I know we’ve been talking about ourselves lately, but how are you? Things going well at work? Noisy neighbor taken care of?
But now, let’s talk about us some more!
It’s been a busy week at Muse laboratories (imagine our office, but with more lab coats and snappy gloves) but before I let you in on what the team has been working on remember to catch us at twitch.tv/gunsoficarus at 3 pm eastern, 7 pm GMT, to chat with us live hear our thoughts, ramblings, and secrets on what’s coming next for Guns of Icarus!
Thank you so much to all the players who took part in our testing. We had 81 players who put having fun on hold to make sure we could test the new match system.
As they can all attest, this was hardcore testing with 351 separate queues recorded. That’s 216 pilots and 398 gunners and engineers.
On a positive note the matchmaker took an average of 17 seconds to put a player into lobby even when there was only a max of 30 players in queue at one time.
Behold the newest decoration being made for your ship.
Friday, normally the most exciting day is being usurped by Satuday this week. Saturday we are testing the new match system. What makes this testing so much more exciting than the last one? Your feedback. After we heard what players had to say about the old system we thought long and hard about making a system that fits the community spirit and matches the amazing and social players we have. Tomorrow we are excited to unveil this new system to you in the dev app and once again listen to all the amazing feedback you have for us.
Testing will occur at 5 pm eastern, 9 pm GMT, June 28th on the Dev app.
A overview of everything the art team has been working on.
You’ve made it though another week. Time to celebrate with Guns of Icarus news, events and streams! As always you’ll find what the team has been working on below, but don’t forget at 3 pm eastern Matthew and Eric will be hanging out with Dan from the Rob and Dan show. He’s super excited to talk about the first two weeks of Hephaestus and what the action the third week is bound to have.
The Captain’s pack. One of the most often asked support questions we get.
Friday is upon us and with it the weekly progress report about the team. As always we invite you to join us at 3 pm eastern, 7 pm GMT, at twitch.tv/gunsoficarus where we will be talking features, bugs, fixes, and answering every question you guys bring our way.
Also remember the Hephaestus Challenge continues tomorrow at TheRobAndDan Show and Imagine‘s Steams. Currently Cake, the Gentlemen, Glowwater Thralls, Holy, Overwatch, Sacrilege, Storm Ryders, and SPQR are the only clans on the leaderboard for their performance last week.
See what the team has been working on after the jump.
After our Kickstarter campaign concluded and pre-orders went up on our site and Steam, people started to interact with the game. We started to coordinate testing with Kickstarter backers and people who pre-ordered, and in the beginning, everything was really rough. Mechanics were being refined, Ux/UI were still rudimentary, and we were just setting up our servers and peeking into that terrible rabbit hole that was networking. With people having their first experiences with the game, we had to think through just how we would shape and interact with our community. Continue reading “GoIO Post-Mortem – Part V: What Dumplings Taught us about Service”
Releasing a game that we’ve worked on for over 2 years should be a cause for joy and celebration. For us, it turned out to be the biggest crisis we’ve ever faced. Leading up to release, positive and supportive articles, previews, and videos by journalists and casters gave the game some momentum. Our Kickstarter backers and alpha players were also incredible at helping us test, fix issues, and get the word out. Later in beta (when people could pre-order) and when the game went live, it reached #2 in Indie and #7 overall on Steam. I took a screenshot and savored for a brief moment. Then disaster struck, literally. Survival was once again on the line. Continue reading “GoIO Post-Mortem – Part IV: Through the Storm”
Don’t forget to sign in before Monday to get your free costume.
Friday is here and it means we get to tell you about our week and hang out with you on Twitch! This week will also have a special guest, Dan from the Rob and Dan show, who is excited to talk about the Hephaestus tournament. The new premier Guns of Icarus event happening this weekend!
As always catch us at twitch.tv/gunsoficarus to talk to us live, ask questions, and press us for details of upcoming features.
We wanted to reach out and let everyone know what has been happening recently with some server and lag issues.
There are three issues and we wanted to let you know exactly what we’re experiencing and how that affects what you’re experiencing.
The first and most drastic was our server hosting situation. For the past two weekends Softlayer, the hosting company that we use, have experienced outbursts that have caused issues (such as game drops and disconnects, slow time, games not starting) that have ruined complete matches. These issues were one off issues and they did not persist. Once we discovered them, we’ve been taking them offline and getting our hosting company to fix them asap. While we do not directly control these servers, we deeply apologize and we are talking to the hosting company demanding better for you, our players.
The second is a scattering of bugs from hit markers not appearing to teleporting or not respawning while falling off the ship. These are bugs on our end and we are 100% focused on squashing these asap.
The third is a fps drop caused by flamethrowers. As flamethrowers became more in use after the last update, the fps drops caused by flamethrowers were more glaring. This is something we’ve seen crop up and know many players have experienced. We want to make sure you know this is something we are looking to optimize so our players do not suffer from avoidable fps drops.
We deeply apologize that many players’ first experiences of Guns of Icarus had to be marred by these issues and apologize to our vets who wanted a simple and fun weekend of dirigible demolition.
As always we will do our best to give you the best game experience possible and if we fail that we will be as open and honest about the reason why. Also, we want to do something about the trouble we’ve caused. So for every player who signs into Guns of Icarus before next Monday will receive a free Revolutionary costume, both male and female. If you already bought the revolutionary costume, please send an email to GreyT@musegames.com and request any other item we sell in the store.
With the publisher’s insistence that we worked in secrecy and that they would eventually be in charge of player interaction, when we left the publisher, no one knew about what we were doing. We had 15 facebook followers who were basically us, family, and friends. The problem of how to get the word out was obvious, but more importantly, we had no way of getting enough people to help us test and give feedback. With a set of mechanics and a demand for teamwork that hadn’t quite been tried before, we wanted people to help us test as early in our development as possible. With the struggle to get the word out we turned to Kickstarter. Continue reading “GoIO Post-Mortem – Part III: Lessons from Two Kickstarters”
