Genre: Platform, Role-playing (RPG), Simulator, Strategy, Adventure, IndiePixel Piracy
Second "Enhanced Edition" Patch deploys tomorrow(ish)
That means that production on the latest patch was pushed back around 8 days, which means that by tomorrow we should be deploying.
Here is what we have so far in terms of patch notes (Spoilered in case you want to be surprised :D.
Remember, this is just the second in a series of patches that will bring the game to the final "Enhanced" edition (for free obviously) to anyone that has the game!
NPC loot drop improvements (all loot tables revised, some npcs drop only what they have equipped, npcs equip and use ranged weapons)
Added resource file for ShopProgression, now used everywhere. Shops have limited stock for some items.
Revised ALL prices for all the items
Revised the whole world map with 5 new types of islands (WIP for some part), moved legendaries to the corners
Added factions back to the game (reside in the four corners of the map)
Fixed a bunch of annoying bugs including but not limited to: pirates slipping into the sea after grappling and pirates dropping to the sea when saving the game if they are on the ropes
+ other small fixes and tweaks
Tiles.xml resource file added
The stat modifier system
Tweaked bounty reward amount, new status effects...
Fixed Achievements not working
game balance has been tweaked toward more difficulty in general
items cost more, enemies wield the same weapons you do...
Now, if all goes well, I hope to include
Faction-specific ship graphics
Faction-specific loot drops (weapons)
Sorry about this folks, but quite literally the WHOLE OFFICE turned inside out the past 10 days and it's been kind of hard working with the constant fear of, well... yeah.. XD..
Anyways, with this patch you guys will start to see where we are going with the game, next up?
LOADS of content, islands, ghost ships, etc.
First look at Pixel Privateers + WHY WE WON'T USE EARLY ACCES FOR IT
WE WILL NOT BE USING EARLY ACCESS FOR THIS TITLE
HERE IS THE VIDEO of Pixel Privateers, made by our OFFICIAL YouTuber Paul Soars Jr.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jubE9eBn8MY
Hello there everyone, Alex Poysky here with a pretty neat update!
My good friend Paul Soars Jr has made a Let's Play video of the current private build of Pixel Privateers and I wanted to take this opportunity to talk a bit about why
WE WILL NOT BE USING EARLY ACCESS FOR THIS TITLE
Let me just blast through the reasons in bullet form, as there are MANY.
1. WE DON'T NEED TO:
We made enough money from clients on Pixel Piracy to warrant upgrading out 2 man NON studio to a 10 man team across 3 countries, with a PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT studio in Turku, Finland; a DESIGN Studio in Murcia, Spain, and freelance artists working to help our LEAD artist (yes we have a PLURAL amount of artists).
2. IT WOULDN'T BE RIGHT:
Even if we NEEDED the money, it wouldn't be right MORALLY. We already went through the motions of game development one time using Early Access and wound up launching a buggy title way too early because we had a very, VERY avid test group of fans who would say it was perfect. By cooking it until perfection on our own terms, we ensure we are giving our clients what they PAY for and not what WE PROMISE THEM WE'LL COME THROUGH ON.
3. EARLY ACCESS IS ABUSED WAAAAY TOO OFTEN:
"Abused" is a very strong term, as we ourselves are guilty of this. When you are making a game, you start out with a wide open field of open doors to potentially go through. When looking for funding, you look through those open doors into ANY direction you want, and promised based on them. Development of a game OBLIGATES a team to close doors little by little, many times closing UNWANTED doors that you PREVIOUSLY promised. Couple that with the fact that nowadays it's STRANGE for a studio to actually launch an Early Access title, and we're looking at an abuse cycle our studio wants to take no part in. We thank each and every one of you who have helped us get to where we are, and we are learning from the past instead of living in it.
4. EARLY ACCESS IS A CRUTCH WE DON'T WANT TO USE.
We feel Early Access is a "Crutch" people use, and it's one we don't need. We should be judged as professionals in a sector where we attempt to thrive and flourish, not flounder and waddle. The only way we can do so is to produce tight, polished games with the risk of having it all go to hell and a handbasket if we launch it and it turns out to be crap. THIS FEAR is what drives us, it's waht makes us fight. If we take that fear away we'd just promise the moon and then deliver something with no "heart".
