Hi everyone, Happy New Year! Although confusingly this post is about the work we did in December because I didn’t have time to write it up before Christmas hit… Anyway, here are the headline areas we worked on:
New Deployables!
We’ve added some new deployables that provide additional gameplay variety and act as counters to certain enemy types.
New Levels!
We’ve been putting two new levels through their paces with our playtesters on Discord – The Pit and Mainframe.
In the past we’ve revisited old levels and reworked/improved those, so it’s been good to create two completely new levels with all of the lessons learned from watching people play.
Overview & Campaign!
With a lot of time in previous months spent improving the Navigator portion of the campaign, we’ve turned our attention to the Ship Overview (the part where enemies move around your vessel). What we’ve found is that a lot of messaging and feedback is required regarding how the two parts blend together, which we’ll continue to focus on in January.
New Enemy Weapons!
Our standard soldier enemy is one that has a lot of versatility in combat, so we wanted to expand this by creating additional weapons that they can carry.
The image in the top-right is their existing weapon; a three-burst mid-range rifle you should be familiar with.
In addition to that weapon, they can now be equipped with a pistol, a shotgun-equivalent or a longer range rifle and their behaviours are adjusted to suit the weapon they carry (i.e. if it’s shorter-range they’ll look to close the distance more).
This also allows us to balance enemy forces to a greater degree – such as weighting more pistol-based enemies at the start, and mix up additional weapons as the wave difficulty increases.
In January we’ll look to improve this feature by giving them custom animations and visual effects to help differentiate them in combat, which will help you prioritise who you should target first!
We’ve got thoughts on a couple of our other bipedal weapon carrying enemies that could be prime candidates for this kind of treatment, but we’ll cover that in a future post.
We love it when you speak to us! We try to respond to every post – but if we don’t please be assured we always read them and take note of feedback and comments! You can reach us on these platforms:
We’ve got so many ideas for extra deployables, weapons, enemies etc. but as we approach release we’re gradually shifting into polishing and improving what is already in-game. This is so that we can maintain a consistently high quality – after all, Early Access major updates are a perfect time to introduce more cool content :)
Thanks for the support and see you next time…
Season's Greetings!
2023 is nearly finished and what a year it's been! The two highlights had to be taking the game on tour to various events across the US and UK in the spring, plus the public demo for the October Next Fest.
Seeing people play the game in person, watching videos/streams and reading all your posts has been an absolute pleasure and we're so happy with the reception SENTRY has been getting. Valve ranking us 24th out of 2336 games in the Next Fest was very humbling (you can read the details on how Next Fest went here).
As well as working through your feedback, we've lately been spending a lot of time on the navigator, overview and upgrade system that forms part of the campaign and it's been lovely seeing everything slot together. We're excited for you to get your hands on this when SENTRY releases into Early Access in the first part of 2024!
All of this success wouldn't be possible without your support, so to every one of you who plays the demo, provides feedback, wishlists the game, shares/likes our social posts or chats on Discord - THANK YOU!
However you celebrate, everyone at Fireblade Software (me, Adam, Alex, Sean, Barry & Mark) wish you a happy and fantastic end to 2023!
Dev Transmission (November 2023)
Hi everyone, for those that celebrated Thanks Giving I hope you had an enjoyable one! Here’s what we’ve been doing in November:
Navigator!
There have been two big areas we’ve focused on this month; the first is continued work on the Navigator part of the game which is one of three layers that comprise our campaign.
A lot of this has been improving the messaging for your actions, which gives a much greater sense of feedback. We’ve also been adding a sense of ceremony for when you commence a run or end it (either by successfully escaping or your vessel being destroyed), which is a nice way to bookend your escape runs.
We’ve also been fleshing out the functionality in this mode, so there are additional pickups to replenish crew, derelict ships to collect new unlockables and an additional ‘chaser’. This is a mechanic that provides an increased sense of impetus to your flight – and while we’ve had homing missiles for a while now, we’ve added a variant which is a high powered enemy strike force on a boarding torpedo.
During Early Access we’ll have a lot of fun adding even more content to this layer!
Upgrades (again) plus Status Effects!
The second big focus for us this month has been upgrades.
One thing that was especially clear from the Next Fest feedback was how much everyone enjoyed the sense of power that was felt while playing. When we were reviewing how we’d previously implemented our upgrade system, we realized that this wasn’t something the early part of the campaign was delivering – and while upgrading weapons would get you to that same level of power, we felt this was a misstep on our part and made for a weaker first impression.
We therefore felt it important to have a rework of our upgrades. Now, when you unlock weapons their lowest level is what you’d experience in the demo – and we build up from there.
