2019 was a busy year for us, with an active dev and QA team and lots of little improvements that have been patched in. In addition there are some huge changes and improvements that are currently on test2 server being thoroughly tested before an early 2020 release. Some of the things that we added in 2019 are:
We have some major changes to BvB that will be added with the new universe this month, and termites 2.0 to be patched mid-uni.
Healing Revamp and Other Things on Test2
On test2 are the exciting changes we’ve been working on revolving Shield Monkey and healing changes. Healing no longer manufactures shields by big reductions to the shields lost with resistances, so you don’t get the weird situation where cross healing is super efficient. HPS has been generally increased, but those shields have to come from somewhere. At level 1 of Shield Monkey, ShM’s get 1 extra shield slot in support freighters, and at level 2, they gain the ability to steal shields from enemies with shield transference weapons.
Zen of the Shield has been changed to +5% shield max and +1% shield regen per level, so everyone can have a much higher shield bank and not be so worried about being 1-shot by bosses and in PvP. Long battles will still be about shield sustain, but with more margin for safety. Shield Monkeys can alternate between healing and stealing without needing to worry about constantly healing the tank without him dying. Shield chargers have been made incredibly stronger, but now only operate out of combat. They won’t suck up your energy during a fight, and when the fight is over, you can quickly fill back up again. For recon class, that means they can even dip in and out of fights to fill up their shields if they can get away from the enemies for long enough.
Transference Power now increases the strength of shield transference lasers while healing, and Transference Efficiency increases the strength of shield transference lasers while stealing. Damage tweaks and buffs now only apply to shield stealing and not healing, but overall, HPS has been increased, as the intended bottleneck is not how fast you can heal, but how fast you can get the shields with which to heal. Many augmenters with transference power and/or efficiency have had their stats slightly altered.
Most resistances have been removed from most ships and replaced by a combination of a new armor stat and higher shield banks from Zen of the Shield. This is in an attempt to move away from the Pokemon-like system where you have to memorize what is vulnerable to what and the only difference between the damage types is just needing the right type for the right enemy. Armor works mostly as a “resist all” stat, with the exception that it is doubly effective against physical, and half effective against mining and transference stealing.
Since the various damage types are no longer as useful as ways to bypass resistances, some types have been increased in power and/or utility. Physical weapon strength has been increased in power by 22%, making them the strongest damage type, generally, though higher in DPE and lower in DPS than energy. Radiation weapons have been increased in power by 33%, and are now the ethereal type of damage. “Laser” damage type no longer exists. Surgical damage on a target is now tracked, and when an AI dies, it has up to twice as much change to drop augmenters and items (but not items from drop tables) based on how much surgical was used to kill it, with the last hit being slightly overvalued in the calculation. Kills against players and their possessions can cause up to twice the item damage and drop up to twice the credits based on how much surgical was used.
For now the way that bases heal will be left mostly how it is on live as to not disrupt the current BvB meta. Base healing will probably get changed at the uni reset following this one, but we will be sure to let you know.
Road Ahead
We had some lofty goals at the beginning of 2019, mostly a full class rebalance and release of tech 23 content. Those got delayed because we wanted the ability to fully branch code and content in order to really test and polish and not hold up our regular patch schedule for minor improvements and bug fixes. But being able to fully branch like this is dependent on me converting all of our many balance sheets over to a new system that I devised, which is powerful, but takes a lot of work. All the various rebalancing of engines, cloaks, weapons, shields, etc that you’ve seen over the last year or so are the results of the new balance sheets. It just takes a ton of time, and I spent almost the whole year personally working on Excel sheets and VBA macros. What I thought would take about a month has been about a year and a half now, but a lot of the changes to the sheets have really improved the way we can make and design items, and should pay off in the years ahead.