5. I simply think EA is garbage at this point in time due to the studios misinterpreting how it should be used.
LARGE studios have NO "real" right to be using Early Access. Come on guys, you base your game's sales point on a HUGE mainstream developer's name and push out a pre-alpha tech demo and charge top dollar for it, just to turn around and whine about how "not enough people bought it to make it viable so we pulled the plug." That has a name where I come from, and it's bullshit, I'm calling you guys on it and will show you how it's supposed to be done. I'm not a AAA studio, I'm BARELY a mid-range studio, and I'm sitting here working on a staurday afternoon after having had my spine collapse on me and having been bedridden for two months now.
If you want the respect of your fans, if you want your "legitimacy" as a game development studio or a world renowned developer or an "ace" producer, don't beat aroudn the bush, don't cash out, don't cut corners and get the job done. I'm sick and tired of Kickstarter, Early Access and all of these startup programs that are supposed to be used by people who NEED the means to get their projects off the ground abused by these Big Name so-and-so's and their rock solid reputations (or not). Why don't you find a publisher to put two million into your idea and get it done? Oh, what's that? Because when you don't come through on a Kickstart or Early Access promise you only dick over a client, and doing the same to a PUBLISHER will hurt because they have nasty lawyers? Well tough s**t friend, them's the bricks.
Oh man that felt good to get off my chest!
Anyways, have a great weekend and expect Privateers to launch in the April-July 2015 time of the year, shortly after Pixel Piracy ENHANCED (WHICH is a COMPLETELY FREE Upgrade of Pixel Piracy that we have put around 100 thousand dollars into between artists, refractored code, man hours, expenses from external companies that have to come in and UN-mess up out game engine, etc, COMPLETELY FREE, just to clear our name and prove we are sorry for having participated in the injustice that is Early Access.).
Febuary Update Number 2 , Looking for experienced testers (Sorry! I've been in the hospital!)
My legs straight up gave out on me and I was in incredible pain. It turns out I had a pretty crappy swollen bit of muscle tissue right on top of the nerves that support my lower back, hence me having been crippled by pain!
Interestingly enough it only required a simple anti-inflammatory shot right on the source. The BAD part was that the source was INSIDE my spine so, yeah, 9 cm needle inside the spine, something I WON'T reccomend. 0/10 would not crippling pain again!
Anyways, I'm back at work and have been informed that Mikko has been hard at work tweaking shop values, loot tables, in his own words...
"...currently underway are shops and loot tables, with some revisions in place already, and others coming after playtesting rounds... tools are in place to easily modify all of this data, bottleneck is currently the amount of testing and feedback based on the beta builds we can get in (for example: I feel that this and this sword costs too little or drops too early in the game)
Aaron and Zack, the two most active testers are busy with their lives and it's not the same as having someone work QA full-time"
The more we test, the better we can tweak, so I'd like to shout out to anyone with testing experience to get in touch via our forums and see if we can speed things along!
Hope you are having a great month, happy Valentines day!
-Alex
Next major patch's roadmap for Febuary
Alex Poysky here once again with an update with our next month's schedule.
Keeping in line with the Enhanced Edition overhaul, we are focusing on the next leg of the groundwork for it, mainly, this month's roadmap.
Days 1-14 approx
We will finish up the remnants from the Balance patch from last month, mainly store prices, wrap up skills, and various odds and ends in the loot table, enemy generation table, etc. In a nutshell, FINISH the final bout of tweaking, so 1-2 weeks to go over the passive items, shop prices and loot tables, adjusting each.
Days 14-21 approx
1 week to fix bugs both new and old. We will adress mac/linux compatibility errors that have arisen in the past patch, and adress long standing bugs and essentially hunker down and fix it so we have a solid base for the next patch.
Days 21-28 approx
1 "free" week to add Content. Read this as possibly new weapons, islands, enemies, graphical assets. STUFF to either SEE or DO.
IF time permits we want to adress the issue of map travel and how boring it currently is. We are looking into a few aspects of travel and are seeing how to make it more about fun and less about waiting. Games like FTL and Pixel Privateers have it right, with a fuel mechanic. The game "Out There" feels spot on in this regard, giving you Risk vs Reward at every time. Perhaps we could figure something like this out for Pixel Piracy to add on an additional layer of depth. In any case it's PROBABLY not going to make it in for this patch, but the groundwork WILL be there!
Well, it's back to the trenches for us! Wish us luck!