Looking back, we probably got caught up making something clever but lost sight of providing the right sense of enjoyment… an easy trap to fall into with first pass designs. Our new system now certainly leans into the fun more, which after all is why we’re here :)
As part of this, we’ve added a status effect system. Often the top tier upgrades provide some additional twist that makes your weapons and deployables even more effective. Here they are demonstrated by our (un)willing volunteer:
From left-to-right: poison, shock, burn, slow and bleed status effects. The latter is hard to capture in static form because it doesn’t drain health, but performs a ‘stab’ every X seconds so is a bit more explosive/aggressive compared to the others.
While we’ve only got round to applying these to the player’s weapons and deployables, at some point we’ll be giving the enemy these for some payback!
Upgrade Menu (again)!
Along the same theme, our previously implemented upgrade menu just wasn’t intuitive to use. We saw how well demo players responded to the Loadout menu and wanted to ensure it was of equal quality.
We’re part-way through that rework, so a bit will blend into December – but it’ll certainly be worth it as it’s much, much better.
Oh, and for those that are curious, every weapon, deployable and ability that you unlock is persistent to your profile. That means the more escape runs you play through, the more you’ll unlock and have available to choose from the beginning of subsequent runs. Conversely, each upgrade is reset at the start of a run, so you can choose what you invest your resources into upgrading during that run. This provides a nice sense of meta-progression as well as progression within a run.
We love it when you speak to us! We try to respond to every post – but if we don’t please be assured we always read them and take note of feedback and comments! You can reach us on these platforms:
Reworking big systems like the Upgrades and the Upgrade menu is time consuming – but hopefully it helps demonstrate how important it is to the team that we make all aspects of SENTRY awesome.
December is a weird month in that we’ll be taking some time off for the holidays, but we’ll be sure to keep you updated on our progress.
Thanks for the support, and see you next time…
Release News!
Hi everyone, we get a lot of questions around our release plans so I thought it was about time to talk about them!
The TLDR is that our goal is early 2024. I’ve got a much more specific time in mind, but I won’t give an exact date until I know it’s locked in. That’s because there are so many moving parts that’ll become clearer over the coming weeks and we’re always going to prioritise what’s right for the game rather than hitting arbitrary dates. As soon as it’s locked in, you’ll be the first to know :)
For those interested, here’s some additional context that has been influencing our thoughts:
At the start of 2023 we’d hoped to release at the end of the year. That can be a tricky time because you only have a small window between the Autumn and Winter Steam sales, which are times where any release momentum you achieve gets obliterated by countless discounted games! That means you can’t delay from early December to late December; if you don’t make that early December window you need to wait.
Next Fest was a fantastic success and the feedback was brilliant. It added a huge amount of polish tasks onto our already substantial list of work though! We’re a tiny team with one programmer, one artist, one designer and as we can’t throw people at the problem to get things done quicker, that only leaves time/release date as a changeable variable.
Despite being an Early Access game, our first launch is important to get right. Making SENTRY as good as it can be really matters to us as a team, so we’d rather err on the side of caution and overshoot quality than risk anything else.
We’ll leave the demo up longer so you’ll at least be able to get your SENTRY fix while you’re waiting for release. It’s getting a bit out of date versus the version us and our playtesters are enjoying, however we need to be careful that updating the demo doesn’t detract from us making the main game. It’s certainly something for us to ponder.
I hope this helps provide transparency on everything we’re considering and trying to balance. Please know that every decision we make is always with sincere intentions for creating the best game as possible and as I mentioned above, we'll continue to communicate our plans as soon as they're locked. We’ve also got a lot of cool stuff in the pipeline we can’t wait to show you :)
From everyone at Fireblade, thanks for the support!
Dev Transmission (October 2023)
Hi everyone, another month whizzes by! Here’s what we’ve been doing in October:
Next Fest!
It feels like a long time ago now, but we released our demo on the 5th October and Next Fest commenced a few days later on the 9th. This week-and-a-bit was absolutely crazy – but in a very good way! You can read about how Next Fest went for us here.
There’s a lot of logistical work during these periods: we need to track who is covering us and what they thought of the demo, as well as logging every single piece of feedback that was posted on the Steam forums and our other channels. We’re already working through this list and we are incredibly appreciative of every comment because it helps us either improve the game or confirms where we’re on the right track.
We were very humbled by all of the people that played the demo and we never dreamed of being the 24th most popular Next Fest demo (out of 2336 games)!
Level Polish!
We’ve been running some private playtest sessions on our Discord server. Thus far these have been a combination of testing improvements to the two levels in Next Fest, as well as two other levels (Mess Hall and Engineering).
