We are launching Steambirds Alliance out of beta today (August 22). After almost six years of development, it has become a full-fledged MMO with lots of polished content, unique bosses, and a kind ofheavily-cooperative gameplay that is rare in todays world. We couldnt be prouder to see it finally, officially released! OK, so thats what Steambirds is. But this post is about why we made Steambirds. Specifically, why this game? Spry Fox has been making games for a decade. Heck, Daniel has been designing games for over 25 years. We could have chosen to make any number of games, including many that would have been significantly less effort. So why?

To encourage friendships

Steambirds was born from a very basic belief: Games can bring people together. An online game like an MMO is more than just a brief consumed experience like a book or a movie. Its a shared space where like-minded people can meet up, get to know each other, and ultimately form meaningful friendships. The truth of the matter is that in this modern world, there are a lot of people who could use a friend. Or even if they have enough friends, they could use a place to spend more time with them. Theres a ton of research demonstrating that lonely people often suffer from poor health, depression, and/or anxiety. Friendship is the antidote. So it occurred to us: what if we made a game that was all about connecting with and cooperating with others? A game with only two teams, and all the players are together on the same side. Many years ago, we had the opportunity to explore that very idea when we co-developed Realm of the Mad God. Our experience making RotMG only strengthened our interest in cooperative games. But then we were forced to walk away from RotMG, well before wed fully explored all our ideas. And we werent prepared to give up just yet. Thus came Steambirds Alliance.

Design challenges

Making SBA a great game where everyone can enjoy time with friends is easier said than done. Online games can easily become toxic places dominated by trolls and cheaters if you dont make enough effort to prevent that. So weve spent a lot of time building pro-social mechanics and tech into the very foundation of Steambirds. Things like:

• Jump in and play: Theres no minimum amount of time you need to play Steambirds per session. You wont ruin it for anyone else if you pop in and out in 15 minutes. We want Steambirds to be like a club room (or the bar Cheers, if you remember that) where its easy to hang out for 5 minutes or for an entire evening.
• Shared XP and Loot: No kill or loot-stealing. No dividing up limited XP everyone gets 100% of the pie. We dont want this game to make you angry at others.
• Ad Hoc grouping: Teleport instantly to other players. Theres no real waiting and arbitrary gating.
• Better together game balancing: You almost always benefit from playing with another player. Even if they are playing selfishly, theres a decent chance that they will end up helping you accidentally. And eventually, theres also a decent chance that they will realize theyll be more successful if they stop playing selfishly!
• Trade: You can trade most of the things you can find in the game. You can even trade gold, the games hard currency. Trade has brought people together for thousands of years it shouldnt be a surprise that it can do so in games as well.

This is just the start. Weve got big plans to expand the social features of Steambirds in future releases. Well be experimenting with new ways to have fun with the people you care about. Helping people build and enjoy friendships is the most important point of the game from our perspective.

What does success look like for Spry Fox and SBA?

You often hear a common complaint on forums across the Internet that game developers are greedy; that they just want to make money. But money isnt what defines success for us on this project. For us, it goes back to the why of building Steambirds. Every single member of the Steambirds team could be earning a lot more money doing something other than making games. You dont become an indie game developer because you love money (unless you really dont understand probability!) You become an indie game developer because you love games, and hopefully the people who play them too. Weve funded Steambirds out of our own pockets. Theres no evil publisher. Theres no venture capitalist demanding a return on their investment. Its just us and our life savings. We could have taken our earnings from our previous games and put them in the stock market and retired a little earlier. Instead, we took that money and we made you this game. Because we want you to have a fun place to be with your friends. We want to reduce the loneliness in the world a little bit if we can. For Spry Fox, success to us means achieving three big goals:

