First day of launch was an amazing success! Thank you to everyone who took a chance on a new title from a new VR developer team. We're going to work hard to make this game the best shooter on the Vive.
Tonight's update is two parts. First is some significant server optimizations. This should get rid of the Drone stuttering behavior that tends to crop up in the middle of the match. The second is some client side fixes due to the great feedback we got. Here is the full list:
Bug Fixes:
Serverside optimizations. We got a good chunk done today but this will be on ongoing process.
Removed buzz notification from holsters. Unanimous feedback was that it was annoying and most players got used to where the holster were pretty quickly. This may come back if there is demand as an option.
Balancing
Reduced teleport cooldown on weapons by 75%.
Decreased muzzle check against walls distance. The was too strict and was preventing players near walls from being able to shoot.
Increase radius shoot bounds. The teleport bounds against shooting outside of your teleport circle was too strict. Now you should be able to get right up to walls and cover and use them more effectively.
Thanks again for the feedback and support!
Orbital Strike: Arena Released!
It's been a crazy 3 months but the first version of Orbital Strike: Arena is now available on Steam Early Access. A big thank you to all the alpha testers who helped make the game 100x better in just the last two weeks.
Anyone interested is invited to our Discord server. Being a multiplayer game, the biggest worry we have is having people online to play with. Here you can post feedback, bug reports, and organize games!
This is just the start. We have big plans for the future. Cya in the Arena!
July 10th Update. New build and feature lock.
Big update today. With the last two weapons completed, we're officially on feature lockdown! We'll be spending the next couple days exclusively hunting down bugs and getting the backend ready for release on Tuesday. Here's the details on today's build.
New Features:
- Holsters! You now have two holster attach points on your hip to store weapons and items. The height of the attach points can be changed from the options panel. The grab mechanics have been completely rewriten to support swapping items between holsters, hands, and other objects on the ground.
- Auto Blasters! New fully automatic blaster weapon. Designed for close range fighting, it brings superior firepower in exchange for less range and slightly less accuracy than the normal blaster.
- Grenades! Frag grenades are great for taking out groups of drones or base defenses. Activate using the trigger and then throw like any other item by holding the grip buttons.
- Added haptic feedback when your hand is near your holster and there is an action available (grab or store)
- Added graphical effect if you try to make an interaction while outside your personal play area bounds.
Balancing:
- Decreased Drone spawn rate to every 30 seconds.
- Increase building health across the board by 50% due to increase damage output from grenades and auto-blasters.
- Increased throw distance of grenades vs other items by 100%
- Grenades and other items are blocked from being thrown through the center shield walls.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed a server crash bug due to large log files.
New Frag Grenade items
Dual Auto-Blasters!
Early Access Release pushed back to July 12th
We've pushed back the release of the game until after the weekend. We're now targeting July 12th as the Early Access release date. The play tests so far have been successful in that we've caught and fixed over 30 issues and bugs. We'd really love to have the holster mechanics and the grenade and auto-blaster weapons in game before release to give people more varied combat options. We're pretty confident we can get these done over the weekend so we hope the delay of a few days to get these in-game and dialed in is the right call.
Also, a new update is available to fix the few issues found in last night's play test. We will be working on the holster mechanics and the new grenade item for the next build!
Bug Fixes:
- Added delay to dropping weapons. You must hold the grip buttons for 1 second before they will drop.
- Added 3 second delay to teleporting after death which fixes a teleport effect issue.
- Fixed a bug which caused drones to get stuck at the hold waypoint before assaulting the enemy base.
Features:
- Now using Steam Authentication when connecting to game servers.
- Added haptic feedback when blaster is fully loaded.
July 6th New Build
Bug Fixes
-Teleport is once again blocked by walls.
-Fixed bug that only showed the name for players on the other team. Correct behaviour is you can only see the names on your own team's players.
-Fixed a bug where destroyed buildings were allowing shots to pass though on the server. Buildings will now always block shots.
-Spectating players will no longer take hits.
-Fixed a bug where the ingame menu would not close on teleport.
Changes
-Teleport results in a 0.75 second cooldown for items.
-Added graphical trail to show teleport direction.
-Lots of improvements to drone pathfinding.
-Added avoidance behaviour for drones.
-Drones will wait until they have a full wave nearby before making a push on the enemy barracks.
-Increased turret charge time to first shot by 100%.
-Balanced the shield item. Shield charge rate decreased by 100%. Increase delay for a blown out shield by 300%
New Teleport changes coming
July 5th Update
I just wanted to get everyone up to speed on the design decisions for the new teleport mechanics. The feedback has been great so far and we've already implemented a first pass to switch the teleport location select from direct pointing to an arc similar to Valve's The Lab.
The problems with the current teleport system revolves around one thing: Latency. When you teleport to a location, there is a delay while the server sends the packet with this info to all the clients. If you have the same amount of latency as another player, you both will see the teleport action take place at around the same time. There is the possibility though, that you could teleport behind someone, and take them out, all before that player gets the packet that you teleported in the first place. Also, there is no indication to tell "where" a player teleported to. You have to frantically look around to see where they went which gives more advantage to the teleportee.
This has resulted in what one player described as "cheat-teleporting." It's never fun to the person on the receiving end and it doesn't really have a counter. We've gotten a lot of feedback on this and these are the two changes we're going to make in the next couple days:
First, we're going to add a trail type effect spanning the from-to teleport locations. This should, if you're close enough, make it obvious where someone teleported to and prevents hiding once you've engaged in close combat.
Second, we're adding a slight cooldown of 0.5 seconds on weapons after teleporting. This gives everyone a chance to receive the packet that you've teleported and also provides a trade-off for teleporting while in combat.
The hope is these two changes will make the game more tactical and make you think about how you're going to position yourself for an upcoming fight. There were a bunch of other suggestions such as being able to block a person in mid teleport and also viewing where the other player teleport request is. We'll keep those ideas and others on the trello board for now while we make these changes first and see how you all like them.
July 4th Update
Happy 4th of July everyone! New build is up!
Bug Fixes
-Added hit detection effect for debugging. When the server registers a hit you will see a text popup on the enemy target. This'll get removed for release.
-Fixed bug with server list results being received while in-game.
-Drone spawn rate increased to 10 second from 5 seconds.
-Fixed respawn effect. We were showing teleport out effect at the spectating players location before they spawned.
-Fixed bug with turrets shooting at the start of the game.
-Added smoothing to turret rotations. Looks a lot better now.
-Fixed bug that showed a disabled teleport circle when trying to teleport very short distances.
-Horrible, horrible bug in drone targeting fixed. They should consistently update their targets now.
-Fixed another horrible bug with hit detection. You may have noticed some shots not registering. The hitbox for weapons were not properly passing the damage to the player resulting in all weapons being a sort of mini invulnerable shield. That's been fixed and if you are hit in the hand or on your weapon you should now take damage.
-Workaround for garbled/distorted character voice chat. Let me know if you are still hearing distorted audio clips.
Features
-First pass for arc teleporter. Still working on the design based on all of your feedback for the second pass.