Optimisations!
Adam has done loads of optimisations since the Next Fest demo. While generally performance was good it could dip at busy moments (like the final wave). It’s these dips that feel especially bad so AI performance improvements were prioritised. There’s still more to be done here that we’ll squeeze in before release.
Main Game!
Focus has also naturally turned to the main game, so there’s been a lot of work on the campaign and a profile-based save system.
New Weapons!
We got asked a lot about upgrade systems and more weapon unlocks and in case you missed my responses or previous posts that discuss these – yes, we’re doing all that :)
These are the next few weapons in the pipeline to get made:
We’ll let you speculate on the primary/secondary fire of these…
Although not a player weapon (yet) we’re also in the process of expanding the alien weapons so there is a greater variety between enemy classes.
We love hearing from you! If you want to reach out we’re active on all these platforms:
Firstly, we wanted to extend a massive thank-you to all the people that played the demo for SENTRY. It was fantastic to read all of your comments and feedback. In most cases I've left a reply but rest assured we read each and every post even if I haven't responded.
I've been collating all the feedback into a giant mega-document that we'll go through and prioritise accordingly. If we don't get through everything before our Early Access release then we'll continue working on it through EA.
As the opening screen of the demo explains, this is but a taste of what is to come in the main game and we're excited to show you everything else that's coming. It won't be long to wait now...
As a small, self-publishing indie it can be hard to anticipate how well we'll do in these sorts of things. Next Fest completely surpassed our greatest expectations however - here's some stats:
Over 40K people downloaded the demo!
Obvious things to improve, but the vast majority of people had fun playing the demo - which is ultimately why we're all here :)
We smashed through the 80K (net) Wishlist barrier! This is important, because hitting certain milestones here helps with future featuring on Steam. At the start of development I (half?) jokingly told the team we wouldn't release the game till we hit 100K Wishlists - it's in sight now!
At the end of each Next Fest Valve posts up a top 50 list... and we made it to 24th! Considering there was 2336 participating demos, that's not bad...
An even more impressive achievement considering the game is being made by one programmer, one artist and one designer (not forgetting the one-week-per-month sound design and music, plus myself handling everything else). But ultimately, none of that happens without you and your support - so thank-you once again, and keep those Wishlists coming!
Gary, Alex, Adam, Sean, Mark & Barry
PS - we'll be leaving the demo up for a while to give people that missed it a chance to play. We'll give you a heads up before it comes down, most likely in November.
Developer Demo!
What better way to start the week and round out Next Fest then watching Team Lead Gary Burchell play through the SENTRY demo!
SENTRY Demo Livestream!
Join Gary Burchell, Team Lead on SENTRY while they play the Next Fest demo!
Demo Out Now!
Hi everyone,
We're due to take part in the upcoming Next Fest, but we thought we'd release the demo a few days early!
Current plans are to have it available till the end of Next Fest so make sure to jump into the action ASAP :)
This is just a snippet of the main game, so it's not got final balancing, polish etc. plus in the Early Access release you'll get extra stuff like the dynamic campaign, upgrades, loads more enemies/weapons/abilities/deployables and co-op. But you'll get all that when you check out our launch version - right now you get to shoot a bunch of aliens and vent them into space!
We'd love to hear your thoughts on the demo, whether those be bugs, feedback or whatever. Best place to contact us is either the Steam forums or Discord
Dev Transmission (September 2023)
Hi everyone, this monthly update is a bit later than usual because we’ve been exceptionally busy getting our Next Fest demo ready!
That also means this is a slightly different post compared to previous Dev Transmissions because we’ve spent the month exclusively polishing and bug-fixing all of the content that’s in the demo.
So rather than having things like new enemies, levels or weapons there were hundreds of little changes that have improved the core gameplay. That ranges from reworking the HUD to ensure everything is prominent and easy to read, through to removing small friction points in the controls – and everything in between.
We did this by running private test sessions with handfuls of people each weekend. We’d send out a build on Friday, which would be tested over the weekend. We’d watch the videos of these tests and prioritise what we were going to fix, working toward a new Friday build that would be sent to another wave of testers.
We’d like to extend our thanks to our community for dedicating their time to help us make the game better – and we can’t wait for you to all get your hands on it during Next Fest. Or maybe we’ll release it a bit sooner? Keep your eyes peeled, put it that way…
Realms Deep Trailer!
We participated in the recent Realms Deep event with our new Combat Gameplay Trailer. Check it out!
We love hearing from you! If you want to reach out we’re active on all these platforms:
