Orbit, Friends, Cosmic Controller, and the Index Update
Welcome to possibly one of the biggest patches that we've ever released - Custom Games multiplayer support, new game play options such as fleet-wide commands, the addition of our game's friendly (yet sassy) mascot Orbit, not to mention support for the Index controllers.
First off, yes, that sassy little voice that keeps asking "Are you bored?" has a name. Orbit is your personal assistant that brings life and energy to the world of Starblazer. She welcomes you into the Demo Room, jams out to the "Starblazer" song, and walks you through every aspect of the game.
Next, we're opening up Custom Games for you all to try out. Just create a room, invite your friends, and then play a MULTIPLAYER game of Starblazer with them online. Yes, that's right. After all of the anticipation and wait, Multiplayer is finally coming to Starblazer. Note that we're still trying to find all of the bugs and could use your help. Please join our Discord channel (https://discord.gg/jDKWnmX) and let us know what you see! Also, Discord is a great place to meet some new competitors (or friends of course) to play with. We want to iron out all of the details before launching full Matchmaking this November.
The third major feature that we've added in is the Cosmic Controller (CCV1.0) - a simple way of issuing commands to ships. With the near-magical press of a button, you can send a command to all of your fleet at once - asking it to protect your Flagship, swarm the enemy base, or return to your own base. There are also two player usability features that have been specifically requested multiple times on Discord - the ability to Build a ship from a distance and the ability to stop a ship's path in its tracks. You can do either of these with a flick of your wrist!
"When is Index support coming??" Okay, we got it! Sorry, I broke the game programming multiplayer, so the Index patch came later than intended… but yes, we got it to work, and I must admit - it's pretty fun to grab those ships! If you haven't found my Easter Egg on the Start Screen, try grabbing some of the ships there…. And then smash them. Real hard. You're welcome. Highest score can Tweet us for a t-shirt or something (really, why not? Deadline of November 1st).
Wax on, wax off… we're always polishing the game! One example of this is getting rid of the need to pull up your menu to transition between rooms. I guess some of you had problems with that…. Okay, we made it super simple for you now ;) just point at a door and select it to travel into the Fleet Builder, War Room, or back and forth.
Expect more Multiplayer features to trickle in before the big launch. Check out this handy cockpit with the ability to rename your player!
As a side note, Orbit isn't the only one who can jam out to our music. Check out these unofficial mods for our game on Beatsaber: https://beatsaver.com/beatmap/6119 and https://beatsaver.com/beatmap/617c. (Why did we do this? We love VR and support all devs!)
New Features: • Medics can now attach to and heal Builders. • Seekers can now disrupt healing of Medics. • Scoreboards on the side of the arenas keep track of player progress for ship destruction. • Persistent settings keep track of player preferences (such as room name, last game mode, etc.).
Polish and Tweaks: • Noises are added to the controller whenever you select ship units. • Gurgle. Whoosh. Crackle. Water, wind, and sun ambient noises added to all of the maps for immersion. • All of the ships have been scaled, with the Bruiser being 2.5x bigger. Increases snappiness and ease of gameplay. • Laser pointer for selection is narrow and changes with the click of the trigger from left to right. • A Splash Screen opens up the game to help with smooth loading. • Fixed the radius of the Medic to have to fully cover a ship before healing it. • All ship speeds are increased to speed up the gameplay. • Fixed the hole in the roof of Blossom (looks like occupants would catch a lot of rain). • PEW PEW PEW. Fighter noises changed to something less abrasive. • Crash. Clunk. Collision sounds added. • Builders are now placed outside of the fleet by default, leaving the inner space for your full customization. • Fleet positions moved down and rotated in Fleetbuilder. • Medics can no longer heal themselves. (Nope. Can't have your cake and eat it too…. It was pretty OP). • Player can cancel loading of a map if they so choose to (indecisive much?). • Builder and Flagship health reduced.
Bug Fixes: • Load times decreased even further between rooms. • Medic rings indicating healing stay on ships after they've been healed to 100%. • Medics cannot unpair and attach to another ship. • Ships snapping to each other cause damage (even Allies). • Buttons display over Flagship in War Room before the Flagship has even opened. • Floor flickers in Fleetbuilder whenever the player teleports. • Menu items aren't highlighting in Fleetbuilder when user points to them. Pre-loaded scenes are thrown out with the trash… decreasing your RAM overhead (better performance. Yay!)
