Welcome back to another news week. There isn't a WIP update this week but we don't want to leave you all hanging with no updates at all so we're here to provide some wrap-up from the Taipei Game Show event we had. We're also bringing in some questions asked during the event to our developer just in case you were also wondering the same thing. Well then, shall we?
Taipei Game Show is an event we frequent as visitors and now these past two years as exhibitors. It's a great event where we get to meet a lot of you players who've travelled to the event and where we can provide a more personal, face-to-face answer on some of the questions you have. We've landed ourselves a small booth in the indie house area yet it was one of the most packed area of the whole event itself with players of all sorts coming to check out every game displayed there.
The 4 day event was packed since day 1 to day 4 especially on Saturday where we can't even stand near our booth due to onlookers waiting to test out M.A.S.S. Builder. There was a time that everyone at our booth was busy with something else for about 10 minutes and we returned to people waiting in line to test the game.
We were also given a time with Indie Wavemakers who showcased M.A.S.S Builder LIVE on their channel! Check it out here with this link!
We've also got tens of heartfelt messages with the Indie House board where players who've tried out games in the Indie House area can write their feelings or feedbacks on their favorite. It's refreshing to know that we're doing the right thing creating this game for both ourselves and all of you.
Now, there are some interesting questions being asked in the event that we'd like to bring forward and share it online, both the questions and the answers. Please give them some reading.
1. So when do you expect the game to be completed? It's been a long time and I feel like there's still a lot to do, balance and content wise. Honestly we're looking towards Q1 2025 as of this moment.
2. I've heard things like ranged weapon color changes are coming for a long time now. When is it going to be finished? It's either after 1.0.0 is released or never at all. The difference between melee effects and ranged effects are the amount of meshes and ranged weapons utilizes a ton of them with a single bullet shot. It's leaning towards the latter at the moment since we're trying to finish the game with all other requested features and content.
3. What's the plan after you release 1.0.0? Start working on the promised KS stuffs. Exclusive KS parts, Free DLC Armor sets. Keep adding more and more customization contents. We want to be a legend in customizing mechas. Many more things are in store for the game, and we want to support MB for a few more years.
4. No plans for MB2 yet? Not yet. Let us finish with this one first then we'll think towards the future of our team.
5. Why don't you make the campaign co-op-able? Because we've designed the missions to be played by a single player. To make story missions a co-op mission, it means we need to make adjustments to the whole game system and it's not something feasible for us to do.
6. Are you going to expand co-op more? I want more missions to play with friends. Yes, we'll be adding more co-op missions to the game.
7. What are your current priorities regarding game content? Top priority, more customization content. More of everything that's already in the game. Mid priority, more weapon types both melee and ranged. Lowest priority, PVP mode.
8. How is Taipei? Love the city. Will be here for the event next year for sure. The people and the food is really lovely. It's a blast every time we've been here.
9. Game progression felt forced to make me play newer missions if I want to use my strongest unit and have a challenge. I want to play older missions with my strongest yet have a challenge. Any plans to touch on this concern? We do, but it's still a secret experiment in our lab. It'll be an interesting addition to the mission system if it works. Hopefully this is done before 1.0.0.
WIP: 0.11.0 New Armor Set Preview ZENITH X
Sorry we took a break, here's some more WIP Progress post of the upcoming 0.11.0 featuring a new armor set!
The set, named Zenith X, is designed with a concept of futuristic, cyber-like designs.
It's a sleek, thin armor set designed incorporate lines and gaps to emphasize running colors and lights of the future, complete with a headgear that looks like a headset.
This will be the final armor set before 1.0.0 is released. And as always, the armor set will hold 3 variants altogether and we hope you can find a liking to the parts they provided, or the whole set itself.
See you next time on our next WIP, or if you're visiting the Taipei Game Show 2024 event in Taipei during the 25th to 28th January, come and meet us there!
