Thanks everyone!

So there concludes another successful closed beta weekend.  First off with a huge thank you to all our players who spent the time playing through another rough build and submitting your bugs and suggestions on Get Satisfaction.  If you still have more to report, please feel free to do so—we just won’t be looking at it as often right now

More information after the jump…

OMG JUST KEEP GOING

We received a lot of great feedback as well as have been notified of many bugs in the system.  We have a lot on our plates every two week between these betas and we’re definitely just running as fast and as hard as we can.  Inevitably, we’ve tripped over a few hurdles but we just can’t stop the race and give up now can we?

Basically how things work is through several iterations.  We try something, if it works we make improvements in the next iteration.  If something doesn’t work, we try to fix it in the next iteration.  Some things have been taking very small steps like weapon balancing while other things are getting huge redesigns, which is both a good and bad thing (good because we’re fixing things, bad because we’re making big changes to fundamental design elements that eat up our valuable time in between betas).  So that’s just a quick Design 101 for you.

I admit, this post is kind of late.  I was aiming to get this out earlier this week but there have been a ton of things happening.  One of which is getting new maps in.  At this point, we’re implementing a bunch of functionality at a break neck pace.  One of things that’s happening right now is getting capture point/king of the hill functionality and display in.  Here’s a preview:

Getting your grand canyon on.

Other things we’re working on include weapon balancing (forever), implementing hull armor system, maybe engine customization, revisiting the repair game.  Still in the middle of figuring out what exactly we can fit in.  We only have a week left. LOL FUUuuuu.

Another patch was applied about 5:30 PM EST. This is a server-only patch; you will not see any download through Steam.

This is primarily to continue improving matchmaking; it also attempts to address some of the unexpected disconnects we’ve been getting reports of.

One change that you may notice in particular: the matchmaking system will favor assigning gunners and engineers to matches that have not yet started over matches that are in progress.

Your feedback and patience as we work this stuff out has been awesome. Report any further bugs (or requests) to our GetSatisfaction tracker and we’ll keep squashing ‘em.

- AI crew can no longer leave guns pointing upward and impossible to use (we like to call that one NaN gun!)
- Addressed frequent snap-to-origin while moving around the ship
- Joining as gunner or engineer no longer takes you to a match that has already finished.
- The engineer’s pipe wrench could fail to rebuild a component properly; this has been fixed.

If you encounter further issues, post about them here: http://getsatisfaction.com/musegames

Things that won’t make it this weekend
Unfortunately, invite/join friend doesn’t work.  Normally you would do this through the steam overlay but because we had to overhaul our lobby system, we just don’t have the time to put this functionality back.  It sucks but that’s just how things worked out in the end.  Kind of really sucky, actually.

Check our Twitter and/or Facebook for latest updates.

Congrats to everyone who is in this weekend!  Here is a rough summary of what to expect.

Servers go up on May 11th at 12PM EST and go down again at May 13th at 11:59pm.  We’ll do our best to keep them running and also make any patches in there are performance issues like last time.  Ultimately, servers should only be down for maybe 30 minutes if patches are made.

The most important thing is that Mac builds are ready this week.  We’re crossing our fingers hoping they don’t explode again.

Info after the break…

How to Install

1. Open up Steam
2. Click on Game in the top menu
3. Activate Product On Steam
4. Copy and paste the key from the email
5. Profit

BUG/FEEDBACK SUBMISSION

For everyday bugs:
https://getsatisfaction.com/musegames

For complicated bugs:
FEEDBACK@MUSEGAMES.COM

We are compiling bugs here in a Google Doc Spreadsheet. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0As7KK0xlixIbdDNNUDRUc0taTXVFVmJRZTBKLTVHTVE&single=true&gid=2&output=html

Try to remember to put “Guns Bugs: ” at the beginning of the subject.

• Date and time (including timezone for people outside EST) the incident occurred.  This will make it easier to locate relevant server logs.
• Unity client logs.  Go to C:\ProgramFiles\Steam\steamapps\common\guns of icarus online\GunsOfIcarusOnline_Data, look for output_log.txt.  Replace ”C:\Program Files\Steam” with the location of your steam install if it’s someplace funny.
• Avatar name of the user in question.
• Which gun/engine/ship/map etc the problem occured on or with.
• Reproduction steps, as specific as you can.  If you can get to the point where the issue happens reliably when X,Y, and Z are done, you will be a great help in fixing it.

For just chatting with us:
http://webchat.quakenet.org
Channel: GunsOfIcarusOnline

Performance
A lot of improvements in this area.  Asset loading has been streamlined and optimized so every doesn’t just seem like it’s broken.  This is both on client and server side.

Matchmaking
UI should be fixed up and have more functionality.  Matchmaking in general should work a lot better.  More info to come as we’re still implementing our solutions.

Guns
Same guns as last week since we had to a lot of balancing in order to make each one feel unique. We’ve also added some extra characteristics to explosive damage dealing weapons, mainly in that there is a small % change to set that component on fire.  Yup, the extinguisher is in this time around.