Because it was taking so long, we decided to do the Shield Monkey and healing first, rather than waiting for everything to go in one gigantic update. The Shield Monkey rebalance has gone really well and received very good feedback from testers. It will be ready to go soon, and possibly will be paired with some minor changes to Engineer class skills and rebalancing of all of the support freighter hulls. We have a new balance sheet for ships that is really cool, using a “perk” system, but it will result in a lot of changes, since our current stats for ships are largely unbalanced. To minimize disruption for the players, but to push updates out without waiting for everything to be done, we are thinking to rebalance classes two at a time by related hull type, and rebalance ships of that hull type together.
Our nearterm roadmap for 2020 is to release the Shield Monkey and possibly minor Engineer changes described above very soon, finish the few remaining balance sheets, release the mod rework and the new cargo system, and then proceed with the other class rebalance two at a time. We have a lot of design work done of the tech 23 stuff, but we want to get the class rebalances done before that can be released.
Star Sonata 2019
Happy 2019, Star Sonata!
2018 brought with it a lot of new things. Enkelin was named as lead content developer and he created the Press Corps to give more transparency to the player base. NCCIntrepid took the lead of Quality Assurance and has been adding more rigor to our testing and bug tracking processes. The dev team as a whole is probably more vibrant and active than ever before.
We had a galaxy assault / BvB revamp to make BvB more interesting and balanced. We added Electrified Georg Ohm. We added several new specialized base kits. AI's and combat bots gained many improvements to their AI, and combat bots gained the new "V Formation" where they form up on your wing to fight, rather than fly all over the place. There was a major change to the shape of Kalthi Depths, with lots of roaming mini-bosses dropping KD dg loot. We revamped the way that planet terraforming blueprints work. Energies and shields were both buffed and rebalanced, making fuel much less necessary on energies and regen much stronger and less costly on shields. We revamped Junkyard and the junkyard tweaks, and added a new "alternate currency" system, where items can be bought and sold at AI bases for commodities in addition to credits. Gunner class received some tweaks and was made more offensive. We had a "Mega Moe" world boss event for Halloween, pitting the player base against the toughest boss ever for special Halloween prizes. Hull extensions and cloaks have had improvements and rebalances that are on the test server and will be patched soon. Jey has done a lot of improvements on the back end, and the server is running faster than ever, and aside from a few days of crash bugs, has been very stable.
Some of the most exciting things that the dev team worked on in 2018 haven't been seen yet. We have been doing a ton of design work on an upcoming expansion for 2019 that will bring both a tech 23 expansion with a bunch of new bosses and areas as well as some sweeping gameplay improvements. We have scores of pages of finalized design docs on the upcoming expansion and spent hours and hours in meetings finalizing much of what we have planned. I'm going to leave some of the details about the theme and content of the tech 23 part of the expansion for another blog post, but for now, I want to write about a few of the big gameplay changes we have in mind.
Healing
We have designs to reduce the strength and the efficiency of healing while simultaneously increasing player shield regen, increasing shield banks by a factor of 10x, and greatly increasing out of combat healing. Instead of gaining massive shields from healing efficiency and cross healing, Shield Monkeys will have to steal shields from enemies to redistribute to their team and engineers will actively use a much stronger +100% transference vulnerability beam to buff the healing from their drones and allies on a single target. We hope that these changes to healing will make healing much more balanced and a more active component in playing the game.
Resistances
The current state of resistances in Star Sonata is more like a weird Pokemon rock-paper-scissors thing than anything else. The planned change with resistances is two-fold. First to bring almost all existing resistances into a new "Armor" stat on ships, where each ship will have an armor that represents the average resists to all damage types, and then have at most one vulnerability or resistance to a specific damage type. Capital ships, heavy fighters, and bases will get the most armor and other classes will have much less. We will also make it so that the game remembers what ships you've scanned with a ship scanner, and for those ships already scanned, present the armor and resistance information in the target box.
