Disclaimer: We're not going into the specifics but an overall look on what's to expect when the update finally arrives much later. This is also not the patch notes nor everything we're adding into the game, just pure balancing. We'd like to use this opportunity to read through your thoughts on them, maybe discuss some changes, and adjust accordingly. This IS NOT EVERYTHING and there will be more balance changes coming. Anything announced before like the melee attack speed changes are still coming but won't be mentioned in the future.
Hello and welcome to another WIP update, this week featuring upcoming balance changes in the 0.10.0. Don't be alarmed by the words balance, we're not hitting anything with nerf bats that'll make things nigh unplayable as this is a game where we encourage everyone to play whatever and however, they'd like to. With that out of the way, here is the FIRST tentative balance changes coming into the game.
DIFFICULTY BALANCING
Difficulties in M.A.S.S. Builder has been a controversial topic for a while now as the game has evolved throughout all these years and it heated up after 0.9.0 release where we made impactful changes to various weapons and enemies. We first designed all difficulties to be playable by anything and everything truly but we've received requests and heard concerns about that design, and honestly it became toxic enough towards each other that we felt the need to address it. Just to list some and not all.
- Very hard isn't hard at all and there's no reason to play anything lower than that - Why can't you play VH when the devs had made it playable by all, skill issue, or maybe you're not using meta or play as how the game is designed to be played. - x is better than y, z is better than x, that's because you cannot use x comfortably in VH as you needed the utility of z, so why aren't you using z.
After a great amount of thought and discussion internally, we changed that completely in 0.9.0 and made Easy the stage for "anyone, anything, anyhow you want to play the game," and Normal as "You can play anything here, but you'll need to try a bit," Hard and Very Hard were adjusted to have players play more optimally than ever, alongside nerfs that we never wanted to do in the first place but was forced to. The gap between Normal and Very Hard is large.
We never wanted anything related to meta to be forced onto anyone in our game. Our philosophy and vision of the game is to have anyone play anything they wanted anyhow they wanted, and we wanted to stand by that, but as the game grew to this point, there were rampant talks of how certain things are unviable when in reality it's just slower than some other methods of play.
There are reasons we don't nerf immortal builds that just stand still and have AoE effects burst onto surrounding enemies to kill them, it's fun and we liked that. There are reasons we don't nerf burst melee, there are reasons we don't nerf what players called Buzzsaw strats over certain points (the dash attack cooldown was laughably ignorable that some players mentioned we failed in killing it when in reality we just wanted to stop players just using macro to spam it too fast). There are reasons we allow players to just map controls onto the same button (hello there melee + launcher spam on left click). We never wanted to take any fun out of the game and if someone found a way to perform something better without ruining the fun of others, hey, bless their discovery.
Which led us to the following decision, we're making easy and normal difficulty easier through numbers crunching. As requested by players who are well into cosplay builds, we do agree that the current balancing is too harsh on M.A.S.S. units that are just pure power fantasy and we'd like to change that, make it easier for everyone to just have mindless fun even in normal difficulty. Story progress should flow even better, and players should be able to progress through in normal even with suboptimal tuning tiers. This should allow more players to play within our design of anything goes.
This used to be only for easy difficulty but after much discussion, we'd like to also include normal difficulty to the fray. On the other side, we'll still retain Hard and Very Hard difficulty as is. Struggle as it may be, VERY HARD should be VERY HARD and not intended for anything suboptimal. VERY HARD is an aspirational content and we intended it to be that way and not only through numbers expansion. You might have noticed some mechanics that are present in VH and not in lower difficulties, or a mechanic that exists but not to that extent. Did you know that enemies non-stop following providing little downtime to regenerate shields was mostly present in VH and not in easy/normal because they have extreme move speed in higher difficulties? Bosses that just keep attacking? We plan to have more of that (and change some behaviors in normal difficulty).