Repair Game
Fire is in.  So that’s a big thing.  For now, explosive damage weapons have about a 7% chance to add a fire charge to a component.  Each charge does 7 DPS.  A component can accumulate a maximum of 8 charges.  So the more explosive damage your rain down on someone, the more charges you will be applying to components and causing more fire DPS. It takes one extinguisher spray to get rid of one charge.  It’s quite terrifying, have fun with that

Another change with the repair is rebuilding broken (0 hp) components.  We’ll be using the TF2 style stand-there-and-whack-a-mole kind of repair.  Each component will require a certain number of whacks in order to be rebuilt.  The Engineer’s pipe wrench will add more whacks than the rubber mallet or open-ended wrench.
Hulls operate the same as they always have.  You can’t repair them above thirds.  If you get to 2/3 health, you can’t repair above 2/3.  If you get to 1/3 health, you can’t repair about 1/3.  So keep that thing repaired.

Ships
No new ships this time around but we did do a lot of redesigning for the Galleon (med_warship).   It was in a confusing place the first beta, its role not clearly defined or obvious in any way.  It was slow, had ton of HP, but not much else.  The guns were too hard to aim (my fault) and the guns on the top deck made it too easy for the captain to just do stuff on their own but not efficiently.  So what did we do with the Galleon?  It’s basically our broadside ship.  Two medium guns on both sides of the ship that aren’t any funny angles.  The health is still high and the maneuverability is still low making it a lumbering hulk of a ship.  We realized it’s extremely susceptible from the back so we added one small gun slot there just in case.  Captains should be able to fend someone off while the gunners are below deck.

Help

• How to repair? Or watch.
• How do I drive?
• How to spot ships?

More to come…

Gun usage from previous beta

Many of you are probably wondering what I’m doing with weapons balancing right now.  Some guns, ahem, were seriously overpowered while others were just piles of steaming buns.

The graph to the left is data we collected from the first beta.  I believe it’s every time the gun was fired or engaged, that’s why we get into the 1000′s range.  Either way, the Small Howitzer has been tweaked accordingly.

As mentioned in the previous post, we’ve created a new axis to evaluate our guns on.  It’s the type of firing mode (burst or sustained) vs. its engagement distance (from under 150m to 2000m).  The following are some words about each guns and how I’ve tweaked them to fit this new model in order to make each gun unique.

• Close Range (0-150m)
• Short (150-500m)
• Medium (500-1300m)
• Long (1300-2000m)

Carronade—Close Range Burst
With a little magic, we have proper shotgun functionality now.  This gun is basically is the close range balloon killer and it’s extremely effective at it.  However, you do need to get very close.  What I can do now is set the range and how big the shotgun cone is.  On top of that, I can designate how many shots are released each time you click.  These shots are scattered randomly within the cone towards the target.  It’s not the most accurate weapon but if you get close, someone is going to drop to the floor.

Medium Flak Cannon—Short Range Burst
Not much was done with this weapon.  It was already operating pretty much the way we wanted to.  The major adjustment is that it is no longer effective against balloons.  This change was also made to other weapons that had explosive damage.  So everyone used to blowing balloons with this, sorry

Gatling Gun—Short Range Sustained
This was originally supposed to be used as a balloon killer, but in light of explosive damage being quite effective as well the gatling gun has been improved.  The feel was also a little off.  It fired way too fast and had a lot of ammo.  It was basically a laser.  Not exactly what we wanted.  What I did was decreased the clip size, lowered the rate of fire, and most importantly increased its damage.  The gun now feels like those big artillery machine guns in FPS games where you just rip people apart.  Yeah, it’s pretty cool now.  And there’s a new model/animation for it too! Woo!

Mortar—Short Range Burst
The mortar was already quite powerful… if you could get its shots on target.  There were some issues with the lag but the general feeling of the gun was quite close.  Only small adjustments towards rate of fire and damage were made to the gun.  A small bit of jitter was introduced to prevent this gun from being utterly ovwerpowering.

Missile Sling (to be renamed)—Short Range Burst
This gun was also largely unused.  We’ve had the hooks to do this already but we’ve gone ahead and made it heatseeking.  Every repairable component on a ship gives off some kind of heat signature, the engines being the most.  Shooting the missile in a ship’s general direction will still most likely give you a hit on an engine.  Still playing around with the variables and may even need to go tweak some things in the code until the behavior is as one might expect.  It’s coming along quite nicely though.  You’ll be able to expect more from this gun in the future.

Rocket Launcher—Short Range Sustained
Not a true sustained fire weapon (full automatic like the gatling) but this thing basically fires of missiles just as fast, or faster with the new gatling tweaks.  We decided that this weapon is ideal for area of denial strategies.  Missiles travel up to about 1000m and explode at a distance of 0-200m after that.  The area of effect explosions have been increased as well making it particularly effective at leading enemies or keeping them away.

Small Flak—Long Range Sustained
Another gun that was ignored due to its ineffectiveness and innacuracy.  You’ll be glad to know that this has been tweaked so that it’s like a medium flak cannon, except it fires faster and has more ammo.  Trade off is the speed of the projectile, some leading required if you’re aiming super far away, and a little less damage.  Overall, it was a feel issue and I think it’s getting pretty close.