-Alex
Patch EN of the ENHANCED edition out now! Translations + Balance!
Hey there everyone!
We at Quadro Delta are proud to present the first of a series of large patches that will bring this game up to TOP shape.
We will be applying mini patches over the next week to tweak the main patch, but in general the game is stable so you shouldn't see anything more than FOCUS mini patches (changed loot tables, tweak a single skill for X reason, etc).
I am SUPER proud to introduce the Balance Patch, a series of comprehensive, overarching changes to the game that flesh it out MUCH more, giving combat, XP, stats, skills, islands, enemies, and every single item and weapon a thorough tweaking.
1.0.14
- First round of game balance updates, stay tuned for more goodies!
- Revised how STATS work! (yes, you read correctly)
- Revised ALL melee and ranged weapons and added new ones!
- Added STATUS EFFECTS (like drunk, poison etc.)
- Revised weapon boosts and added new ones (even to ranged weapons), some of which apply status effects
- Added rudimentary MOD SUPPORT (some game data is now loaded from xml files and can be overwritten in the new Mods folder, don't ask us how to do it, we don't know!)
- Added FULL translation support (existing translations can also be overwritten from Mods/Translations) Current translations are English, Spanish, Finnish, PARTIAL French (70%), PARTIAL Italian (80-90%) and FULL German. In the coming days we will be updating those PARTIAL languages with the full language sets as they come out!
- Drunken pirates will emit BUBBLES from their FACE! (seriously, what more could you ask for?!)
It's been a LOT of hard work for the secret Balancing team, I wanted to invite them all to the forums to chat about their work!
Zach, Christian, Aaron, and Jesse, thank you all so much for the dedication!
Our translator teams are individually thanked in each language they participated in!
Mikko, you have undertaken a monumental task and have come through for everyone mate, thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Expect more big news in a few hours!
-Alex
A personal rant against my game + MAJOR patch deploying on the 29th, details inside!
As I stated at the beggining of this month, we are working on a series of major patches that will be launched each month until april, which I will comprehensively call EN, HAN, and CED, which will all build up to one final MASSIVE revision to bring the game to the free, Enhanced Edition update.
The update itself is massive, and as I've stated a bunch of times already, we WILL NOT charge any more for it. Call it a massive overhaul, a dlc, or whatever you like, it won't cost you anything. I know I say this every time we mention it but you would be surprised how many people leave comments saying "OMFG THE DEVS ABANDONED THE GAME AND NOW MAKE A DLC FOR IT". I just state it as an obvious disclaimer at this point, as we have at least 7 people working on Pixel Piracy right now!
BALANCE PATCH:
You can currently play the ALMOST latest iteration of the balance patch by opting in to the BETA page on the pixel piracy properties part of the steam library.
Changes:
Honestly, waaay too many to count, as I've stated, we have 7 people tweaking the everliving heck out of the game, each stat, each skill, each price is getting an overhaul. As it's an ongoing process feel free to hop in and play around while you wait for the FINAL 1.0 (we will push more balance features like new status effects, drunkenness, poison, heal over time etc in FEBUARY as a 1.5 patch) on the 29th.
LOCALIZATION (Translations and FAN translations):
We've finally done it, it's in, no more half-assed wonky translations. We finally nailed the buggy internal system that kept the game from accepting more than 100 lines of translated code. Now we can translate all 5000 lines of code, and will do so. At first we will sadly have to rely on Google Translate for language except Finnish and Spanish, which we will translate by hand.
The upshot is that we will release the translating toold freely which will let any fan of ours just type in the text in the tool and create their own translation document, which they can send us on our forums or send me directly, and see their work uploaded to the game for everyone to enjoy.
We WILL credit those who spend the time translating obviously!
I must say I haven't had this much fun with pixel piracy in months. The game plays out more like a traditional RPG now, you won't find any more super high tier items dropping on the island next to the start anymore, and the game itself provides a stiff but fair challenge without ever becoming overwhelming.
PERSONAL VIEWS AND RANT STARTS HERE
---------------------------------
Pixel Piracy has been in a sorry state lately for a series of reasons that really grind my gears. Most of them have nothing to do with the gaming scene or development at all. LIFE sometimes gets the better of people, and for whatever the reason Pixel Piracy's work came to a crawl.
