Greetings Fellow Sky captains and Crews!

We crashed our testing server! We were testing a bunch of MK2 weapons and broke the server!  In Between crashing everything we got to try some truly exciting things that we can’t wait to share with everyone.
Congrats on the Shrike and Tempest Launcher being earned. Your hard work in game has brought this new ship and weapon to PvP!

If you want to be the first to see all the content we’re working on. Follow us at twitch.tv/gunsoficarus where we show off every internal session and give away the password to the dev games early (and your chance for free items.)

New Gun: Mk2 Project

We’re trying to expand on the success of the Heavy Flak Mk2 which has been amazing to see players use. Today we tried everything from shotgun lasers to the newest room clearing Mk2 Cavitation Gun. We’re not 100% sold on it yet, but it was a great test especially when combined with Mk2 Telsa! The Mk2 Tempest with a slow moving missile offered a unique take on the weapon, but we have quite a few more ideas for all the weapons before we settle.

New Gun: Fan Made Mk2

Eric hasn’t been the only one trying out crazy new weapons. We took the Mk2 Carronade into Search and Destroy to a solid victory. The cannonballs over grapeshot approach was intriguing. There’s a lot of potential there and it was great to see how guys from the art team and engineering team reacted to this new and exciting beast.

New content:

Night descends on Icarus!

• Parous Glen (Night)
• Ashen Scuffle (Night)
  • Enjoy a new visual experience as you navigate a dark and ominous lava-scape. These are the first of many night maps and have been testing for a while. This comes with a lighting change to lamps on ships to make sure even if you have a hard time seeing ahead of you, you’ll still know where you are on the ship!

 

PvP gains Alliance ship and gun!

• New PvP Ship: Shike
• New PvP Gun: Tempest Missile Launcher
  • Global community challenge. Since PvE players have to unlock new guns and ships, we wanted to attach the same idea to new PvP content. To make sure some players don’t have tools that others don’t, it’s a global challenge. Once 4700 matches of PvE are completed both the ship and gun will be available to everyone in PvP! We want to use this system for a bunch of rewards so let us know what you think!

 

• Leadership medals
  • The first leaders earned a special reward for taking the top spots on the leaderboard. This was something we did manually, but now every leader will automatically get a medal and title for the work they’ve put in.

 

War begins!

The merchants hit their war goal over the weekend and with that, the small squabbles between factions have blown up into a full blown war! Merchants join arms with the Chaladon as the Immortal Insurrection and find themselves squaring off against the Northern Guard the combined forces of the Republic and Baronies.

Get into game to vote for your alliance’s goals. You decide your reasons for fighting and what you need to fight for next.

 

Changes:

• Added a message that appears when a running Steam client is not detected, and prompts the user to restart Steam and then the game (used to quit immediately)
• Changed display of Wall and Mission Reward to display approximated real efforts and % change instead of abstraction of curve that these are based on
• Crusader visual adjustments
• More accessible wanted leaderboard
• Reduced leadership time to 4 days (from 7)
• Updated opening cinematic
• See skills and guns and ships locked and show how to unlock them with rollover
• Added instructions for the world map
• Tutorial improvements
• Enemy AA Ordnance: Muzzle speed 500m/s (from 350)
• Infiltration: Increase enemy budget, increased VIP hunting task force 0.5 (from 0.4), fixed issue with walls and enemy spawning interaction
• Assault: Increased enemy budget, Mining Outpost (intermediate base) hull +30% and armor +25%, Manufacturing base (final base) hull +25%
• Hard difficulty: Enemy base and AA ordnance damage -13% (from -25&)
• Veteran difficulty: Drill & bases durability +35% (from 0), Enemy base and AA Ordnance damage +50% (from 0)
• Hell difficulty: Drill & bases durability +55% (from 25)
• New menu for books

 

Fixes:

• Achievement adjustments and fixes
• MAC: When displaying function keys to the player, macs now add ‘fn +’ in front of it
• Chat overlaps window
• Fixed a pathfinding issue that could cause matches to freeze up on certain maps (Thornholt Crest most notably)
• On the statistics screen, if one hadn’t played a class yet, the most played ship is no longer shown as a white square
• Infiltration: fixed mismatch between in-game and match-end display of VIP health
• The CA list no longer continues off the UI when there are more than 7 CAs online
• Fixed glitched world map when a system language other than US English was in use
• Fixed typo in Lochnagar description
• Fixed broken storm sky transitions after exiting a match while a transition was active
• Fixed an error caused by people trying to activate special abilities in PvP
• Team tab now properly displays the teams when spectating to the end match screen of a PvP match
• Increased flare gun’s light brightness and fixed it overbrighting the helm
• Fixed lights not falling back to vertex path (should improve dark maps on low settings)
• Clan membership button disappears
• Inconsistent load-out preview when joining ongoing match
• Character customization lighting darkened
• Fixed resource display during war
• Fixed unlocked faction ships are not accessible in Evadne’s Ship Reports
• Fixed missing loading screen images

 

Greetings Fellow Sky captains and Crews!

Yeshan are being testing now! We got to fight chargers and strikers (not their final name) and their mighty boss, the Eviscerator.

If you want to be the first to see all the content we’re working on. Follow us at twitch.tv/gunsoficarus where we show off every internal session and give away the password to the dev games early (and your chance for free items.)