Small Howitzer—Long Range Burst
The favorite gun.  I halved the clip size to 2, increased the reload speed, and increased the damage.  Wait what?  WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU INCREASED THE DAMAGE?  Hold on a second, I also decreased its pitch and yaw degrees.  It still makes it an awesome sniper fire, taking out guns and engines in one hit, but because its angles are so confined you just can’t use it for close range.  At close ranges, an enemy ship can easily move out of the howitzer’s line of sight.  Long range is an entirely different story.  A skilled gunner on the howitzer paired with an equally skilled pilot might be able to pull off sniping at close range, but at that point I don’t care anymore.  Your crew is just really good

HALP HALP!!!

Okay here it is.  The following are various changes we’re going to implement in the next closed beta weekend based on the various feedback and bugs we saw.

Interface & Matchmaking

• Better user flow in matchmaking menus
• More information. To be honest, there wasn’t really much before
• You’ll be able to see avatar names on top of their heads, so you should know who’s on your boat and if they’re AI or not.

• Chat colors will be associated with your team color
• We’ll hopefully bring in match info (TAB function in other games like TF2)
• Many many matchmaking fixes
• Better team indicators for ships, but also not making them entirely obvious because we heard many of you enjoyed trying to figure out who was on what team… but at the same time not making it impossible (e.g. blue on the junker’s balloon was just too hard to see)

hipster filters go!

Just some lines and boxes here, move along.

Repair Game
A lot of people told me that when they first saw the repair game they were dubious but ended up liking it quite a bit.  However, I have to mention that a lot of stuff just wasn’t in and there were definitely things that were broken.  Here’s a breakdown on all the forthcoming changes:

• Instead of 3 hull lives (some of you may have noticed you can’t repair above 2/3 or above 1/3) we’re going to do shields/armor.  Think of the Protoss.  You can repair their shields but you can’t heal HP.  This will give us some interesting opportunities to further differentiate weapons and have ones that bypass shields.  That’s cray!  This also means only 1 hull point instead of our planned 3.
• We hope to get fire effects in.  The flamethrower may not make it so that means explosive damage has a % change to cause a component to catch fire.  Fire causes damage over time and spawns more fire damage and fire health over time.  Basic fire does not spread from component to component though (that’s for later ).
•  The fire extinguisher basically does damage to fires.  At the beginning of a fire, it might be a small one so you can leave it alone without too much worry.  If you ignore for it too long, the fire might be huge.  The longer you wait, the longer it will take you to extinguish the flames.
• Rebuilding components was just plain broken.  It was too easy.  When a component is broken (0 hp) you will need to sit there and whack it (TF2 style).  Each component requires a number of whacks.  The engineer’s Pipe Wrench will be more effective than the Open-Ended Wrench and everyone else’s Repair Mallet.  What this does (perhaps with extinguisher too) is allow multiple people to rebuild a component.  Just imagine your entire crew crowded around the balloon repair point trying to bring it back to life.  This recreates the experience in the original Guns where you had to repair engines while your cargo hold (non-repairable) took damage—that feeling of helplessness, panic, inevitability.
• Ships will have variable HP based on its own unique characteristics instead of by size class (the original plan for small, medium, and large class)

Guns

• Several pieces of criticism on the guns.  What we’ve tried to do is make each one as unique as possible by creating a new description matrix of Burst or Sustained fire vs. range (close 0-150m, short 150-500m, medium 500-1300m, and long 1300-200m).
• Until we balance the guns we already released, we will not be releasing any more.  I hope we can at least get 2-3 more but we’ll see where we are early next week.
• More effects fixes
• Better hit feedback both for your own ship as well as hitting others
• Some indication of enemy ship/component health.  We’re thinking to show this through our spotting mechanic

Captaining

• Adding in wind flags so you know if your ship is moving, direction, and speed
• Fixing the altimeter
• Adding back our wind effects (something wrong with our quality settings that kept this disabled)
• Redoing the helm wheel a little bit so you know when it has returned to neutral position

I probably missed some things but that’s the gist of the million things we’re trying to get in.  Oh god.

Seriously, thank you so much.

Our 1st closed beta weekend has officially ended!  Thank you to everyone who was able to partake.  There were a lot of things that were broken, not up to our standards, needs fixing, but we hope that everyone had at least some fun and are excited to play your 2 additional weekends in the future.  Hopefully we didn’t scare you all off

We’re pretty sure that we didn’t because many of you did a great job in sending us all the necessary information we need to make the game better.  To all of you who spent the additional time to chat with our developers, (Birdimus-Brian, awkm-Eric, Jormungandr-Alex, SpaceMuffin-George, con-Conrad, Clara-Jess) and write bug reports for us, thank you very very much!  This is how we improve the game, by having supporters like y’all to spot things that we missed.

We’re currently holding many meetings today (MEETING MONDAY) to prioritize, discuss, and analyze the various bug reports, suggestions, and pieces of feedback that cropped up this weekend.  We have a lot ahead of us before the 2nd closed beta weekend so that’ll be all for now

Eric