Oculus, Windows Mixed Reality, and Vive Update
We are pleased to announce the release of Starblazer to all of our Oculus, Windows Mixed Reality, and various Vive users. In this newest update, all of the headsets are supported through SteamVR. Even for the Vive, the experience is greatly improved by allowing players to grab and manipulate ships realistically. You can check it out either in Fleetbuilder as you create your fleet or even the Start Screen if you can catch a ship flying by.
We have been getting the request for Oculus and WMR support for a long time now, so thanks for the patience on this. No port or feature is easy when the game is being built by a single developer / coder. But regardless, we bumped this up the priority list after meeting all of the great Oculus and WMR fans at various game conventions. Thanks for the support and encouragement!
Additionally, we've taken some of the feedback from our users on Discord and implemented the popular laser selection system from many other VR games. It is now easier to tell which ships are being highlighted and selected, allowing for quicker and more intuitive gameplay. Some menu items can even be selected from a distance.
This is a great example of the types of features we want to work hand-in-hand on with our community, so please join the Discord and give us some feedback so that we can polish it and make it even better.
https://discord.gg/jDKWnmX
Finally, as always we continue to polish and refine the game wherever we can. Here are some of the minor bug fixes and tweaks that we've tackled in the past couple of weeks as well.
Bug fixes:
- Fleetbuilder uploads are now being saved again properly (broken accidentally in last patch).
- Ship highlights would get stuck in Fleetbuilder right after a Menu UI interaction. Now the interaction is less sticky and behaves naturally.
- Boundary walls were askew in Incomplex, allowing players to accidentally teleport out of the map.
Tweaks:
- The fleet starting positions were lowered in Blossom to be more easily accessible to the player.
- The quit button now only had to be held for 1 sec instead of 3 to activate Quit menu.
- Inkers will bounce off of more objects when thrown (but who would do that to the poor squid?)
P.S. Did anyone find that awesome Easter Egg on the Start Screen from the last patch? Have fun ;)
Blossom Patch [0.816]
Even Starblazers need to relax every now and then, which is why we bring you the world of Blossom.
Blossum is a beautiful, tranquil world and has our largest competitive map yet! Originally we were going to save this for the campaign, but after fans saw the development on Twitch, we decided to release it to them early. It has a large, U-shaped playing field, but can easily be navigated using two lightning fast hyperlanes that wrap around the map. Will you race around the outer edge of the map on a hyperlanes? Or perhaps you'll sneak underneath the tunnel hidden by the complex? Or maybe you won't attack the enemy head-on at all and choose to hide in the far back corner of the plains behind the hyperlanes. All decisions are up to you as the space commander!
For our Oculus users, a much requested feature was the ability to snap turn. Now, whenever player taps the toggle button left or right on the Oculus or WMR, the camera will turn 30 degrees. I must admit, this certainly has made managing battles a lot easier! Additionally, to support our new Oculus and WMR users, I changed the console in the Demo Room to show controls for all three headsets. Before, it had the HTC Vive as a placeholder (oops, Amateur Hour! Haha). Now, when you walk up to the console, it cycles through all of the controls virtually on the controller. A clearer way to show off controls no matter which headset you prefer.
One of the biggest sets of bug fixes was around the bugginess of the Medic units. We used to have issue with:
• Medic healing effects still being shown on invisible ships (that sucks, right? No more sneak attacks if that happens)
• Medic healing effects still being shown on paired units even after the Medic has died. Even though the Medic wasn't still healing, this is definitely misleading!
Gameplay Tweaks:
• Medic healing reduced by 10% to a per unit healing rate.
• Sniper health decreased from 100 to 75, decreased damage by 20%.
• Hyperlane symbols added to Icarus, using the design from Blossom for consistency.
• The Quit button will now automatically pull up after a match to make it obvious to the player how to quit the round.
• One nerf to Easy mode - Spectres will now never spawn when difficulty if set on Easy. As much as we love our Spectres… newcomers need to ease into their awesomeness!
• Locks now say "Coming Soon" instead of just locked. That's more accurate… as we're working as fast as possible to deliver these features! They won't be locked forever :)
• Training Room is more epic now… more ships, added music and fanfare.
Bug Fixes:
• In some cases in which a Flagship would remain invisible after a Spectre has died. Now it'll consistently reappear.
• Fixed some instances of UI Sprite layering overlapping in the wrong order.