That's all stopped obviously but it still pisses me off that I could let it come to that state. Vitali is a good friend, a great guy, and he is a brilliant programmer (even if he likes using older versions of NGUI that aren't as good as we'd think in hindisight, lol), but he's just a person at the end of the day.
The stress of taking a small project, one meant for personal use, and turning it into this massive, ambitious thing, stressed him out to points he wasn't aware existed.
When we started Pixel Piracy, I was working at GamersGate.com as their head of content managment, and Vitali was working at Treehouse games. He initially had wanted to make the game a small pet project and through my insistence of taking it to a greater level, accepted and we formed Quadro Delta.
He's younger than me, so managing a studio must have been even MORE daunting. It got to him, I saw him change wholesale, the stress almost ate him alive.
Think about it, you have a small prototype, work a 9-5 job like everyone else, and some producer comes and says you have potential to make a game that'll sell like hotcakes, you are obviously Skeptical (Yes Vitali, I saying it is allright for you to be Skeptical :D). You say sure and get to work, and are happy with things until one day it just, goes insane.
I contacted Re-Logic and they picked up our title, and what happened next is what I regret the most. We put a lot of hard work into it, but still hadn't generated enough revenue to HIRE more people. I worked V to the bone, not in a bad sense but in the sense that I kept pushing him to achieve more than he alone was capable of.
He broke. Literally. I think I BROKE Vitali XD. I saw him kind of phase out and focus on getting the job done and that's that. Practical, quick, efficient, not artistic and full of life, which is when the buggyness started happening. Getting things done QUICKLY and EFFICIENTLY is not getting them done PROPERLY in the world of programming.
We royally dropped the ball, scrambled, launched the game and used the money to hire a maintenence programmer (Mikko) to fix the crapstorm.
NO we did not abandon the game, NO we didn't cash in. We messed up, pure and simple.
The worst part of it, the one I have regretted privately until this very moment, is the fact that this ordeal discouraged Vitali from FINISHING his own game. He has since begun working on a new, incredible project and is letting Mikko finish Pixel Piracy. This project has a VERY healthy base, he is doing everything right this time, and it's 100% multiplayer.
I know MIkko will get the job done, and it'll be great, but I wanted to straight up apologize for not having had the foresight to have hired him two months EARLIER. If we had, V wouldn't have become discouraged and things today would be a bit different, you wouldn't have had to put up with bugs, with a premature launch.
I also want to take it upon myself to apologize to Re-Logic for this. I feel they put their trust in us and we failed them to an extent. Regardless of how well we are doing NOW, we still messed up THEN.
In any case we are all human beings, we all succumb to stress, we were both new to developing PROFESIONAL titles, and all that is done and behind us.
It's why I took a stance with Vitali to push Pixel Privateer's launch back and offer the current version for free. We are NOT going down this road again, we are taking things in a profesional sense without losing sight of who we are as individuals.
He's going to hate me for posting this, but it's also something he deserves, as well as the rest of the team, and YOU guys for putting up with our crap.
At the end of the day I'm just a dude sitting in front of a computer with a blanket wrapped around him because it's cold and anxious to go upstairs to open up my Magic the Gathering From the Vault 20 box I just bought, Jaakko is a guy who does Yoga and fell on his ass this afternoon because there was ice on his driveway and hurt his wrist, Mikko is an ex WOW addict who likes sending funny GIFS, Tuomo is a calm and very practical guy who likes getting the job done, Nino is the amiable and silent type who smiles calmly, even when frustrated, Kole is an awesome composer, a dear friend and he ALWAYS asks how people's days have been, Jesus is the incredibly energetic type, probably talking to someone with his great booming laughter and moving his hands around so much that he reminds me of that Ship Salesman from Monkey Island, Vitali loves his cat and counterstrike and ESPECIALLY Ksenia, his girlfriend and is an absolutely spectacular friend who has always trusted my judgment and to whom I will be grateful forever for having done so.
What I'm trying to say is, we're getting the job done, we are normal, regular people. Good people who mess up and face the music and criticism head on and try and do things better the next time!
Thank you for sticking with us, we are about to prove it was worth the wait!
Reflections on the word IMPOSSIBLE + Pixel Piracy's January patch (launches 29 of january)
Second off, I know the steam announcement page isn't usually used for this, but since it's my only day off, I've been reflecting a bit on the past and wanted to take a moment for you guys to know me personally, and give you a single bit of advice, a small tidbit of information that changed my life entirely the day I came upon it.
