Beta 4 Details

We apologize for the lag.  We’re testing new servers and there are  lot more players this weekend than ever.  A lot problems seen are most likely due to lag issues (guns not reloading, not respawning, etc) — 6/23/1:01am EST

Alright people, you know the drill!  Servers open at 12pm EST on June 22nd.  They’ll go back down at 11:50pm EST on June 24th.  Make sure you cancel your dates, dinners, cruises and other social events to get some good ol’ airship time in 😀

Report your bugs to GetSatisfaction.  A few notes on that though.

More after the jump…

Bug Reporting
We’re really thankful for everyone putting in the time and energy posting bugs and making good reports.  Seriously, your input is what is making this game chug along.  Without your help, we’d be rife with bugs and issues that would take us a much longer time in finding.  So again, thank you.

One thing to make things easier for us is on GetSatisfaction is to try to search for similar bug reports and upvote those if they’re the same.  This way we can more easily see what the more prominent issues are by number of votes.  Similarly, please try and separate bug reports into individual posts.  We’ve gotten some posts with 4-5 bugs in it, which is totally fine since we get all the reports but again… it’s just for identifying the most prominent issues.  That would help us a lot.

For super serious bugs, we might ask you for Unity 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.

Installation

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
6. Don’t forget to set your Avatar name is Avatar Customization otherwise you’ll have gibberish when you chat

What’s New?
We have a load of new content and tweaks for you all. Those of you who were in Beta 1 or 2 will see huge changes. Don’t be alarmed, we’re constantly making tweaks and sometimes pretty substantial changes. Here’s a quick run through of what you can expect (from the perspective since beta 3).

• New Maps—Anglean Raiders (domination), Water Hazard (team deathmatch), Scrap on the Dunes (king of the hill).  So that’s a total of 5 maps on top of Battle on the Dunes (team DM) and King of Flayed Hills (domination)
• Skill customization UI—read the hover descriptions to see what they do!
• Basic character customization works now (hair!)
• Further weapon balancing—read the hover descriptions to see what they do!
• Better character animation (although your own animations are janky, don’t look at your own shadow, it’s bad luck)
• Map Screen (press M, very useful for maps with control points)
• Performance optimization—maps load FAST now
• You can name your ship
• Awesome matchmaking lobby (jumping from slot to slot, friend invites)

How to Play
We don’t have any kind of tutorial or level-design to support teaching you how to play the game.  The reason is because we’re solely testing out core functionality.  Yes, it has caused us some problems (how can you test something well if players don’t know what they’re doing?) but it’s always balancing a million spinning plates.  Here is a manual in case you need a refresher for now.  Tutorials coming soon.  We just had a meeting on it 😛  \

https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1Z5zkxRD1NwudycXQxxJ4V_W8CLm7DsUb0jb-3YrXNuQ

Investigating Repair Game
One very important thing we’re going to try and iron out this beta is regarding our repair game.  It’s the most non-standard mechanic in our game and the hardest to communicate without chunks of texts.  We want to find something that satisfies our design goals as well as making it intuitive for players.  Right now, the feedback isn’t clear enough to represent the 2-stage repair system.  Nothing is there to bring you back to a component to reactivate it.

We’ll be doing more research and more targeted surveys to see what everyone things about the whole experience.  Here are our initial design goals for the engineer class:

• Create a time-management like experience
• Have engineers run around the ship, like a doctor making their rounds on a hospital floor
• Have moments where rounds are interrupted by an emergency like a doctor getting called to the ER
• Ensure that pre, post, and in-battle times occupy the engineer’s time
• Shy away from stand-there-and-whack-a-thing model of repair to ensure action and movement is always happening

Obviously, some of these design goals still haven’t been met.  There are a few cursory systems that have yet to be implemented.  We’ve been talking about a way to fix some things though.  Here is a proposal: reverse grenade heals.

What the hell does this mean?  Well, grenades usually wait for some seconds and then explode.  Reverse that and you get explode and then wait for some seconds… but that doesn’t make sense until you add healing in.  We have a complete heal on the first hit, which gives the player immediate feedback and is similar to traditional repair models in other games, but the wait for some seconds prevents the component from being healed until the end of those seconds.  This will get the engineer to run to something else and repair, come back later when the cooldown finishes.

Basically, when you repair something it gets really hot (steam or whatever) and is too hot to touch until it cools down.  Biggest issue is that none of the repair game has a real life analogue.  People understood Diner Dash because everyone knows how to make a hot dog.  Who knows anything about repairing airship hulls!?

So… just keep that in mind as you play the repair game.  Think about UI, think about the feeling you have when things explode.  Are you standing there waiting for the gear to fill up?  Does that gear even make sense?  Why is it disengaging?  Why did it stop spinning?  Do I hate the repair game as it is?  We’ll be doing more research into this through surveys and game data.