Steambirds Alliance
So Long And Thanks For All The Feathers
It pains us to say this, but we can’t afford to keep working on this game. It has already cost us a great deal more than it has earned, and while we have plenty of ideas for how to improve Steambirds further, we have very little confidence that those ideas will be enough to turn things around. Spry Fox is a small, independent studio with no investors or wealthy patrons, and we can only do so much. Unfortunately, Steambirds is barely limping along right now and doesn’t have the critical mass of players that it needs to be a compelling MMO. Fixing the issues that are driving people away and getting lots more players to show up will cost significantly more money than we happen to possess.
Because of the aforementioned issues, effective immediately we are disabling IAPs for gold. We don’t want players to spend more of their hard-earned money on the hope of a long-term place to play, only to have it disappear in a few months. We will continue to keep the game online and running for at least four more months, but after that time it is likely that we will shut down the game to avoid further hosting and maintenance costs.
Thank you so much to everyone that has been part of this journey with us. We’re broken-hearted to be announcing the end of the road, but we take solace in the fact that we at least met some wonderful human beings along the way. We'd like to thank everyone in the community who gave us their support during these years, and especially those of you who stayed around even when things seemed dire. Without you, we wouldn't have even been able to make it this far. We hope you had a good time and made some friends along the way.
Good skies!
- All the Spry Foxes
New Boss: The Urchin
The Urchin is quite elusive: to find it you'll need to craft a special item and then use it in a specific place. We recommend that you bring a full fleet of seasoned pilots with you, as the encounter can be quite a handful!
The boss can drop a lot of the usual goodies, but also has a chance to drop 4 different URs and some other unusual items. Good luck!
Improvements & Balance
With this update we are also addressing some balance issues and general improvements, both for new and veteran players. Community-suggested changes are indicated with
- Leader changes on mission selection now let the new leader pick a mission
- Low level ingredients can now be crafted into tradeable bundles.
- Players in lower tier missions now get their damage downscaled by a tier appropriate %.
- Upscaling of low level players during missions now caps at a mission tier appropriate %.
- Revised nanite trading fees to be more consistent with the cost of 5 upgrades of the same type.
- Buffed Merlin's Staff from 12% to 15% dmg.
Bugfixes
- Fixed an issue where DK secondaries were missing supercharge/degradation stats.
- Fixed the XP Boost item description to properly show 90 minutes.
SBA’s More Together Update
The More Together Update includes a number of fundamental changes to the game. The majority of changes are designed to actively bring players together in the game and keep them together, but we haven't stopped there; we’ve also included a revamp of the crafting system, the new Boss Arena, and a whole host of other smaller changes.
Bring Players Together
First thing’s first, we made changes so it is far less likely you’ll start playing new content alone. We asked “What if instead of going on individual quests, players joined shared missions with a clear focus?” As of this update, our revamped missions are multiplayer encounters a lot like dungeons. Each mission has a goal visible to everyone in the mission, shared progress towards the goals, and clear rewards.
You’ll join missions from the Mission Command in the Rebel City. This is a regularly-updating list of missions you can join, and a short list of some upcoming missions. Each mission tells you upfront your goal, the rewards you can earn, and how many other players are actively playing. When you join a mission, you’ll be teleported directly to a squad of players doing the same mission.
All the old great content you’ve come to love has been converted into missions accessed via Mission Command. This replaces the old system of getting missions from the Pilot Pub and then jumping into an overworld carrier. The pub is still there, but now it’s primarily for daily rewards and bounties. We’ll be looking at adding more bounties and similar content to the pub at a later stage.
Keep Players Together
Now that players are starting with others due to the new Mission Command structure, we’ve made more changes to try keep them together: squads, speed changes, and closing the power gap.
Squads
When you join a new mission from Mission Command, you are immediately teleported to a squad of players, all actively doing the same mission. One of the players will automatically be selected as the squad leader, generally the strongest or most veteran player. In most missions, if the squad is far away from a mission target, the leader can instantly teleport much closer, and any player that gets separated from the leader can quickly teleport to join them. Gone are the days of having to travel across a huge world to find that one distant target.
Everyone within a squad will be pointed at the same mission target with the radar indicator. Your radar will only show the other players in your squad, and a prominent indicator of the current squad leader. You should follow your squad around, but if you get too far away from your squad, we start to zoom in your camera a bit, limiting your vision and reminding you that you’re not with your squad. At the same time, we highlight that you can quickly teleport to the squad leader with a button press.