• Player could accidentally spawn outside of the arena in Incomplex.
• Spectres and all invisible ships were still being shown on the player's handheld map (yeah, that's definitely not fair, right!?)
• If the user exited back to the Start Screen AFTER they've been to Lobby, grabbing of the ships was disabled permanently.
Finally, a lot of coding went into prepping the Campaign. The only results you can see on this now is the addition of the Campaign button in the Lobby menu. Right now it's locked until finished up. Get ready for this in one of the coming patch releases!
P.S. there's the beginnings of a pretty epic Easter egg in the Start Screen. Kudos to the first player to find and post on social media!
The Saffron Update [V0.810]
It is with great pleasure that I bring to you all the Saffron Update.
First off, let's start with the eye candy. This new update brings a new map into play - a close-quarters arena called Saffron Stadium where users start battles face-to-face. This intense map begins at full-throttle, with no time to wait to engage.
Next, I bring you the biggest and most asked for gameplay fix - a better system for quitting the game. Before, we had a quit button that'd appear when the player pressed the Menu button. In the heat of battle, players were accidentally quitting the game! Not good at all. Now, with the new system, the user holds down the menu button, a loading symbol appears, and THEN the menu appears.
Throughout the development of the game, we're learning a lot about what is usable and understandable to the player. Two things that I added to make gameplay easier to pick up include - the button of the ship being built is highlighted green so that it's obvious the Builder is building. Also, highlighted buttons no longer just enlarge, they turn yellow. On top of those menu fixes, ships now also turn yellow when they can be picked up, to help make more intuitive.
Finally, you know that I'm always working to improve performance and make the game run at its smoothest (just something that I need to learn more about and will continue to grow in). This patch, I upgraded my game engine (Unity3D) and the VR SDK (SteamVR 2.0). Both of these have helped performance a lot and open up new options in the future. On top of that, I re-engineered all of the physics layers in the game to cut down on interaction between objects, this way only the critical physic collisions are chewing up frame rate. Last but not least, I changed the loading structure of all the levels so that they load in the background now, and don't have a jarring transition scene-to-scene.
Other game play tweaks:
-Increased radius of the Seeker by 60%
-Ships stabilize if not given an assignment (rather than spinning out of control like before)
Other bug fixes:
-Sometimes holograms on controllers are switched Left / Right
-Sometimes the arrow on the hologram faces the wrong way
-Builder UI buttons disappear when a Spectre hides the Builder (makes it hard to press then, eh..?)
-Enemy ships can be revealed by waving controller at invisible ships (cheap, right?)
-Ambushing ships appear to be stuck at pillars on Incomplex
-Ship targets are not broken whenever a target goes invisible (that's not fair!)
-Holograms get stuck when selecting multiple times in the match
-Lowered Orbit's voice in Demo Room by 30%
(Yes, I am tracking and chasing down every last bug! Dedicated to perfection!)
V0.805 - Crashing Fixed!! New Selection System
IF YOU'VE CRASHED BEFORE - TRY THIS PATCH. Trust me. It's better.
Brandon and I just got back from PAX East, an event filled with lots of avid gamers and VR enthusiasts. One of the best things that we got out of the event was the chance to talk to people more experienced in development and the VR industry. It was through these conversations that we were able to get to the bottom of the crashing seen by a few of our users.
I made countless changes in the code to optimize for performance, including:
Bullets have a more finite life cycle to prevent memory leaks.
Ships are removed from memory more immediately after explosion.
All pathing functions are removed immediately with ship death.
Only the ends of the pathing functions are updated each frame to keep up with target. The inward paths are keep static.
The hand / map function is updated via event system, not per-frame update.
The AI function will ignore all previously destroyed ships are soon as health goes to zero.
Medic and Spectre requests are all removed after death.
In general, memory management for all textures and models is improved so that less is stored in the memory over time, creating better frame rate and crashes.
On Icarus, I removed most of the dynamic lights and replaced with baked lighting.
On Icarus, I removed FX that were performance consuming - i.e. solar flares, sparks on ends of lasers.
In addition, we got really good feedback on the way the selection system should work. I changed the selection so that every time a ship is selected, it creates a new path, rather than adding on to the original path. This is a common mechanic in RTS games, so it makes sense to pull in here. Why did we not think of that before..? Hrm... dunno. That's what we have you all for. :D
That said, we definitely hear your feedback and make changes as soon as possible! Please join our Discord to help give us some more tips!
https://discord.gg/jDKWnmX
What else?