On the same note, there will be more discussion following multiplayer mode difficulty later when it is time. We hope this clarify a lot more behind the thoughts on which direction and why we're changing the game. For concerns regarding end of mission rewards, please know that quick run throughs in Normal yield much more as they can be run much faster with much less strategy, a mindless fun. There are more plans to better this, but it cannot be mentioned at the moment. If there are any other concerns, feel free to discuss it with our representative in our discord server.
Photos from Taipei Game Show 2023 M.A.S.S. Builder Booth
Thanks to everyone who came to try out our game and hang out, talking and discussing the game with us! With that said, we'd like to share some of the views from our booth with everyone else who might not have the chance to visit our booth! We're looking forward to showing off M.A.S.S. Builder to more people in other events this year, so maybe next time! We'll continue with our WIP updates next week!
M.A.S.S. Builder is at the Taipei Game Show 2023!
Hello everyone! As mentioned last week, we're now here at the Taipei Game Show 2023 at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center from February 2 to 5. The M.A.S.S. Builder booth will be located in the Indie House area Booth Number C26 and we encourage anyone visiting to come and have a talk with us.
You'll be able to meet with the members of our team, with our game designer always at the booth to answer any of your questions! Come have a talk with us about anything you wanted to know about the game or about us.
If you haven't tried our game yet, you can also come try it out at our booth and a chance to get a free steam key for M.A.S.S. Builder for yourself or your friends! The stock is limited so if you'd like one, come fast!
M.A.S.S. Builder is heading to Taipei Game Show 2023!
Hello everyone! With borders opening up, M.A.S.S. Builder and the Vermillion Digital team is proud to announce that we're heading to the Taipei Game Show 2023! The event will be held at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center on February 2 to 5.
The M.A.S.S. Builder booth will be located in the Indie House area Booth Number C26 and we encourage anyone visiting to come meet the team. The floor plan can be checked at https://tgs.tca.org.tw/index_2c_e.php
Ask anything you'd like about us or the game at the event, We hope to see you there!
WIP: 0.10.0 Accessories Preview Part II
Hello everyone! We hope you're all having a happy rest with the Lunar New Year festival. On our side, we're still working to push out the new update, with this week being another showcase of the new accessories coming with it. The theme this time is tank wheels. There's been lots of request for these but making them a whole piece wouldn't be flexible of use, so take a look at the variants and how we did them below!
We hope you like them and can plan how to use them when we release them with the next update! Stay tuned for more WIP update next week!
Another week, another WIP post! As we're still in new year's mood, we'd like to present something to fuel your creativity, new accessories coming in 0.10.0! These are just the first ones and there'll be more to come in the future, but we hope these ones will be to your liking!
Hello... and welcome back to the weekly WIP of M.A.S.S. Builder! We're resuming this sequence of weekly tidbits and sneak peeks for the upcoming version, starting small from one of the scenes from a new mission... looking like somewhat of a cargo hold? But whose or where is it and what kind of mechanics you will find there?... you'll need to find out in the story, which is something we'll focus on in the coming 0.10.0 version!
There are more ammunitions stocked up this time and we'll keep you interested in the coming weeks! Stay tuned!
Hello everyone, welcome back to another "What's Next" post of the year, albeit only the second one as we've only made two major updates this year. Again, we'd like to add a disclaimer that this post won't go into details of what we'll be doing for the next coming update, update 0.10.0 (no it's not 1.0.0 and we'll continue on this trend towards 0.11.0 and 0.12.0 and so on). Let's start shall we?
First things first, we must announce that we will not be working on Multiplayer PVP as we'd promised a year ago. This is due to all the problems and concerns with multiplayer that arose during 0.9.0 alpha test of multiplayer. We've been collecting a lot of data and planning accordingly on its improvement, and that's what we'll be working on in 0.10.0 in the features and systems department.