Second, we will be revamping the damage types to make them more about the utility that each damage type brings and less about rock-paper-scissors. "Laser" damage will be removed. Energy damage will be the default damage type for both pulse guns and non-ethereal lasers. Surgical damage will cause onboard item damage as you damage the target, potentially disabling them over time, and cause an increase in credit, augmenter, and item drops (including from drop lists) when an AI is killed based on how much surgical damage he took in the battle. Heat damage will remain the damage-over-time damage type of choice and the amount of DoT will be increased and standardized across all heat weapons. Mining damage will still be used on asteroids, but gain the additional property of being armor piercing, and ignore the armor stat on the target. Physical damage will continue to knock things back and have a high DPE. It will gain even more DPS than it currently has, but also become subject to double armor mitigation. Radiation will be the ethereal damage type, with ethereal lasers being radiation, and possibly radiation bullets being ethereal. Hitting an enemy who is below some fraction of shields with radiation will irradiate them and no longer require the killing blow to irradiate.
Mod Rework
The mod rework that has been talked about in the past is almost completed, and will be released along with the big 2019 update. The two most exciting things about the mod rework are the addition of "primary" mods, which are much stronger and have a strength associated with them, and "re-modding" an item, where a modded item can go back to the neurodoc, and a player can pay increasing amounts of credits to have a chance to increase the strength of the primary mod, add another secondary mod, change a secondary mod, or even change the primary mod. This brings a very fun mini-game of continually crafting and refining your best equipment, but the increased cost each time you do it means that you want to pick carefully from the options presented in re-modding.
New Cargo System
We've developed a more straightforward design of a cargo system than previously talked about which will be released with everything else. The new cargo design is where items will drop with a "cargo" tag, similar to a mod, such that any item with the cargo tag will always take exactly 10 space. Equipping, using, or transferring an item will remove the cargo tag, but tossing will retain it. Items with the cargo tag will have square brackets around the item name in your inventory. This should hopefully free up a lot of hull space for some people, and let others feel like they can DG in whatever ship they want without sacrificing too much for holding loot.
Improved Visibility/Cloaking System
Enkelin has a complicated but elegant design on revamping the visibility and cloaking system that will make things much easier to balance for stealthy ships.
Giving the Skill Trees more Impact
We want to make the skill trees have more impact and each skill change the way you play the game, rather than just give some stats. Focus skills will give different damage mitigations and add extra slots for different equipment types. Advanced sub-skills will all have large effects and make your choices even more meaningful.
More and stronger super items
We are planning to add a lot more, powerful, super items. This will give those extra slots in capital ships a lot more meaning. Keep an eye out for "broadside" super items built from dg drops and doing massive damage to the left or the right.
Overloaders
Overloaders will no longer self-destruct, but instead cause item damage to your weapons as you use them.
Rebalance of Fighters
Another rebalance of the fighters, giving more fighters useful side-effects, giving more power to fighters launched from a players ship, and making more noticeable difference between fighters that take different amounts of slots.
Rebalance of Drones
Drones have a new balance sheet with rarity, range, mobility, and other factors that give a desired DPS for each drone. We've already done a quick balance pass on drones that is on test, but there will be a more in-depth look at drones for the big update.
And Much More
And lots of other little things are planned, as well as a light rebalance to the power of classes, with an overall balance between offense, defense, and utility for each class and trying to hit those targets for a fully kitted out player of each class. A lot of the work done in 2018 was actually preparing for a big branch in our source code so that we can work on this upcoming release while maintaining a main branch for small changes and bug fixes. Look for a post about the tech 23 stuff in the near future!
We are continuing to work on all the in-game store features that Steam requires in order to launch.