With weeks of new things being shown, we'd like to dial back to some balance changes we're planning to make to improve the game in 0.11.0 First, let us remind you that we'll be unlocking tier 7 units and sub-units in the development tree and their unlocking materials will be dropped from later waves in challenges and latest missions. We expect them to provide tons of power to the player and we'll keep watch to modify them if any of them are game breaking.
Now, for a more specific balance change, we aim to increase the power of tanky tech sub-units in the coming update. We'd improve them in 0.10.0 and while they are well received, their power is too low to be competing for a sub-unit slot. In 0.11.0, we're increasing their power by a significant amount.
Units that improve shield regeneration cooldown are mostly buffed by around 50%. Think nodes that currently lower time before shields start regenerating by 25%, all of them will be changed to a 40% reduction, allowing players to easily slot in one of two for constant shields regeneration. This should make them more dependable and more competitive for a slot in any build that rely on the regenerating shields.
On the same note, we'll also be improving sub-units that straight up improve shields regeneration and regenerate shields through other means. Things like Perpetual Generator will proc more frequently. Arms S. Battery will recover more shields. Things like that.
And lastly for this goal, we're also improving durability tech sub-units that are overshadowed by their peers, such as Metals Replacement and recovery nodes such as both the Nanorobotics variant.
What do you think about these tentative changes? We'd like to discuss about it so if you have any opinions on what we've listed, we're more than glad to hear from you through our discord, linked below. See you next time!
Welcome back to another WIP post, this week introducing a new Bullet Shooter that is on another spectrum of shooters. Please welcome the Pile Bunker!
PIle Bunker is a MELEE Bullet Shooter, having one chargeable bullet, you. This is a weapon that took a long time to get it to work, being vastly different from other shooters, requiring us weeks to design, craft, and finding solutions for what we wanted with it. What you're seeing is the final design of Pile Bunker, a weapon that launches you into enemies.
The Pile Bunker can be charged for higher distance, piercing enemies, and a really high extra damage multiplier. It will damage any enemies within its path and players can instantly dash to cancel out of the end part.
While this might sound like a really good melee weapon that allow players to move through the battlefield quickly and uses Piercing to calculate damage instead, Pile Bunker will need to reload after every usage. No amount of MAG.Load will be able to increase its ammo amount.
Well then, why don't we make it a melee weapon instead? Well, the design philosophy of melee weapons is to have combo attacks and a single-attack weapon wouldn't fit well within that category. In our minds, we also think that Pile Bunkers would thematically fit better with shooters, being a weapon that winds up, pierce, and launches a steel needle into enemies and retracting them on reload.
Wait, that design we just mentioned was different than what we're showing right? It doesn't drag enemies along the trajectory and burst damage out at the end at all? You are correct in your observation. We tried staying as true to the name as possible at first but with our enemies design that doesn't allow some of them to be dragged along, that design was not able to feel good. Thus, we tinkered it in a way that allows Pile Bunker to just pierce through upon charging, and strike quickly when not charged.
With this design, players can also canonically think of it as other piercing blade, piercing lance, or anything that fits their design. This gif above shows how we've attached accessories onto the needle part and we can't wait to see how you all utilize and create something from it!
Welcome back to another weekly WIP update. It's a short one this week, featuring some weapon parts of the upcoming new shooter PRISM. We designed these things to look like they're particle accelerators or energy charging machineries but we'll also throw in the simple parts for you all to freely customize it as well.
Welcome back to another WIP update. This week features one of the short perpetuals update we've been working on since ages ago, regarding Quark's models and aesthetics. These Quarks were one of the special uncommon Quarks that does not conform to the normal behaviors and uses special moves to effect combat. We haven't used much of them as they were causing frustrations for players and we've shifted them away, even to an extent of removing them from the game in most missions.
In 0.11.0, with the constant improvements we're doing here and there with the game, we'll be bringing them back with an updated model and possibly updated powers as an improvement to the old ones.
We wanted these uncommon/special ones to be able to spawn in most missions and provide a challenge more than the normal behavior of running into players or drop dead, but we'll also try to remove any frustrations from them like the old area shield they used. We hope we'll be able to make them a fun experience for everyone. Until next time!