• Earning enough to pay for hosting and ongoing development. We want SBA to keep running for a long time. In-game purchases go towards making SBA self-sustaining. There is very little chance that it will make us rich, but we hope that it will at least pay our bills, take care of our teammates, and let us keep this game alive for you.
• Entertaining our players for years to come. We want SBA to be a joyful place for you to hang out! You probably have a lot going on in your life. SBA should be a place where you can take a break, have a laugh and feel welcome. And maybe blow up a giant cat mecha while youre at it.
• Helping players build and enjoy friendships. This also means well try to have low tolerance for toxicity.
  • Please help us with this. If you see someone being toxic, ask them politely to cut it out. If they wont, you can report them. Spry Fox will do everything we can, but were just a handful of people and we can only do so much.
  • In general, try to be the best and kindest person you can be. Everyone has a bad day (or week, or month) sometimes and they could use our understanding and support too.
  • TLDR: if we want this community to stay awesome, we have to work together to do it. Everyone plays their part!

A long journey

Weve been building towards a game like SBA our entire careers. From the very first day we started Spry Fox, weve tried to live up to our motto of Making Happiness. And part of that is making a fun game. So weve spent a bunch of years learning to make polished, fun games. Games that at this point have been played by tens of millions of people. But that isnt enough. We also want to make the world a better place. Not just provide a few minutes of hedonistic pleasure, but an actual, positive change in the world. We learned how to build MMOs. We started with RotMG, and Steambirds is built off a similar design philosophy. But building MMOs, especially real-time bullet hell MMOs, is very hard. Probably the hardest type of game development by an order of magnitude. The sort of thing that big companies like EA or Bungie still struggle to pull off with teams and budgets massively larger than ours. MMO development can kill a company. It took us much longer than we thought it would, but we persevered. We dont always get everything right, but we care enough to at least try as hard as we can. And we are going to keep trying, and keep improving, for as long as the world allows us to. We can imagine no better way to spend our time on this planet than growing a positive, low toxicity community with all of you. Because you matter to us more than you can possibly know. So here we are. Steambirds is on the verge of launch. Lets see what the future brings! With all our love, Spry Fox

[ 2019-08-22 12:27:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

The moment has arrived! In the next couple hours, we will be shipping our first major update of the open beta. You already know about some but not all of it we wanted to surprise you!

Meowza Herself

Lets start with what you already know: the Meowza 2 (M2) encounter. As previously announced, when Meowzas infamous mech is defeated, there is a large (but not 100%) chance that Rebel spies will successfully lock onto Meowzas signal in her inner sanctum. If this happens, a special Rebel carrier will appear which leads to Meowza herself! (Note: it is not currently possible to proactively increase the chances of the special carrier appearing, but in a future update it will be possible to actually help the Rebel spies lock onto Meowzas signal. Wed love to hear your ideas/suggestions for how this could work, please share your thoughts in our Discord!) Sarge will not allow pilots onto the special carrier unless they have sufficiently upgraded their planes or have reached a pilot rank of 90. This is to prevent over-eager Rebel recruits from throwing away their valuable aircraft in a completely futile (if courageous) assault against M2 in her ultimate place of power. Inside the M2 encounter, you will first be confronted by upgraded versions of the Three Brothers. Some of their individual attacks have been upgraded to be more deadly, and they also have new joint attacks that they inflict at key moments in the battle. Those who survive this battle will need to fight their way through a hallway filled with elite unites before boarding a final carrier, which takes you to Meowzas secret temple. Youre not fighting a remote-controlled mech at this point. Youre fighting Meowza herself, wholl be wielding ancient technologies against you that are so powerful, they might as well be magic. I could tell you more, but you might as well just watch the encounter play out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4gWDXcqDxs Meowza currently drops one new Special Legendary weapon (at the usual very low rate) and has a guaranteed T10 drop. There is a small but significant chance that the T10 drop will be a modified T10 armor, called M2 Armor, that is stronger than normal and/or has special stat buffs.