If you’re successful with your current mission, the leader can sometimes also pick some follow-up missions so your squad can stick together and take on more content as a unit!
Speed Changes
In our investigations we found that speed engines and other speed modifiers were a big contributor to player separation. If you don’t know exactly where you should be going, you are instantly left behind. Even if you do know exactly where you should be going, players without the top-tier speed engines, upgrades and skills, found it very difficult to keep up with speedy players zipping around. We’ve made the tough decision to remove the speed engines (existing speed engines will be automatically converted to damage engines) and nerf a lot of the other speed bonuses throughout the game. We’ve compensated slightly by giving all players a +15% baseline speed boost. This is quite a significant change, so we ask that you please give it some time to get used to - we’ll also be keeping our eyes on this and adjusting further as needed.
Closing the Power Gap
There’s a huge variation in the difficulty of different content in the game. Veterans are not only more experienced players, but their planes also have much stronger gear. This wide power gap makes it almost impossible for new players to join veterans, which is currently unsustainable unless we have a large number of active players. With this update, lower-tier players will get an armor and damage boost to bring them a bit closer to top-tier players. We hope this will make it easier for newbies to contribute and be more valued by veterans.
Boss Arena
This update brings the addition of the new Boss Arena. The core is that you’ll be fighting more than 100 different combinations of bosses and minibosses in a small locked room. You’ll find this mission showing up in Mission Command. Check out the exciting new combinations and see if you can overcome the challenges!
Crafting
Crafting in Steambirds has always had some rough edges. We’ve taken the time to both improve the UI and make crafting a more critical aspect of playing the game.
The biggest change here is the addition of ingredients. Instead of having to juggle various crafting items - a rather clunky affair - most crafting now relies on ingredients. Ingredients don’t take up any cargo or storage space, and can be stacked up to a limit of 100 or more. You can see your list of ingredients from an option at the bottom of the inventory menu.
One big change that crafting ingredients enables: tiered items can be upgraded with copper up to T8. Most enemies in the game now drop varying amounts of copper. Instead of hoping to get lucky and get that much-need T8 weapon, you can now rely on the much more consistent upgrade path to getting there. We’ve also added many different catalysts that drop from different parts of the game and are needed to craft or fuse new SPEC or ELEM items. We’re excited for more changes that the granularity of the ingredients allows us to do - we can slowly give you resources to craft a rare drop, instead of relying on a tiny drop percentage to create rarity.
The addition of ingredients removes the old hack of storing excess items inside crafting recipes, so we’ve removed this from most recipes. We’ve also improved the logic for which recipes are shown/hidden so you aren’t inundated with a huge number of recipes that aren’t relevant. All of your old crafting progress should be maintained and automatically migrated into the new system.
Other crafting improvements:
- Added a confirmation box to crafting
- Improved the crafting details panel
- Removed the confusing location goal from crafting recipes
- Fixed a scroll bug where details can move off the screen
Other Changes
This wouldn’t be a major update without a list of other changes to the game. Community-suggested changes are indicated with
- Tentative fix for the notorious chat bug
- Automatic skill loadout switching when changing planes, based on last one used on that plane
- Suggest another active flock if yours seems mostly inactive (maximum of once per day)
- Adjusted the default camera zoom to show 15% more
- Improvements to the flock register
- Increased range of T0-T5 machine guns (for newbies playing the Quad)
- Fix combat sim bug where stationary enemies spawned on 2 adjacent walls couldn’t be killed
- Siege Tank can use flak while in siege mode
- When you are idle for too long, kick you to the RC selection menu instead of quitting the client
- Apex Military Academy mission is now more granular (more goals so you can see progress)
- Prevent spamming of trade requests outside the RC
- Fixed dungeon mod descriptions for AMA and HFSC dungeons
- Show the teleport effect on other players
- Fixed some more small bugs/issues
- Probably even more small changes we’ve missed here...
Why we made Steambirds Alliance
We are launching Steambirds Alliance out of beta today (August 22). After almost six years of development, it has become a full-fledged MMO with lots of polished content, unique bosses, and a kind of heavily-cooperative gameplay that is rare in today’s world. We couldn’t be prouder to see it finally, officially released!
OK, so that’s what Steambirds is. But this post is about why we made Steambirds. Specifically, why this game? Spry Fox has been making games for a decade. Heck, Daniel has been designing games for over 25 years. We could have chosen to make any number of games, including many that would have been significantly less effort. So… why?
To encourage friendships
Steambirds was born from a very basic belief: Games can bring people together. An online game like an MMO is more than just a brief consumed experience like a book or a movie. It’s a shared space where like-minded people can meet up, get to know each other, and ultimately form meaningful friendships.