Small tweaks as always. We're perfectionists and we're here to give you the best RTS strategy game.
Flagship now pairs with enemy ships (to eventually attack) instead of getting stuck on Allies.
Improved the radius of ship selection to make it more snappy.
Enemies are now highlighted red instead of white to make the targeting clearer.
V0.804 - Incomplex (New Map!) and Performance
Hey Starblazers! Thanks for being patient, but I have a great new patch for you! I had to travel internationally for a month for my full time job. However, I got back to work on developing Starblazer as soon as I came home. I think you'll be pleased with the progress.
First off, we're bringing in a new map for the game - Incomplex. This map is an indoor, close-quarters map that is pretty challenging even in its simplistic design.
Next, the biggest priority for me right now is addressing some of the performance issues that users are having. I made a ton of optimizations that should speed things up for you all (please give feedback on our Discord if so!):
- Cut down on ship debris to use less high resolution textures crowding the RAM.
- Modified the Medic and Spectre search functions to only update every tenth of a second, instead of every frame.
- Modified the self defense functions and targeting systems of all ships to update every tenth of a second, instead of every frame (no impact to usability).
- Reconfigured all of the code internally to make more calls to dedicated ship variables, as opposed to calling CPU intensive find component functions.
Then, I made a huge UX change that I think you'll love. We got a lot of feedback that the pairing system didn't make a lot of sense to users and wasn't intuitive. To address, I changed pairing to only work with Medics and Spectres. This means that offensive ships will only target enemy ships, but defensive ships can target and snap to offensive ships. This ended up being very smooth, easy to follow experience. And select the wrong ship? Easy, a simple selection of the defensive ship can re-assign it. Select the lead offensive ship? The defensive ships will follow. Let us know if you find it as intuitive as we do!
Finally, we're always making tiny adjusts and changes. We added controller instructions to make it easier for first time users, as well as balanced ship speeds, and music transitions.
Please, please, please give us your feedback! Join us on Discord. We're all ears :) Starblazer can be great with your help!
Discord:
discord/https://discord.gg/jDKWnmX
V0.801 - Icarus Re-envisioned
After watching the hundreds of players come through our booth at PAX, we realized that the original map shipped with the game could benefit from a redesigning.
So with pleasure... we bring you ICARUS.
In this map, the hyper lanes on either side of the map speed up your ships 3x times. You also have the option to dodge through the asteroid field in the center of the map.
Setting waypoints for your ships to navigate the asteroid field can be as strategic as it is fun. However, just be careful you don't fly too close to the sun or the ship will catch on fire!
No matter how you play the map, we think that you will enjoy this new design and really test your skills as a space commander.
V0.795 - PAX Build! Training Room
In this build, we include the Training Room that was demoed at PAX South. As a separate chamber to Demo Room, users can now run relaxed simulated battles to get comfortable with the controls before launching into a serious battle in War Room.
V0.794 - Texture Optimization
Remember that annoying crash that you had to deal with when we launched the game? Hopefully not, as I have worked as fast as possible to get to the bottom of it.
In an effort to give the player lots of custom paint options and high quality models, I was loading too many high resolution textures to the memory buffer. Whenever one of you would try to stream, it would overload and cause the game to crash. Of course, I never had this issue because I use a real gaming rig that has 64 Gb of RAM. Just kidding! Of course, this needed to be fixed.
That said, in this build I implement an dynamic texture loading system that pulls textures from asset bundles saved on the hard drive. I also mask some of the loading asynchronously during game play. This way, you get minimal load times and no more crashes! All without sacrificing high resolution textures.
There are a couple small fixes too. I disabled friendly fire. Why you were shooting your own ships, I will never know... but apparently that was an issue too. Anyways, fixed!
V0.792 - Easy Ship Deletion in Fleet Builder
In this update, I make some of the mechanics of the Fleet Builder more intuitive and easy to customize your fleet. I just recently added a "Clear" button that can remove all ships at once for an easy blank canvas. In addition, it is now super easy to delete ships by just dragging them outside the fleet boundary. No more need to use the menu to delete a ship!
In additions, I continued to provide several bug fixes:
Items on the floor no longer "jump" when player teleports.
Ships in all rooms are the same matching color.
Timers and scoreboards have stability improvements upon reset.
The Flagship cannot have negative health (yeah, that was happening..)
