Winter is finally here!  Aside from battling our landlord to plug up a hole in our room (and trying not to freeze to death in the meantime), we’re again working on number of new additions and fixes to Skirmish and making good progress with Co-op.  While we’re working hard on getting things done, let me give you a tour around the studio 🙂

A bunch of things we’re working on are features that will hopefully mitigate some heated situations in the game right now.  The two that I’d like to explain in-depth before we release onto Dev App and into Production is Ship Scramble and Slot Swapping.

Hit the jump for more details!

Ship Scramble

One of the biggest additions we’re working on this month is Ship Scramble.  The biggest piece of feedback from everyone is the stacked teams situations when well coordinated crews facing other crews that may not be as experienced.  In a lot of other games, this might not be problem.  However, in our case, our match lobbies persist.  This means when a match ends, you are put into the same match lobby with the people you just played against.  The stacked team is still there with its formation untouched.  This persistence, while making new matches easier, perpetuates teams staying static.

While we address this situation, we also have to acknowledge that a “stacked” team is also the coordinated one.  It’s the way you’re supposed to play the game!  By taking to each other and running a tight ship!  As players progress and improve at the game, the game encourages higher level play, teamwork, and skill, and is therefore more conducive to friends or clan members crewing together.  So whatever solution we come up with has to strike a balance between rewarding teamwork and allowing others a safe space to become that coordinated team.

Having considered a number of different possibilities over the last couple of months, we think we’ve found a good way to implement ship scramble that both allows coordinated crews to stay together, but also allow the opportunity for other crews to rise up to the challenge in a more balanced way.

Here’s how it works:

Once a match is created, the blue and red sides will now have their win totals tracked.  The win totals are cumulative from the creation of the match until its closing.  The win totals are not tied to player teams or crews; they are only tied to red and blue sides.  Once a side attains a consecutive winning streak of 5 for instance (Note: 5 is just an arbitrary number I’m using as example here, and the actual win streak number we’re still determining), ship crews will swap places across blue and red team.  Note that the entire ship’s crew including the captain remains together.  In this way, we keep a cohesive crew together but also offer an opportunity for new teamwork possibilities and dynamics.

We had considered crew scramble as well, but after thinking through it, it is not only possibly too drastic, punishing to a well-coordinated team, but also technically and logically nightmarish.

In public matches, the scramble is always going to be enabled.  However, in private matches, scramble can be enabled or disabled so clan, tournament, or featured matches would not be affected.  Scramble will have a visual indication letting all players in the match know that a scrambled had taken place.

Crew Slot and Ship Swapping

Closely related to the Ship Scramble are a pair of features that would make it a lot easier for individual players as well as crews on ships to move around in the different slots in a match lobby.  Finally!  For anyone who’s ever had to switch with another person in a full or nearly full match, you guys will love this 😀  You can now click on a player name and request a crew slot swap with them.  The request will show up in Notifications with the option to accept or decline.  If accepted, the 2 players will simply trade and swap slots.  Additionally, a captain can request ship swap with another captain in the same match.  If the other captain accepts, than the entire ships with all the crews will swap places.  Whether it’s for tournament, competitive, or scrimmage play, or teams willing to voluntarily swap places to balance the match, there are now much easier ways to make it happen.

Co-op Work Continues

This month, we’re also pushing forward with 2 major building blocks of Co-op – AI plane behavior and AI director – and making good progress.  Player progression in Co-Op is also being defined.  While we don’t have something tangible to show just yet, we are getting closer and closer!  At the same time, the artists are hard at work on a brand new trailer for Adventure.  If you’ve browsed through our facebook page recently, you’ve probably seen some style-frames that we posted, but here they are again:

Dev App

If you haven’t gotten a chance to get the Dev App yet, and would like to test and preview upcoming features and polishes, please join the Guns of Icarus Experimental Crew.  From there you can grab a key to the Dev App, be kept up to date of new features and times we’ll be in game to test.

We’re revising our build release schedule to allow more time to test.  Dev App has slowly become a great way for us to evaluate features and as we move forward, it will only become more important to us.

Other Good Stuff

There are quite a few things we’re working on this month.  One thing is pretty big server and database optimization, so not only would everyone experience better performance and stability, we’re also paving the way for deploying servers to more places around the world.  End match screen is going to look more spiffy.  Winning team will get a “team pose,” and stats, achievements, and unlocks will be presented on a screen as you return for the next match.

Spawning in match is getting some much needed love, now with ability to select from team spawns.  This feature is now available in Dev App, so please give it a whirl!  Speaking of testing, don’t forget that the range-finder is still in Dev App, for final testing. Map height boundaries got some fixes, so the altitude meter on helm should work better.

Clearer labeling are also being designed to address the issue of new players not knowing that Novice matches fix and reduce the selection of maps, ships, and builds to a subset.  For people who want more flexibility in Practice, we’re working on that as well.  Turning profanity filter off will soon be a reality as well.  Landing, stopping, and starting animations are getting polish passes, and you just might see players on other ships soon!

To bug hunters, we’re not letting you guys down.  We’ve squashed a few already, and as we get closer to release of the next update, we’ll be focusing even more on fixes.

If you haven’t gotten a chance to get the Dev App yet, and would like to test and preview upcoming features and polishes, please email keyvias@musegames.com for a key to the Dev App.

See you in the Skies!  Howard