The truth of the matter is that in this modern world, there are a lot of people who could use a friend. Or even if they have enough friends, they could use a place to spend more time with them. There’s a ton of research demonstrating that lonely people often suffer from poor health, depression, and/or anxiety. Friendship is the antidote.
So it occurred to us: what if we made a game that was all about connecting with and cooperating with others? A game with only two teams, and all the players are together on the same side. Many years ago, we had the opportunity to explore that very idea when we co-developed Realm of the Mad God. Our experience making RotMG only strengthened our interest in cooperative games. But then we were forced to walk away from RotMG, well before we’d fully explored all our ideas. And we weren’t prepared to give up just yet. Thus came Steambirds Alliance.
Design challenges
Making SBA a great game where everyone can enjoy time with friends is easier said than done. Online games can easily become toxic places dominated by trolls and cheaters if you don’t make enough effort to prevent that.
So we’ve spent a lot of time building pro-social mechanics and tech into the very foundation of Steambirds. Things like:
This is just the start. We’ve got big plans to expand the social features of Steambirds in future releases. We’ll be experimenting with new ways to have fun with the people you care about. Helping people build and enjoy friendships is the most important point of the game from our perspective.
What does success look like for Spry Fox and SBA?
You often hear a common complaint on forums across the Internet that game developers are greedy; that they just want to make money. But money isn’t what defines success for us on this project. For us, it goes back to the ‘why’ of building Steambirds.
Every single member of the Steambirds team could be earning a lot more money doing something other than making games. You don’t become an indie game developer because you love money (unless you really don’t understand probability!) You become an indie game developer because you love games, and hopefully the people who play them too.
We’ve funded Steambirds out of our own pockets. There’s no “evil publisher.” There’s no venture capitalist demanding a return on their investment. It’s just us and our life savings.
We could have taken our earnings from our previous games and put them in the stock market and retired a little earlier. Instead, we took that money and we made you this game. Because we want you to have a fun place to be with your friends. We want to reduce the loneliness in the world a little bit if we can.
For Spry Fox, success to us means achieving three big goals:
A long journey
We’ve been building towards a game like SBA our entire careers. From the very first day we started Spry Fox, we’ve tried to live up to our motto of ‘Making Happiness’.
And part of that is making a fun game. So we’ve spent a bunch of years learning to make polished, fun games. Games that at this point have been played by tens of millions of people.
But that isn’t enough. We also want to make the world a better place. Not just provide a few minutes of hedonistic pleasure, but an actual, positive change in the world.
We learned how to build MMOs. We started with RotMG, and Steambirds is built off a similar design philosophy. But building MMOs, especially real-time bullet hell MMOs, is very hard. Probably the hardest type of game development by an order of magnitude. The sort of thing that big companies — like EA or Bungie — still struggle to pull off with teams and budgets massively larger than ours. MMO development can kill a company.
It took us much longer than we thought it would, but we persevered. We don’t always get everything right, but we care enough to at least try as hard as we can. And we are going to keep trying, and keep improving, for as long as the world allows us to. We can imagine no better way to spend our time on this planet than growing a positive, low toxicity community with all of you. Because you matter to us more than you can possibly know.
So here we are. Steambirds is on the verge of launch. Let’s see what the future brings!
With all our love,
Spry Fox
Major Update: Meowza 2 and Dungeon Mods!
Meowza Herself
Let’s start with what you already know: the Meowza 2 (M2) encounter. As previously announced, when Meowza’s infamous mech is defeated, there is a large (but not 100%) chance that Rebel spies will successfully lock onto Meowza’s signal in her inner sanctum. If this happens, a special Rebel carrier will appear which leads to Meowza herself! (Note: it is not currently possible to proactively increase the chances of the special carrier appearing, but in a future update it will be possible to actually help the Rebel spies lock onto Meowza’s signal. We’d love to hear your ideas/suggestions for how this could work, please share your thoughts in our Discord!)
Sarge will not allow pilots onto the special carrier unless they have sufficiently upgraded their planes or have reached a pilot rank of 90. This is to prevent over-eager Rebel recruits from throwing away their valuable aircraft in a completely futile (if courageous) assault against M2 in her ultimate place of power.
Inside the M2 encounter, you will first be confronted by upgraded versions of the Three Brothers. Some of their individual attacks have been upgraded to be more deadly, and they also have new joint attacks that they inflict at key moments in the battle. Those who survive this battle will need to fight their way through a hallway filled with elite unites before boarding a final carrier, which takes you to Meowza’s secret temple.