What we can say right now is: 1. The first and foremost priority is to further develop multiplayer mode, mainly on matchmaking features (we're still in consideration whether to only matchmake people with a ping threshold of under a number). 2. A reconnection feature must and will be added into the game as it is a core feature for multiplayer that we didn't have enough time to complete in alpha phase. 3. More information of players in the lobby, more QoL issues in the feature.
PVP will be discussed and worked on at a later update, we are sorry about this, but the feature won't be fun if we released it alongside the current multiplayer issues, and fun is our first priority in the game.
And since we'll be working to further complete multiplayer mode, we'll have the others on the team work to complete more story contents as a focus. Why story missions? Because we wanted to finally complete one of the game's goals, a total of 26 story mission. We have been thinking hard about this and have come to a conclusion that we are now at a place that we should focus to complete each feature one by one, and story missions are something we can work alongside the multiplayer upgrade plans. More story missions also mean that we can further unlock nodes of the highest tiers (just like how we unlocked t6 in 0.9.0) sooner than later. We expect to complete around 4 story missions in total, maybe more in 0.10.0
And lastly, we'll be continuing other content works that we've always been doing, accessories, more poses, and more weapon parts will still be coming to the game in 0.10.0 Balance changes will happen as well, but it won't be drastic as in 0.9.0 as we think the current game is in an alright state. To clarify on this, we're thinking of making EASY MODE having players almost immortal, NORMAL being extremely clearable with enemies being slow, hard and very hard requiring a fully thought-out method of play and enemies challenging the players' own skills.
And no, we don't think that everyone should be able to complete VERY HARD if they don't utilize everything they have. We won't balance the game around any self-imposed challenges. We will balance the game with normal in mind for everyone, cosplay builds and everything, and players should not have a hard time if they keep upgrading their unit through the game. We will balance things according to the degree of fun we feel when piloting our M.A.S.S. units in NORMAL difficulty. Again, thank you for sticking with us and M.A.S.S. Builder, see you next week. Discord: discord.gg/quS7E46 Feedback Hub: bit.ly/3wpWofe
0.9.0 Afterwords
Hello everyone, this is Vermillion Digital team, once again having our postmortem or, in our words, the Afterwords of major updates. We'd first like to thank you to everyone still sticking with us through all these long months of drought where we can only show you how we're progressing with the updates we've worked on. Our aim is still true to make this a game where people can play with whatever they wanted in the way they wanted, and while 0.9.0 doesn't provide much customization options, we're still glad you're mostly positive on the additions. We hope we'll be able to continue working towards our goal along with all of you!
Now! Let's us use this time to explain how and why it took... almost 10 months to work on 0.9.0. We might have mentioned this before but as 0.9.0 was the update we worked on Multiplayer; the development process was us basically rewriting 50% of the whole game. Before this time, M.A.S.S. Builder was an "offline only game" where every part, every piece of information was calculated and stored within a player's own PC. They could take that save anywhere, played it offline, and modify things however they like. We still wanted players to be able to do that, but now there's a catch where multiplayers must not be affected by anyone's modification of the game.
This made us scoured through every line of code in the game to see if it can be used maliciously. Doing so, we've discovered a lot of work that can be optimized, works that our past inexperienced selves have found to be worthy before looks to be something that hinders optimization nowadays, and we just cannot allow ourselves to overlook them. Thus began the optimization. The first few months after we started working on 0.9.0 are all about rewriting codes, optimizing them, merging some parts together, and planning we would structure multiplayer codes alongside every part of the game we did in the past.
But hey! Doing so allowed us to perform a much-needed upgrade to the game. Optimizations we never thought we could do, new systems in place such as the boosting curve, new features and functions that were created to further support tech nodes creation, and much more to come (just like that combo attack curve that faced a last-minute cut, we'll finish it in the near future we promise).
Now, towards the main feature of 0.9.0 itself, multiplayer. We first wanted to just release a non-playable showroom with no endpoint in playing just for players to show off their units. However, with the rewriting of codes taking that long and speculated to take many more months, we discussed among ourselves if it would be worth the wait to just have a mode like that, and decided it was not. We assigned one of our six to start working on more aspects towards multiplayer immediately, and the best solution was to create a co-op mission that we might use to fully test out our features.