Universe Reset 5th May
Universe Reset
Subnavigator Xibesh, commander of the P.S.S. Excelsior, has reported increasingly large hordes of Aveksaka Suta in the Vihara region of Subspace. The Suta will soon breach the blockade and reclaim Subspace entirely. In response, Paxian scientists plan to use the device in Kumari to destroy Vihara and the countless Suta swarms inside. Lyceum scientists believe losing this region will destabilize all of Subspace and result in our universe imploding on the 5th of May, 13:00 EDT (18:00 BST, 17:00 GMT). With the destruction of our old universe, a new one will be created! All characters, their skills, ships, and bots will be transferred over, but deployed drones and userbases will be lost, as well as anything on the userbases! You'll have to re-explore the universe to map everything out once again.
With the activation sequence of the Kumari device, Lyceum scientists also predict the arrival of two waves of ancient outposts surfacing from the depths of time. They will be reappearing some time around the 22nd and 28th of April.
Welcome to another Pixel blog where I, Pixel, will be going over what has been done over this past week.
Hober Mallow
Tentative Tractor Beam Changes
Additionally their’s been a topic made about suggesting changes to current tractor beam mechanics. Click here to find out more…
Pixel
Battle Sphere – Super Laser
Finally witness the fully operational Battle Sphere! Yes, the Battle Sphere is currently being worked on to add a super laser that will be able to cut through almost everything.
Here’s a mock demostration of the current progress on the superitem visual, this is probably going to change at the final result, as discovered some issues occur with this current animation after multiple uses.
User Interface Improvements
In other news higher resolution background textures for all dialogs in the games user interface, this will reduce artifacting that the previous version used to produce.
Ring Station
As you’ve probably noticed via this blog’s background image, ring stations! This is currently in concept stage but most of the visual work is done. Here’s some image content produced so far:
Greetings! We are excited to announce a new role on the Star Sonata development team. This role is being introduced to address two separate goals:
As a member of the Star Sonata Press Corps, you will receive read/listen-only access to weekly dev meetings. At these meetings, you will have the opportunity to ask questions, much like the public comment period at a local governmental meeting. In exchange for this access, we would like Press Corps members to report to the rest of the community on what the dev team has been discussing and working on. You’ll receive a forum designation to reflect your status as a Press Corps member, but you are also welcome to use other avenues to report to the community. Joining the Press Corps is also a great way to get acquainted with the team in case you’re interested in becoming a developer in the future. Everyone is welcome to apply, even if you have previously applied to join the dev team. Just send an email to jeff@starsonata.com indicating your interest and he’ll take it from there.
Universe Reset July 22nd 2017
In recent events, Hober Mallow has learned how to buff stuff. With this revelation he has buffed the strength of the Aveksaka exponentially to increase the difficulty of Subspace. The Aveksaka are now destroying the Terran universe quicker than ever before – Lyceum scientists predict our universe will end on the 22nd of July, 13:00 EDT (18:00 BST, 03:00 AET). This is only days away now, remember to pack your bases and permanent drones before they are deleted! All characters, ships, bots, and skills will be unaffected by the reset. Fortunately, the newfound power of the Aveksaka will be lost in the collapse of our universe.
https://w2.countingdownto.com/1871887
SunDog60
I’ve been working on Arctia the past few days, fixing any issues with it mainly. The Arctia AI will now spawn around each room, not on top of every wormhole as they do currently. They will also spawn in a flurry of snowflakes, this should help alleviate the strangeness of seeing a random shard of ice appearing next to you. Lady Aurora will now drop a rare holoprojector similar to Lord Borean (these changes aren’t in yet at the time of posting this blog!).
Next patch, there will be a temporary mission in The Junkyard to delete those pesky Prefab Fighters from your ship until we can get an improved solution to them.
Bobbo
Bobbo has been working on fixing problems and in general improving the Seer Nanite Infusion Devices. If you have had issues with this and would like to help speed up the fixing process, the current fixes are available on test for you to experiment with!
NCCIntrepid
NCC has converted the built-in Lion Maul tweak generator on the Lion and the built-in Sniper Re-Router tweak generator into tweak devices. This will allow bots to use them as well as modernizing the ship inbuilts to be closer to what is now found on ships today, such as the Paxian Grand Reinforcement on the high tech Paxian ships. We are aware of the lack of information on the super item tooltips and we will be looking into fixing that soon.