Dungeon Mods

This parts the surprise! In addition to M2, weve also added what were calling dungeon mods to this update. These mods are being applied to all of the hardest (T10) dungeons in the game (except The Dig, which will also be getting mods of a slightly more complex variety in the future.) Mods can be normal, difficult and lethal. 60% of the time when a dungeon spawns, it will spawn as a normal dungeon, which has mods which are intended to make you play a bit differently than you normally do, not necessarily to make the dungeon more difficult. For example, the normal In Your Face mod, which significantly reduces the cost of your maneuver but also makes you take a bit more damage from enemy bullets. 30% of the time that a dungeon spawns, it will be a difficult dungeon. Difficult mods definitely make a dungeon harder, but also reward you with double the upgrade drops as well as **3x** the drop chance for all other major rewards from the boss. For example, the rare Nearsighted mod significantly zooms in the camera, making the dungeon feel claustrophobic, while the Rush Hour mod increases your superspeed by +50% while making you take +30% more damage from enemy bullets.
10% of the time that a dungeon spawns, it will be a lethal dungeon. Lethal mods make a dungeon extremely dangerous; unprepared players should probably bail on them immediately. Those who brave the dungeon are rewarded with double the upgrades and a **7x** drop chance for all other major rewards. For example, the lethal Dead to the World mod completely disables your Steam so you cant use maneuvers or abilities while also increasing the damage you take by +20%. At the current time it is not possible to intentionally spawn a lethal dungeon, but in the future we intend to make crafting lethal dungeon keys a possibility. Other Changes There are quite a few other changes in this build as well, some of them quite significant:

• Menu buttons have been shrunk a bit so that you dont have to needlessly scroll a lot.
• Teleporting to a player who subsequently enters a portal will leave you at the spot right outside the portal instead of nullifying the teleport or putting you inside a dungeon without warning.
• All new Meowza battle music!
• Pilot Skills UI can now be filtered by aircraft class.
• Grand Lion is no longer susceptible to water damage and no longer drops T9s but its Stiffener drop rate has been increased to compensate
• Machine Gun skill 4B (aka Social Agility) has been changed to: +20% turn rate, +5% superspeed, and +5% camera view
• Hog skill 1B (aka Stoic) has been renamed to Fast Exit and changed to: On maneuver: +30% superspeed for 3s duration
• Sword skill 3B now uses postAdd instead of Add math.
• The max distance you can be from a quest target or a boss when it dies in order to qualify for quest completion and/or XP has been increased by 50%. This should eliminate the complaints weve been getting about not getting credit when you should.
• Reduced the delay on teleporting to the Rebel City from 3s to just 1s. (The delay for player-to-player teleport remains 3s.) The old 3s delay didnt seem to impact veteran players, it just hurt new players. Not much point in that. Also, a 1s delay will make M2 a little less terrifying.
• The Re-ed dungeon miniboss no longer shoots misleadingly tiny, deadly projectiles.

And of course, we did a lot of work on the servers and our backend tools, as usual. That never stops. Last Word We hope you enjoy this update! We look forward to your feedback on it and will plan to address any bugs or balance issues that may have escaped our attention in testing over the next couple weeks. Aside from that, well be focused mainly on improving server performance and stability for the next several weeks, plus any balance changes that are needed to the game overall, as we prepare to officially launch SBA on Steam in the very near future.

[ 2019-08-01 22:01:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

Thank you to everyone who participated in our first open beta weekend! As planned, the servers have now been put into maintenance mode and the game is no longer playable. We'll be using this quiet time to improve the game and look forward to welcoming you all back on Friday at 10am Pacific Time, when the servers will once again be reopened to everyone (and will remain open until the end of the weekend, at very least.) At some point in the future, perhaps as soon as a week from now, we will let people play 24/7, but we are not ready to do that quite yet and can't make any firm promises as to when that will occur. But it will happen soon! We encourage everyone who played this weekend to join our Discord server and give us feedback on your experience! (We also tend to make special announcements and run community polls in Discord, and it's a great place to discuss and learn strategies for playing more effectively, so there are lots of good reasons to pop on by.)

[ 2019-05-27 17:49:34 CET ] [ Original post ]