We’ve changed our schedule a little bit to facilitate some more testing, which is great for everyone, so that means we have another closed beta weekend coming up! Same details, servers are officially up and supported on Friday 7/20/12 at 12pm EST will be down on Sunday 7/22/12 at 11:59pm EST.
More details about what changes and additions you can expect after the jump!
Getting Buff (and jacked)
The new repair was a big success so we’re continuing to build on that one bit at a time. We already knew that there’s not much for the engineer to do on a fully serviced airship (full HP and the like) so we’re now testing a buff system. It works like rebuild in that you’ll need to stay at a component until the bar fills up, multiple people can still help you out so it goes faster. When a component is buffed, it will last for 30 seconds. You can rebuff at any time during the decay period (although this is not optimal). The current buffs are as follows and are applied with a single buff tool (courtesy of DynaBuff Industries!):
- Engine: +25% output
- Gun: +20% shell velocity (increases range)
- Balloon: +20% resistance to fire
- Hull: +25% armor
Right now we’re keeping the system rather simplistic and then iterating from there. We have ideas for multiple buff tools (perhaps breaking our deal with DynaBuff but competition is healthy, amirite?) and different buffs. Expect some more improvements in the next beta weekend but we hope this makes the Engineer game a little more well-rounded.
We also have a bet going on in the office (at least I do 😛 ) that we’re going to get one specific piece of feedback regarding how this thing is implemented right now. So, don’t forget to post your bugs!
Other New Stuff
- Flayed Hills will be looking a little different (betterer since the terrain got uprezzed) but also the playable region is getting pulled in. Way too big to be fun (that’s what she said).
- Galleon’s balloon repair point got moved down to the helm deck. Also added a second small gun on the middle deck to the left side.
- Constant tweaking for weapon damages as usual. Looking forward to hearing your comments regarding the carronades.
- Flare Gun has been removed since it has never worked correctly with cloud cover and visibility, we need to make some improvements on that whole system
- RAMMING is now not OP. Crashing into ships imparts force, which makes for a sort of pushing or bouncing effect. It’s pretty cool, you can push someone into a wall now lol. You won’t be able to use your balloon to ram. Well, you could but you’re just asking for trouble. Best way is to take out some armor with gatling or carronades and ram away if you have enough speed.
- HUGE UI improvements. It scales independently of resolution, lots of visual tweaks (looks shmexy). Most importantly, you can switch classes, teams, and slots through the match lobby! Click on the slots and icons and you’ll switch!!
Stuff we’re still working on
- Achievements system and its UI, tons of cool stuff happening here.
- Performance for flamethrowers is finally okay now… the next step is getting a day of time from Tim to further improve the visuals of the particles (he’s in high demand, popular guy, popular with the ladies)
- More ships
- Some guns (missile circus, we’ll leave you with that. Pirate clowns?)
- Revising clouds and visibility e.g. flares should actual disperse clouds
- More skills (related to clouds, Black Tar captain skill is an idea I have, use that and cause your engines to spew smoke and create some cover/dmg pursuing enemies when they fly into your smoke… we’ll see how that goes)
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
- Open up Steam
- Click on Game in the top menu
- Activate Product On Steam
- Copy and paste the key from the email
- Profit
- Don’t forget to set your Avatar name is Avatar Customization otherwise you’ll have gibberish when you chat
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.