Welcome to the Babylon playtest build! Up until recently, we’ve attempted to follow the traditional game development model and use a numbering convention to highlight specific builds. However, the team felt it was confusing any time a major build was released to our community, and now that we’re starting to gain momentum with our Pilot Program, it makes more sense for us to use an easier kind of naming convention. So…welcome to Project Genesis: Upgrades X4 — Babylon.
For this release we are focusing on three major areas of feature development:
Community-Based Feedback
New Features
Build Stability and Production Grade Code
Community Feedback
There has been a fantastic amount of high quality feedback provided by you all. Whether you’re discussing play balance in Discord, creating wish-lists for features, or are operating as a Test Pilot and filing bugs in Jira, we’re using all this great input to focus our development priorities. We’ve implemented the following systems to address feedback we’ve received via Discord and your responses to the surveys you’ve filled out at the end of the closed playtest sessions. ~60% of the feedback has clustered around two significant areas:
What to do and Where to Go The largest amount of feedback has oriented around reducing confusion around objectives. This really hampers new players, especially as our veterans go “kinetic” and start the assaults right out of the warp gates. However, we’ve improved the objective system by fixing the bug where all objectives show (including the opponent’s objectives on your capital ship) as well as including range finding as a part of the first person shooter HUD once you’ve performed the breach and board maneuver.
What is Happening and Who is Doing it In addition to helping players know what objective they should be focusing on, we’ve also implemented an extensive notification and HUD system. This system now reports to your team which objective your opponent has completed with both visual and audio updates.
Local Warp Field We’ve also added a new “local warp” capability to the ships, so that they can safely escape back to a non-conflict area. This warp capability should help improve the readability of “transference events” — ie. when a piloted ship is attempting to complete a defensive maneuver and transferring awareness back home to defend the capital ship base.
These tactical maneuvers are a key part of Project Genesis FPS to space combat gameplay. They allow players to quickly re-position themselves to key locations on the battlefield so that they can better respond and react to opponent tactics or their team’s needs.
New Features
User Interface One of the most significant additions to Project Genesis, is our new user interface. This system will see some significant changes over time, but we’ve built the core foundation that should help users navigate the world of Project Genesis quickly to get in and jump into the fight.
New Character: Technomancer
Our latest character model introduced into Project Genesis is called the Technomancer. This avatar was the second character under development after the Hacker.
Lore alert: Having shifted close to neo-mania, this particular model rides on the edge of sanity, preferring to incorporate concepts and techniques that are not tested or rigorously applied. This sort of cognitive exploration and adoption influences its asymmetrical look as it leans into novelty over stability.
Under the hood: this avatar was used to help us take another pass at our rigging and animation system in a more standard and inter-operable way. This should allow us to add characters more quickly as well as easily attach weapons and FX to the skeletons.
Production-Grade Code
One of the biggest areas that we’ve invested efforts into is our game infrastructure. For the Andromeda build, the infrastructure investment oriented our ability to get feedback from you, and get the build into your hands (either the bleeding edge Test Pilot builds, or the exclusive playtest builds).
In the case of Babylon, we moved the last of our prototype configurations into a more robust system. For those who are building in Unreal, this means that we moved the final portions of our core game mechanic Blueprints into code in a process called “refactoring”. This will drastically improve stability, and extensibility, and our ability to iterate quickly on the key system that allows us to let players transition from 3rd person space combat to first person skirmishes. The areas affected are: FPS, 3P space combat, ship/avatar configurations (big hangar update), and weapons.
Babylon
With all of these significant upgrades, we move Project Genesis into the next phase of development: feedback implementation. This counts for both meanings of the word: 1.) giving in-game feedback to the player via a new notification and objective system and 2.) prioritizing and incorporating feedback from the community.
Our Test Pilots are actively hitting the insider’s builds, the Pioneers are creating some exceptional content, the Ambassadors are helping our growing community, and our playtesters are starting to become positively lethal Pilots. Now that our fundamental distribution apparatus is complete, and we’ve moved into production-grade development, things are about to start moving quickly.
Onward and upward!
New Trello Update: August 28, 2019
Hello folks!
Just a quick announcement that Terry got a chance to update our Trello with the latest and greatest from our recent team sprints.