Pixel
Pixel has been very busy yet again adding wounderful background changes to galaxys and other things.
End of the Universe
Temple Grounds
Shadow
Reaver Skins
Base Radiation Field Generators
Changes to base radiation field items, that will affect enemy ships resistances as they get closer to your bases.
Weekly Dev Blog – 5th of July + Universe Reset Announcement
Universe Reset July 22nd 2017
It’s that time of the month (year..? whatever) again. The universe has become old and unstable. Scientists predict the precise collapse will occur on the 22nd of July,13:00 EDT (18:00 BST, 03:00 AET).
Earthforce would like to remind you to pack your stations, recover your drones and for the paranoid, dock your bots before the collapse.
We hope to see you on the other side!
enkelin and Pixel
Have been hard at work putting the final touches to the new Station Management 22 zone. Pixel is working on getting the AI to function as desired and making them look awesome while enkelin is putting his focus on getting the stats for the new equipment just right. It’s unlikely the project will be finished and properly tested before the upcoming universe reset but we’re hopeful we can get it all done by the one after.
Bobbo
Has created a Vulture boss which is currently on test server for you to check out.
Jey
Has been working on plugging the hole regarding Base Thrusters. Before, when someone would attack, the defending party would be able to ‘outrun’ the attacking party by simply using base thrusters into the same direction, meaning the attacking party could never catch up and after the 12 hour timer their kits would go destroyed. Jey has implemented a hard limit of 30.000 distance from the nearest solar body (planet, wormhole, etc). If permanent assets go over this limit they have 10 minutes to get back in range. Failing to do so will make the station go into a destroyed state and any permanent drones will vanish. This timer never resets, but when a station has been destroyed by this mechanic the timer will be set at 1 milisecond, allowing players to tractor their kits back within the 30.000 limit and repair them. Repairing them outside of the 30.000 limit will kill the base instantly again. Once this feature gets patched in the base thrusters will be returned to their former glory.
DarkSteel
I’ve been spending my afternoons reverting the unintentional beefs to permanent drones that were brought to our attention last week. We’re also discussing further adjustments since we’re not entirely happy with the role permanent drones currently play. More about that after next week’s developer meeting.
Dev Blog – New Modification System in Progress
Introduction
Greetings! I’m excited to announce a new project that has recently cleared the earliest stages of development (in other words, the devs have finally stopped arguing over all the little details). The main goal of the project is to make the item modification system more accessible to new players, while also giving endgame players greater ability to fine tune their setups. While we’re at it, we’re also trying to make modifications more exciting. As with any revamp of existing content, there is always the danger of throwing off the balance of the game. The purpose of this post is to share our plans with you at the earliest possible occasion; we’ll listen to your feedback and take our time with the next development stage in order to avoid any unintended nerfs. One other note: while this project is a whole dev team effort, enkelin is taking point on it so any feedback should be directed to him.
Discussion of Design Philosophy
Making Modifications More Rewarding
People play video games because they are rewarding. One of the great UI improvements of the past few years was the Ship Window revamp, in which you can view all your exact stats. This gave players a concrete way to measure the improvement of each new item they obtained, and has led to an improved sense of reward. But while you may feel rewarded when your DPS goes up by 1000, this is not the most powerful kind of reward a game can offer. What we are going for is a game experience where you KNOW you’re better even before checking the Ship Window. That’s a deeper level of satisfaction compared to unemotionally comparing two numbers after the fight.
The problem with the current modification system is that most mods only provide a small increase in stats, and the total effect is only noticeable because you have so many modified items. We are making mods feel more rewarding by introducing new, powerful modifications on a limited number of gear types. There’s a weapon mod that splits every shot into two, an energy mod that redirects some damage taken to your energy bank, and a radar mod that boosts your hostility by broadcasting rude messages to all your enemies. The end result is that your gameplay will be noticeably altered (and improved) when you obtain one of these new modifications.