Continuing a streak of showing exciting stuffs, this week is about the up and coming, new Energy Shooter we've designed as something fun. An energy shooter we call PRISM. First, take a look at this image.
That doesn't look exciting at all though. What are you cooking, Vermillion Digital? Well, take a look at this next clip of PRISM.
Prism has a secondary firing acquired by holding down right click for around a second. It deals no damage at all, but attaches a prism onto every lockable points within an area. This means every enemy that can be locked by homing missiles are susceptible attachment points of this secondary fire. What does it do? Well... let's have this next clip explain it as it's worth more than a thousand words.
The PRISM's primary fire will chain to each and every PRISM that's attached on an enemy. Every shot is counted towards a threshold and when the threshold reaches a certain point, the PRISM explodes for another instance of damage. Stacking explosions here can be extremely strong to clear out groups of enemies if you can setup the perfect chain.
Now, this makes it feel that PRISM will only be good against groups of enemies... but that's not the case at all. Remember we mentioned that PRISMs can be attached to every lockable points? Yeah... with bosses having multiple lockable points, PRISMs are significantly effective against bosses. A charged shot aimed carefully can create multiple PRISMs onto a boss and every primary fire will now hit each and every of those PRISMs.
We're still fine tuning their numbers like attachment range, chain range, chain count, etc. We wanted it to be usable and not clunky in any situation but also not too overpowered that it overwhelms other currently overpowered weapons and be viewed as the only good weapon out there. We'll leave it here for this week. See you again soon!
With last week's Bullet Shooter's Single fire showing off, it is necessary we also show its twin, the Energy Shooter's Single fire charged shot as well.
We went a different angle for the Energy Shooter's charged shot. With Bullet Shooter being the fast, penetrating bullet, energy shots are bigger, slower, and explode upon impact. This is a fiery ball of death, a charged-up buster shot, and an impending doom for its victims in our imagination. We wanted to make the effect much more extravagant at first, but the visual clutter was too much thus we have the toned-down version here.
While the effect might not show, the full explosion range is significantly larger than an uncharged shot. You can see in the first image that these goes further beyond in comparison, and just like the bullet shooters charged damage, this one also does ramp its damage to absurd numbers after fully charged. . We're excited to see how you'll use the charged shot later when the update drops, and how you'll customize your weapons to match the explosions.
Last week we mentioned reworking some of our old weapons, right? Here's the first of those reworks, single bullet shooters. They are now able to charge up for a few seconds to fire an empowered shot. Let's talk about their concepts first.
Railguns is a shooter we've been requested since the first patches of M.A.S.S. Builder, and we have always wanted to add it into the game. However, there's a wide variety of railguns in imagination, those with extremely huge stationary firing rails, those with a handheld version that uses some sort of electric rail channeling energy from somewhere. There're even ones that uses speed up plasma energy on rails instead of traditional bullets. In M.A.S.S. Builder, our shooters does not represent weapons, but concepts... so we stripped those ideas into the core concepts of railguns in our understanding, a chargeable weapon that fires an extremely accelerated bullet.
And that's what we added to the Bullet Shooter's Single firing method. Players can charge up their shooters for a few seconds, raising its damage multiplier significantly much more, even higher than they could do in those few seconds, and release an extremely accelerated and fire bullet. We will not coin this thing a railgun, because we know that you can imagine more with it and not locked to the name.
Welcome to the first 0.11.0 WIP update! We're starting where we left off in our "What's Next" this week with the improvements towards controls and input mappings. Moving forward, players will now be able to map their inputs to two-buttons-press for controllers. That might not sound exciting, but it allows us to create some new functionality without caring for the "not enough buttons on a controller" problem.
This means... hold down attack for charging? Yes, we're reworking some of our old weapons to accommodate charged firing, and we're looking to make some new weapons that will be different and fun to use. We'll show them when they're ready, soon!