Now that the Game Developers Conference and E3 are behind us, the team has shifted out of “Demo Mode” and is back on track into full Production (we’re playing a little bit loose with our development terminology as we still have elements of the game that are in Pre-Production, but for all intents and purposes, we’re excited to start focusing on core features). Here is a quick overview of the things we’ve been working on to date:
Visual updates galore
Upgraded movement controls
Visual Effects: Weapons, Shields, and Thrusters
The team has upgraded our visual effects across four important space combat systems: damage states, weapons, shields, and thrusters.
Damage States To improve the experience of vanquishing your foes, a new damage system has been implemented. This includes adding additional models with stressed elements to indicate what remains after a ship breaks apart. There are also other touches like smoldering metal that add visual flavor and contrast.
Weapons For weapons, the rail gun, ion repeater, ion disrupter, gatling gun, missiles, flak cannon, and even cluster bombs received a level up in their visual quality. All of these names are currently a placeholder, but we’re using them as descriptors for the time being. Impact visual effects (VFX) for these weapons also received a polish pass.
Shields Capital ship shields also received a VFX pass. The original shield was really just a semi-transparent mesh that changed color as it took more damage. Now, the system has several visual layers and includes a dynamic local response to indicate to the player where the shield is actually being impacted.
Thrusters Mark Nicolino built in some basic emissives for the ship engines, which have a great ionic glow for an idle state, but there were no other effects applied to let players know when the ship was cruising or boosting with afterburners.
The community was having difficulty reading when the boosters were firing as the only indication was an energy bar in the HUD. The experience was lackluster and didn’t provide the visceral experience one would expect from powerpacked engines on a weaponized support ship. So we made an effort to improve readability by emphasizing the three different states. We also added some initial kickback in an attempt to really drive home the feeling of high thrust output.
Ship Battle Wear and Tear Space is a hostile place and space combat ups the ante. The team has implemented the first version of our battle wear system. Mark has taken a pass on wear and tear progression so that a player’s flight and combat hours will cause a gradual degradation of a pristine support ship.
For now, however, players will get a chance to see the most severe form of the battle wear system (minus damage states, which exist but have yet to be included in an external build).
Vessel Movement System
When it comes to controls, Christian has an intuitive sense of how to approach iterating on the feel of gameplay. A competitive FPS and 3rd person combat player, Christian has mentioned that he’s not normally into space games. However, he has given himself the mission of creating a space combat control model that an FPS/3rd person combat player would like to play. This kind of approach is imperative because of the nature of Project Genesis’s breach and board genre mash-up. The transition from 3rd person space combat to FPS on-board firefights can be jarring if not tackled properly.
The movement system is another area where the community has provided great feedback. There are two areas we made changes: inertial momentum and power slide. These changes were made to add flexibility and additional flight control to ship maneuvering. Longer term, these changes set up future design passes to help players in evasion tactics for when they have been locked-on by a fire-and-forget weapon or an especially skilled flight combat opponent.
Inertial Momentum Inertial momentum loosens up the flight controls to allow for additional angling when turning. We’re transitioning from a more rigid flight control model to let inertia have a greater effect. One of the benefits for this new model is that it provides some relief from getting stuck in the “perpetual circling” that can be quite common in a more arcade-like flight model. This might feel a little uncomfortable at first if you’re used to more responsive controls, but in internal tests, the team adapted to the new model quickly.
Power Slide The power slide takes inertial momentum a step further. This allows for a more prolonged use of inertial momentum and when coupled with the afterburner boost, really amplifies the ability to juke in quick unpredictable maneuvers.
In Conclusion
It has been longer than the team would have preferred to get a new playtest build into the community’s hands. However, their patience has paid dividends as we now have a sizable amount of infrastructure built to provide frequent Insider’s builds and pave the way towards our future open playtests.
If you like the idea of a space-combat-meets-FPS genre mashup and would like to participate in the Test Pilot Program, join our Discord and sign up today on the www.projectgenesis.com website. You’ll be able to get early insiders builds ahead of the more casual players of Project Genesis.
And finally, if you are interested in some of the more technical infrastructure development the team performed (badges and leaderboards, new “Open Kitchen” development model, and optimizations), we've created a longer article here on our Medium page for you.
How far along are we?
When we shifted our development model for Project Genesis to an open-kitchen style, we did so in order to involve our community in building the game from the ground up. And in order to maintain this commitment, we want to keep you informed around the current state of the project so that you know where development stands.
So we created this graphic to convey our progress. And we'll continue updating this as well as our roadmap within trello.