You may or may not like my game, you may or may not CARE who we are, You don't know me, you probably never will, but please let me give you my personal view on what the word "Impossible" means.
I was a nobody, 27 years old, living a dead end job in the military, absolutely fed up with life. Hell, I had even contemplated being a coward and ending my life A LOT more than once, TRUST me, the military can do that to you and will run you over, chew you up, and spit you out.
One day I realized that life was living me, that I had been told what was POSSIBLE and what was IMPOSSIBLE all my life. I have ADHD and have heard "You can't study due to your Disorder" (My first grade teacher) , "You'll never write anything beautiful due to your disorder"(My fifth grade literature teacher), "You will never amount to anything due to your disorder"(One of my C.O's in the military, for years). Currently, I have studied three degrees, written a series of science fiction novels, and help run a flourishing game studio with my dear friend Vitali Kirpu. I THRIVE on the word IMPOSSIBLE.
Please, don't buy into that load of garbage, the word IMPOSSIBLE is what people will hide behind to push you down, to put people who think, people who dream, and people with ambitions back into the conformity of social acceptance. "Don't ask that girl out, she's too good for you", "You'll never be able to land that job." "What do YOU know that could possibly amount to anything?". If I had a dime for every time I've heard that I'd neither be rich nor successful. I'd be miserable and would have fulfilled their expectations of underachievment.
What did the person who made the first metal boat say when people called the idea of a large piece of metal that could be bouyant an absolute crock of IMPOSSIBLE hogwash? Did he just duck his head down and walk away? Nope, he made a freaking piece of metal that floated that we use to this day.
The same applies for ambition, for aspirations, for life in general. I dreamed of my own "Big Break" In life. That one instance where I'd be given a single chance to shine and would take that spark and light the largest fire in the world with it. I realized that there was a very distinct difference between "dreaming" and "achieving", and I set out to changing that.
The only thing I changed in my mind to be able to shift my entire life around, was my perspective. I stopped thinking that "it just wasn't meant to be", or "Never in a million years." and started thinking "perhaps if I alter the situation" or "how can I adapt to create the perfect situation that caters to this particular ambition."
I simply don't let life live me anymore. I don't let anyone tell me, or make me live life according to a set standard. Sure, someone can knock me on my ass and hurt me, but I think my greatest trait is my capacity to stand right back up, stronger than before, look that defeat in the eye and not take it as a failure but as a learning experience.
I went from a sad little man who let life, and everyone in it, push him around to a confident, capable person in complete control.
I met the girl of my dreams, and was immediately assaulted by the fact that due to my previous negative nature, she disliked me. I didn't let that demotivate me, in fact I persisted, we kept speaking, and here we are, three years later, a happy couple. She's sitting here watching House Of Cards right next to me.
I pursued my dreams to be a part of the gaming industry by starting from the bottom. I worked Indie Game PR for a small game, and learned the intricities of game making. I slowly built up the confidence to speak with larger and larger peope and the one thing I have discovered is the following. EVERYONE is approachable. You can speak to anyone, or try to! You have nothing to lose, what's the worst that could happen if you ask the girl you like out, or write a resume for a job you feel won't accept you, or even ask someone famous on twitter if they want to chat sometime? She'll say no, they will kindly reject your petition, or the tweet will not be responded, and you will be exactly in the same spot you would be as if you hand't asked. Seems pretty cut and dry to me, just DO it, nothing bad will come of it, and you will have a lot going for you if you get that yes!
A great deal of my professional life consists in convincing people, negotiating, or taking something "IMPOSSIBLE" to a DOABLE state.
Do not be afraid of what you are capable of.
Do not measure your life against what you HAVEN'T done.
NEVER take a fall as a defeat, but as a learning experience.
TAKE criticism in stride, and fix your mis-steps.
Measure your alongside your ambitions, and discover just how far you can bend it to pursue your dreams.
Achieve,
The word IMPOSSIBLE is only a word at the end of a day, but your actions are real and permanent!
If these words fall upon deaf ears that's fine. If they cause some of you to make fun of me for expressing myself or trying to help you, that's also fine! The words weren't meant for you after all!