Stat Stick Discussion
With the addition of these new, extremely powerful modifications, we are going to be toning down another aspect of your setups in compensation. Part of the reason for this is that we would have to rebalance all existing dungeon content if we allowed everyone to get way stronger than before, but there’s a more fundamental reason too. The nerf will target so-called “stat sticks,” i.e. any item that is equipped primarily for a stat bonus it grants, and is rarely or never used for its primary purpose. In Star Sonata, examples of stat sticks include Mzungu Cloak, Point Defense Zeta, and high-tech tractor beams. In many cases, well-modded items of these types are carried but never activated/used. In a game like Star Sonata, stat sticks may make up over half of a player’s inventory. This is sometimes taken to be a sign of customizability of setup, but it is actually the opposite, as I explain below.
One of the principal facets of game design is to give players interesting choices. Should your Shield Monkey sacrifice 500 shield regen for 2000 more HPS? Should your Speed Demon sacrifice 100 speed for extra range? These are examples of choices where there’s no clear answer, and that’s the kind of decision that makes for an interesting game. But when an item’s value is exclusively based on its modifications, there’s no choice left for the player. As a Berserker, you want to fill your hull with Evil-modified gear, and if you get the chance you won’t mind a few Radioactive or Super Intelligent mods on top of that. The actual nature of the gear has no bearing on the decision, so long as it’s reasonably small. In pushing back against the proliferation of stat sticks, the dev team is shifting the game in a direction that will give players much more interesting choices, which is what customizability is really about. For specifics, see the Grand Table O’ Nerfs below.
Rundown of Changes
What is staying the same?
What is changing?
Grand Table O’ Nerfs
We are aware that this project will cause a lot of concern in the community. This blog post will serve as the first step of many in ensuring that the revamp proceeds in a way that works for the players. We are intentionally leaving all numerical values up for debate for now, which will allow us great flexibility in achieving the desired game balance. Here are some considerations we will be looking at as the project proceeds:
More information here
Recent client patch reduced the crashes by a lot but there is still more than can be considered acceptable. I am still working on tracking and fixing as many of the crashes as possible but the remaining ones are pretty complicated. We are up to date on patches so expect new ones every week or so.
Pixel
Has been busy with another developer make the faction selection dialog!
Dark Steel
We’re introducing a new tag that allows items to drop on death. It’s first implementation will be on every kind of Industrial Commod. If a bot or player gets killed all their/its Industrial Commods will be dropped.
We’re also going to be making bots drop 20% of their credits upon death which will be modifiable by Piracy and Surgical damage. This should put a lot more risk on off-team trading routes.
Bobbo
Fixed a bug with Deathblossum where it wouldn’t take the range tweak bonus into account when choosing targets.
Ryan
Ryan has been working on our ingame store. Here is a preview of it while it is still in progress. Keep in mind that there are still a couple images missing and that the fonts in several spots are going to be upgraded.
Welcome to another Pixel blog where I, Pixel, will be going over what has been done over this past week.
Background Improvements
Yes! That wonderful default background of nebulae that has been around Star Sonata for quite a while now has been expanded upon! With eight more variants of backgrounds, expect next universe and possibly some current instances of this universe to have a more dyamic background than before!
Here’s one of many changes the new background visuals have produced.
Shipyards
Shipyards are now visually constructing dreadnaughts and battleships in Beta Antares once again, this will come next universe.
Added a new ship to the game called the “The Commissioner”. This has been co-opted with Hober Mallow to add the final touches to the ship for in-game release.
Special thanks to James5 for producing the ship. The topic related can be found here.
Been expanding Kalthi Depths loot table, making additions to the following areas (in-progress):
In the shadows of the development, something is making a scratching noise.