You’re not fighting a remote-controlled mech at this point. You’re fighting Meowza herself, who’ll be wielding ancient technologies against you that are so powerful, they might as well be magic. I could tell you more, but you might as well just watch the encounter play out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4gWDXcqDxs
Meowza currently drops one new Special Legendary weapon (at the usual very low rate) and has a guaranteed T10 drop. There is a small but significant chance that the T10 drop will be a modified T10 armor, called “M2 Armor”, that is stronger than normal and/or has special stat buffs.
Dungeon Mods
This part’s the surprise! In addition to M2, we’ve also added what we’re calling “dungeon mods” to this update. These mods are being applied to all of the hardest (T10) dungeons in the game (except The Dig, which will also be getting mods of a slightly more complex variety in the future.)
Mods can be “normal”, “difficult” and “lethal”. 60% of the time when a dungeon spawns, it will spawn as a “normal” dungeon, which has mods which are intended to make you play a bit differently than you normally do, not necessarily to make the dungeon more difficult. For example, the normal “In Your Face” mod, which significantly reduces the cost of your maneuver but also makes you take a bit more damage from enemy bullets.
30% of the time that a dungeon spawns, it will be a “difficult” dungeon. Difficult mods definitely make a dungeon harder, but also reward you with double the upgrade drops as well as **3x** the drop chance for all other major rewards from the boss. For example, the rare “Nearsighted” mod significantly zooms in the camera, making the dungeon feel claustrophobic, while the “Rush Hour” mod increases your superspeed by +50% while making you take +30% more damage from enemy bullets.
10% of the time that a dungeon spawns, it will be a “lethal” dungeon. Lethal mods make a dungeon extremely dangerous; unprepared players should probably bail on them immediately. Those who brave the dungeon are rewarded with double the upgrades and a **7x** drop chance for all other major rewards. For example, the lethal “Dead to the World” mod completely disables your Steam so you can’t use maneuvers or abilities while also increasing the damage you take by +20%.
At the current time it is not possible to intentionally spawn a lethal dungeon, but in the future we intend to make crafting lethal dungeon keys a possibility.
Other Changes
There are quite a few other changes in this build as well, some of them quite significant:
- Menu buttons have been shrunk a bit so that you don’t have to needlessly scroll a lot.
- Teleporting to a player who subsequently enters a portal will leave you at the spot right outside the portal instead of nullifying the teleport or putting you inside a dungeon without warning.
- All new Meowza battle music!
- Pilot Skills UI can now be filtered by aircraft class.
- Grand Lion is no longer susceptible to water damage and no longer drops T9s but its Stiffener drop rate has been increased to compensate
- Machine Gun skill 4B (aka “Social Agility”) has been changed to: +20% turn rate, +5% superspeed, and +5% camera view
- Hog skill 1B (aka “Stoic”) has been renamed to “Fast Exit” and changed to: On maneuver: +30% superspeed for 3s duration
- Sword skill 3B now uses “postAdd” instead of “Add” math.
- The max distance you can be from a quest target or a boss when it dies in order to qualify for quest completion and/or XP has been increased by 50%. This should eliminate the complaints we’ve been getting about not getting credit when you should.
- Reduced the delay on teleporting to the Rebel City from 3s to just 1s. (The delay for player-to-player teleport remains 3s.) The old 3s delay didn’t seem to impact veteran players, it just hurt new players. Not much point in that. Also, a 1s delay will make M2 a little less terrifying.
- The Re-ed dungeon miniboss no longer shoots misleadingly tiny, deadly projectiles.
And of course, we did a lot of work on the servers and our backend tools, as usual. That never stops.
Last Word
We hope you enjoy this update! We look forward to your feedback on it and will plan to address any bugs or balance issues that may have escaped our attention in testing over the next couple weeks. Aside from that, we’ll be focused mainly on improving server performance and stability for the next several weeks, plus any balance changes that are needed to the game overall, as we prepare to officially launch SBA on Steam in the very near future. 🙂
Phase 1 of Open Beta has finished. See you Friday!
At some point in the future, perhaps as soon as a week from now, we will let people play 24/7, but we are not ready to do that quite yet and can't make any firm promises as to when that will occur. But it will happen soon!
We encourage everyone who played this weekend to join our Discord server and give us feedback on your experience! (We also tend to make special announcements and run community polls in Discord, and it's a great place to discuss and learn strategies for playing more effectively, so there are lots of good reasons to pop on by.)