Well, the results are as expected, a buggy mess that took months to finish, an unoptimized mode of play, but at least, a playable multiplayer in the most basic sense. The problems stemmed from using P2P networking, but as we deemed this is the best method for us as an indie developer, it required much more countermeasures in place to make it a good system. Currently, players are mostly being kicked out of a session left and right, mostly because we did not have any locks or thresholds on pings, thus players from regions across the world can still connect to each other with extremely high ping, resulting in the network being faulty enough to disconnect players from each other, kicking people into the lobby itself. Looking at every bug, every complaint, every suggestion, and every discussion made by you, we know this is a long road to walk towards and that it cannot be done within a few weeks to fix for sure, so we'll leave 0.9.1. in the state it is. We're sorry how our anticipated update turned out to be, but we'll strive to make it better by the next major update. There will be systems to better match players into each other, there'll be more features in the multiplayer system, there will be many things coming to our game.
On one final note, we know that game balance is something that's controversial in a game like this where we wanted to have a fun game where anyone could just take any build to play in any mission. We still stand by that mission of ours and will be turning easy and normal mode difficulty into some sort of a story mode where it's almost impossible to fail. We'll keep hard and very hard where it's at that players making a mistake can cost a life immediately. Basically, easy and normal will be easier, hard and very hard must achieve what they set out to be, an aspiring content where one can aim for. Everyone must be able to have fun in some kind of way. That's what our game will be.
Next week, we'll talk about what's coming next in 0.10.0. Please have fun with what 0.9.1 can provide for now and as always, feel free to send in your suggestions and discuss the game with us through the official discord channel.
- Vermillion Digital Team
MAJOR UPDATE: Patch 0.9.1 Released! Alpha Phase Multi-Player READY!
Well! We've started the year off with version 0.8.0 and we've finally done working on version 0.9.0 at the end of the year and now, we're ready to release the long-awaited update! Patch notes can be found here:
As always, we'll monitor for any bugs and changes required for a week or two. If the game is stable enough for players to have fun, we'll start 0.10.0 development but for now, please enjoy the newly updated M.A.S.S. Builder with new additions of everything including the co-op multiplayer missions!
Known Issue:
Lots of disconnections in Multiplayer is expected as we have no ping throttling to matchmake players with low pings to each other yet, thank you for helping us test the feature.
Changes in 0.9.1:
Flagbearer, AI Assisted Aim, and few more nodes that aren't working now works properly.
Removed the misplaced Shields Enhancer passive stat gain.
The shielded boss in Very Hard mode has... 10% of its intended stamina so it always fell down, we fixed that.
Added a new respawn button so players won't accidentally click on abort mission button.
Easy AND normal is now easier for people who just want to progress the story or just want to play a cosplay build or any build they wanted with no worries.
Corrected a few sounds and particles VFX, they should now perform better.
Adjusted the weak points on some bosses to make it easier to hit when downed.
Binary Monarch now has a downside of -33% instead of -50%, we're still monitoring how the game settles and will work on it in the coming days.
Volatile Void Reactive Weapon now has 130% damage and 1 second cooldown.
Fixed Mission count, it should now not be /00.
Fixed QB freezing players making them unable to do anything if players durability reaches 0 while charging up.
Fixed drones not showing proper alignment in photography mode.
Fixed a bug that causes enemies to not have their HP multiplied properly in co-op mission 20
Fixed Color settings in multiplayer, players should be able to see accurate colors now. Lens flare are still being monitored but the update should help in most cases.
Reduced camera-shake from some enemies' attacks.
Optimized multiplayer missions desync. Projectiles will be much smoother than before.
The boss in co-op mission 3 will now drop its items at the center of the stage instead.
