https://youtu.be/T_mztYvkZjk
The First Stand:
If you come and join us in-game this Saturday - or if you can't play, at least watch over on our [twitch channel](https://www.twitch.tv/spiltmilkstudios) - we'll give you an unlock code for an exclusive skin. The only way to ever get this skin will be to play with us.
Here's the Recycle in all its green glory:
But there's more! If we all manage to gather 50 pilots at the same time, then we're going to bring another exclusive skin to the game, only this one will be unlocked for everyone who ever gets the game - the commemorative Phoenix:
So it'll be a group effort, and we'll need as many pilots to sign up as possible, but I know we can do it!
FULL DETAILS:
When:
28th Jan 10:00-12:00PST (18:00-20:00 GMT)
Where:
Ingame! [Sign up here](https://www.playlazarus.com/) if you haven't already!
But if you can't play with us, watch the madness over on our [Twitch channel](https://www.twitch.tv/spiltmilkstudios).
Why:
If you join in, you get the exclusive Recycle skin.
If we manage to get 50 pilots playing at once, then we all unlock the other exclusive Phoenix skin for everyone, forever!
Chat:
We've set up a Discord channel here so we can all chat away during the event: https://discord.gg/g9kzBeD
We can't wait to see you in there, please do share this with your friends - after all it's free to sign up and join in the fun!