These words are meant for the people who will read them and become motivated to achieve. To you all I can say is pusue your goal, don't let your life live you, don't let a defeat be a failure, don't stop fighting.
-Alex Poysky
FREE copy of Pixel Privateers current Alpha + launch delayed 2 months in order to do the right thing and make Pixel Piracy even better.
Hello everone, Alex Poysky here with a short update.
Before I start, YOU WILL be able to get a free copy of our current Pixel Privateers Alpha in our www.quadrodelta.com forums, along with a google doc link to the tutorials needed to play the game.
ALSO, YOUTUBERS can freely upload videos of the current build on the internet so long as you mention that this is obviously a NON released ALPHA.
Quadro Delta Forum Link
As you may or may not have known, our next game, Pixel Privateers, was being prepped for Early Access.
While we are certain it would have sold well, and had enough content for an EA title, we have opted to wait until it was very well polished, balanced, and full of content (I.E in BETA) befrore approaching Early Acces. The reasons are simple and I will list them below.
1. We are still heavily reworking Pixel Piracy, and would never want to give the sensation of abandoning one project in favor of another, even though there are two completely seperate teams on each, Vitali and I still oversee them both, and commiting to a SECOND launch with Pixel Piracy's Enhanced edition being made could give the wrong idea, and since we aren't in this for the money we have decided to wait.
2. Pixel Privateers is great, and I say it with the proud knowledge of knowing that we have learned from our past mistakes and put the resources earned from Pixel Piracy to good use. But the project being great doesn't mean that it's READY for early access. Right now, what's in the game works amazingly well, with no severe bugs to take into consideration, but it lacks content. We want the end product to have many different Biomes, Planet types, trade empires, and obviously ENEMIES. We have a tiny bottleneck at this moment, as all of the aforementioned stuff is PREPARED, but requires our artist to make all the assets. While we initially had figured that we would hire a second and third artist during early access to use the funds on, once again, it goes against what we personally consider Early Access to be for.
We force-launched Pixel Piracy and it bit us in the ass, so until we make ammends and redeem our studio with the quality YOU deserve we aren't launching our second title. It's where we put our foot down and we feel it's the right thing. Work will continue as usual, as will financing, but instead of using anticipated sales and grand sweeping promises, we are hunkering down and putting our money where our mouths are.
I don't feel it'll take more than a month to get things in proper shape, as there wasn't very much of a stretch between where we currently are and where we want to launch comfortably, but as I said before, we are commited to a PROPER Pixel Piracy version being launched beforedoing so, and will use the extra time to pump it full of new things.
We have our VERY helpful and active test group working to give us feedback on Pixel Privaters, and the insight is speeding things along greatly.
In a nutshell, this post serves to put pressure on ourselves to achieve the goals we set out to prior to generating new ones.
I'll obviously keep updating, Jesus will obviously keep maintaining the forums and community, and we have enough money to do this right.
Sure we could just poop out another game right now and cash in, but the easy thing isn't always the RIGHT thing to do now is it?
Expect the massive balance patch for Pixel Piracy to come out soon. I THINK you will have to start a new game with it.
Also, expect Steam Cloud saves, a new UI, the game translated to a bunch of languages, and loads of new weapons, items and "stuff" in general (Islands, Encounters, enemy loot tables, etc).
I am personally commited and obsessed with giving you much more than you paid for, as it was thanks to your help we got to where we are now.
HERE is what we were considering releasing on Early Access, for free, so you can see the game in it's current state, and mess around with it all you want. It is ALREADY outdated because we patch it up every day a few times, but we won't be updating this version, we want to surprise you once the game comes out! This way you can test the game in it's current state and see how we avoided a potential problem with our fans. The game is SOLID but it lacks content. So feel free to play as much as you want and give feedback, but remember that while your version won't update until we let you guys buy it (with a DEEP loyalty discount to anyone who has Pixel Piracy obviously!) ! I know many of you will be asking what the heck is going through our heads. We don't want to keep you waiting, and if you recall we did the same thing with Pixel Piracy last year before it launched on Steam via torrent. This is our way of saying thanks, of proving how hard we are working, and how as a Studio we love you guys!
As we are doing it via our dedicated server, you will need to register on our official forum Quadro Delta Forum Link and go to the announcements section
There, now we have pressured our entire studio into a written commitment to everyone, shown you guys what we are up to, and are living up to our promises, all in one post :D.