Internal testing happens every Wednesday and Friday at 11 am eastern. Though due to our schedule in the office, this can change. Be sure to follow to be the first to see everything!

New Ships: Yeshan

The new enemies are live! With a lot of work done on them they are powerful beasts that work to extend Yeshan’s mighty reach. We will definitely give them more immersive names than Charger and Striker, but for now that’s a good example of what they do. Striking powerful hits and terrifying devastating charges.
Our early fights with them focused on attacking those bulbous balloons with massive success, but we can’t wait to see .

New Boss: Eviscerator

Truly a monster to behold, check out this sneak peak of the Eviscerator. Definitely want to make some changes to both its power and weapon layout, we’re really happy with this first fight against the beast. We’ll be tweaking it asap and getting it ready to be in player crosshairs!

As always, thank you for flying with Guns of Icarus Alliance.

-Keyvias

 

Greetings Fellow Sky captains and Crews!

Things broke! But, that’s what should happen in testing and this one looked really interesting. While the team works hard on the fixes and changes to the world map (details incoming!) we continued our work on Ambush and night maps!

Remember, if you want to see everything first and live, we are now streaming our internal testing sessions (no commentary) a at twitch.tv/gunsoficarus make sure you follow to see when they appear! It’s normally Tuesday and Thursday at 11 am eastern, but times are subject to change depending on the team’s needs. The only way to stay up to date is to follow!

New Bug: From Night to Day

Internal testing doesn’t just mean cool new things. Sometimes it’s seeing how different systems interact. The eclipse from last week bumped into a unique glitch with our boss spawns. Hopefully by now you’ve noticed that when a boss enters the map, the world reacts sometimes with storms, sometimes with different lighting, and other visual effects.
Well one of those meteorological effects caused our eclipse to turn into full day. A wild and different effect, it was weirdly unexpected, but an interesting glitch for us to explore.

 

Continued Work: Ambush

The map has been signed off on! That means this will be the final time you see the blocky textureless terrain for Ambush testing. We took on the waves of convoys and even closed off passes with mine storms! We can’t wait to show off this finished map as the art team takes a pass over it.

As always, thank you for flying with Guns of Icarus Alliance.

-Keyvias

Greetings Fellow Sky captains and Crews!

Week 2 begins with an eclipse.

We just released a hotfix to address a lot of the feedback we have received.  You can find all the notes here. While we squash bugs though production is not slowing down on new content and exciting features for the game!

We are now streaming our internal testing sessions (no commentary) and you’ll be able to watch them at twitch.tv/gunsoficarus make sure you follow to see when they appear! It’s normally Tuesday and Thursday at 11 am eastern, but times are subject to change depending on the team’s needs. The only way to stay up to date is to follow!

Continue reading “ALLIANCE GAZETTE VOL.2”

Greetings Fellow Sky captains and Crews!

Congrats to the first leaders of the Icarus Faction War!
New titles have been granted to honor this historic event. The title of First Leader has been granted to all four factions’ leaders, and the title of First Grand Leader has been granted to all four faction’s overall leaders.

First lore entry commemorating the first week of war is coming shortly, and so is a new leadership emblem to be worn on costumes. Stay tuned!

In addition to fixing bugs critical and small, brewing in our lab today are a number of exciting things.

New Game Mode: Ambush
We are set with the mechanics of Ambush, where ships work together to intercept and ambush enemy airships making bomb runs to bases. These bomb carriers would be supported by other enemy ships and even a boss. You need to race to intercept and kill them in time before they destroy your base. If you kill enough of them, you win. If your base gets bombed into oblivion, you lose.

Mechanically, the mode is playing pretty well. It’s intense under fire and also a race against time. It takes coordination to see who chases down what.

But as typical in any testing, things break! Somehow, we managed to spawn into the matrix today…

Next up in this mode, we’re starting to make the first map for it!

Muse MKII Program:
In our weapons lab (Eric’s desk), we’re prototyping new faction MK2 guns, and here’s a glimpse:

The goal of the MKIIs are to create vastly different versions in how they play and work, but still maintain that consistency with faction technology and theme. The Gas Mortar MKII is a rapid fire, multiple canister launcher, but the gas dissipate much more quickly.

With the Lens Array MKII, think shotgun laser.

Next week we’ll preview the Coil and the Missile MKIIs, so stay tuned!

Updated Stormbreaker:

The Stormbreaker will be retrofitted with a heavy gun slot, so you can mount the Cavitation gun!
In today’s testing, the retrofitting was deemed satisfactory by us, and you shall see it in Dev App to test drive soon!

Also, we are testing quite a few client side fixes that we’ll deploy asap, and these are the things we made fixes for.
– Fixed several memory leaks that eventually led to crashes on all platforms
– Handled some previously unhandled NULLs that could cause crashes on Linux
– Improved visibility and added distance counter to objective indicators on Assault
– Fixed missing event leaderboard title text
– Corrected some text referencing “Preorder Alliance” to “Buy Alliance”
– Fixed a music playback error caused by attempting to seek to an invalid time

Once we run through these fixes, we’ll deploy a new client build (no server restart required), and announcement will follow.

What’s on the docket next week:

Endless Seek & Destroy
Single Ship Infiltration
Missile Circus MKII
Coil MKII
Yeshan Ship

Thanks everyone and stay safe in the treacherous skies!

-Bubbles