And we’re running another closed beta this weekend! Surprise, surprise! What we’re doing this round is ramping up players and of course testing a few more things. We have to ready our servers for the load during the ominous open beta coming soon. So we’re doing a promotional drive right now to attract more players into this round of beta. You can check that out here:
Servers will be up 8/3/12 at 12pm EST to 8/5/12 11:50pm EST. Get your play on this weekend! Don’t forget to report bugs at http://bit.ly/MuseBugs
More after the jump…
New Stuff
We have a ton of new things for you from skills, UI, weapons (flamethrower, finally!), a ship, performance, light mapping, just tons and tons.
For skills, I’ll be making addendums throughout the week as we finalize exactly what’s going in. In the meantime, here is the long list of all the potential additions
Skills
Captain
- Black Tar—Causes your engines to spew black smoke (actual smoke clouds) to distract your enemies and perhaps for your own cover. The ability to change the level design comes at a great cost though! Damaging your engines! And maybe lag lol 😛
- Chute Vent—Greatly increase downward acceleration and top speed
- Bumpers—Reduce collision damage
- Moonshine—Gain a huge increase in forward speed and acceleration by using a crazy batch of moonshine in the engines but also causing said engines to blow out very quickly.
Engineer
- DynaBuff Kit (not exactly new but we’ll hopefully have a new art asset for it)—this time around we hope to get click and hold interactivity for this so you don’t have to click the whole time. Refer to our older post about what the buff kit does.
- Fire Tarp—Instantly put out a fire, medium cooldown time
- Fire extinguisher (change)—short cooldown time but lower extinguishing power than fire tarp
- Salvage Kit—instantly rebuild a downed component and add more health to it on its rebuild
Gunner
- Modified Trigger—Increased rate of fire while damaging your gun for 5 every shot
- Rifled Barrel—Increased range while damaging your gun for 15 every shot
- Heavy Duty Spring—Increased reload speed while damaging your gun for 35 with every reload
- Charged Rounds—Increased projectile speed while damaging your gun for 20 every shot
Flamethrower
A version of the flamethrower should be in this round. We can’t wait any longer to test this thing even though we still don’t have final particle assets for it. One thing I will say about using the flamethrower is that it will undoubtedly destroy all your frames. The particles have not been optimized or looked at by an artist. This is purely for gameplay testing. We know it won’t look quite right and will probably lag everything to death. Just wanted to warn you 😛 But hey, you can light people on fire properly now!
UI Bits, Gun Info
A lot more details have been added to the various UI bits especially when choosing your guns. We’re leveraging all the actual data that we futz with in the balancing process so you all now have an idea of what the numbers are like. I’m pretty sure I’m going to get even more gun complaints but… it is what it is. We know that a lot of you are stickler for numbers so we’re exposing that even at the expense of my sanity hahahaah…ha…haha….ha…. O_____O.
Achievements?
We’re also doing a lot of UI work to get our achievement and progression system in. We’re hoping that we can test some bits of it this round but we’ll keep you updated as we move along.
New Ship
The new ship, the Pyramidion, will be available for use this round. It’s quite fast but can’t really turn. It’s good at a particular type of strategy and with the right equipment you should do quite well. I don’t want to say too much about it but let you figure it out.
Collision Review
The last thing I want to mention is that there were some revisions to collision damage last round of testing. Colliding into something with your balloon is an extremely bad idea. Or if you get rammed in the balloon… well stay away next time 🙂 Hull and guns take a fair amount of damage but armor (that top bar at your hull repair point, the thing you can actually repair) is most resilient to collision damage. Also remember that collision damage is a function of ship speed and mass. The heavier you are, the faster you’re going, the more damage you’re going to take/deal. So keep those in mind when flying around!
More stuff to come
We’re always making improvements to the game, moving along at a very fast pace. Here are a list of things off the top of my head that will have our attention for next round of testing
- Competitive play support (custom games, spectator modes)
- More UI improvements (UX flow, more display of statistics, adding in final assets)
- Costume integration (we have 30)
- Hair integration (we have lots of those too)
- More character customization features (need to double check this)
- Click and hold skills (mainly for buffing and usage of the fire extinguisher)
- Always balancing
- Always tweaking performance
- Flamethrower optimizations (yeah, prepare to lose your frames)
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.