Have a great week guys! I'm off to continue helping Mikko balance Pixel Piracy!
Pixel Piracy Enhanced Patch Progress Report #1 + BETA OPT PATCH
We are adressing EVERY object in the game, each and every weapon, item, and passive is getting a makeover and kudos to that, THE GAME WAS UNBALANCED AS HECK!
You see, as developers, we RARELY have the time to actually sit down and PLAY the game, and that means some of the things we put in may or may not be completely tweaked. We had playtesters, and for the most part they said that the game was balanced and all, but obviously in order for things to be perfect, you need dedicated people and not just random forum goers.
We have a closed skype group with a balance team who tweak the game 8 hours a day, but I'd much rather let Mikko give the information directly so as to be both more ACCURATE and not beat around the bush.
"The balance changes are still too early on to be considered "fixed". I see three parts to the balance equation:
1. the way the stats work (the one we're working on now, and the changes look good on paper)
2. the way the items, weapons are defined (I like the idea of refining how the loot is dropped, the weapon stats themself are a part of that, but it needs to provide a progression rather than to just be random - testers said you can find the best items in the game on the starting island. That's not good progression)
3. The enemies (currently they're too similar, it's the same fight over and over again. Items with more variety will help with this, also tweaks to AI or even limited AI profiles might help a lot more)"
When I asked him about the inner workings of it, how long it could take, and if you guys could play with the new beta patch he said:
"I'm bad at estimating time but I'll give it a shot:
for the stats part, one more week MAX, tweaks to numbers can be done in minutes once all the game rules are clearly defined. That's probably more than half-way done.
For the weapons and items numbers tweaking itself takes little time now that the resource files can be loaded and anyone can edit them. For the loot part, it would probably take at least one week since we need to define a system by which the loots drop. That means defining loot tables based on some variables (danger level, enemy type, item type and utility etc..) Ideally these would become external resource files as well so we can have people "modding" them
The final part, enemies is more difficult to estimate, it depends on what scope of things we end up doing for that. Small tweaks, a few days to over a week, new subsystems or subsystem rewrites, probably longer than 2 weeks
Yes, people can opt into the beta branch if they want to check out the current progression. They can get the same builds as the balance group, there's no password for that branch right now. I would advice to only test it using new saves because the variables will change and probably ruin the balance of current saves in the process.
We can make it so the current saves by default use the old ruleset, I'm leaving it in to prevent people bemoaning about their dear saves being ruined. We'll save the ruleset data with the save file, so new saves will only have the new ruleset active to prevent any kind of funny business
In fact, we can probably make it selectable at the start if for some reason people want to play with the old ruleset and items etc.
Not sure if we should make it selectable if the balance changes make for a considerably better experience though
Wow, I need to take the dog out for his long walk now, I'll get back to you later "
As you can see it'll be an ongoing process, and his dog REALLY needed a walk! We have the right people on the job, and come it's launch time, the game will feel much more like we had wanted it to from the start. Gameplay will be much less chaotic, much more methodical and strategic, combat will not feel "samey" and hundreds of your long standing issues will be adressed.
Regarding the LOCALIZATION patch that was supposed to come before this one. I switched the two around and had the BALANCE patch come first for a very simple reason. We are waiting for a VERY important UI overhaul to launch on monday, and once we push it into the game, you will be able to do a wide array of new things with it once we tinker around with it. THAT faciltates the localization of the game much quicker than "By hand" translation ever could, and I feel it's only logical to save time by having the Balance come out first, as that doesn't touch any sort of language string or need us to re work it once the ui patch comes in on monday.
TL:DR
Beta patch is available, it's a huge balance patch but it's about 3/4 of the way done for weapons, then we need items, passives, and finally enemies. It'll be around 3 weeks to FINISH it full-on, but in the meantime we will also incorporate a new shiny UI, a localization system, and somewhere down the line, a tutorial.
Enjoy!
Looking for TESTERS for our new game!
This new game is made by an entirely different team. We are still hard at work on this month's large patch, as well as the Enhanced Edition of Pixel Piracy, so please, don't start claiming we are abandoning the project or whatever prior to doing a minimum amount of research, thank you!
Details on how to become a tester are contained within the post below!
http://forum.quadrodelta.com/index.php?/topic/50-looking-for-testers-for-our-newest-pixel-game-pc-only-for-now/