Things that are good this time:

1. Bots have been fixed! They will no longer wander aimlessly, and are back to being a threat.

2. Turrets have been updated, and there are a lot more of them. You should find even simple bot games a lot more challenging.

Things that are bad this time steamfacepalm:

I had to do a little work under the hood today, so a full database wipe was necessary. This means the leader board, and personal stats are all back to zero. I try to minimize these types of things, but this is Early Access so there are going to be issues like this sometimes. It was much better that I wiped and started clean, than having to make weird database patches.

I'll post a pre-wipe scoreboard to the the Discord server.

Today's update focuses around a more fluent interaction with the Steam Lobby system, and Kaz Ball's own server-side implementation of teams. With this release, we should have removed several weird edge-cases that were discovered during the last game event.

1. Lots of updates to make joining, and maintaining Steam lobbies less error prone.
2. Added Vsync option in the video options to prevent your graphics cards from smoking.
3. Added a feedback form in the hangar to report bugs, feature requests, and enhancements.
4. A few other random things that are not particularly interesting to players.

Hello everyone!

There have been a lot of requests to set up some sort of gaming event in order to coordinate times when players will be online, and available to play in the PvP matchmaking queues!

This has been a high-priority for me, and I appreciate the patience being shown by the community over the past month since the first Early Access release.

I've been cooking up a few different ways to implement something like this, but completely forgot that Steam has support for this via the Steam Groups feature, so let's see if this will fulfill our needs.

I've created three events:

Friday, 19 July @ 20:00 each region: Kaz Ball Open - 1
Saturday, 20th @ 15:00 each region: Kaz Ball Open - 2
Saturday, 20th @ 20:00 each region: Kaz Ball Open - 3

Steam's event system uses your local time to determine whether or not the event has started, so this may be a little bit confusing. I'm open to some discussion surrounding how to best deal with our regional timezone differences, but for this event I'd like to define some time zones that are relevant to Kaz Ball's regional matchmaking system.

EU = UTC
NA = EST (UTC-5)
Asia = JST (UTC+9)
SA = UTC-3
AU = UTC+10

You'll likely need to adjust for your local time if you wish to compete in a specific regional slot. Feel free to participate in one or more regional slots if you wish.

I've also set up some new channels in Discord for each region so players can try and interact with each other a little better, or to gauge who is online, etc.

I look forward to seeing everyone!

Thanks for the reports! Here are some fixes for today:

Patch notes:
1. Don't fire afterburner when not moving, and a few other weird afterburner issues
2. Fix the leaderboard sorting mechanism
3. No longer add statistics for unfinished games
4. Allow players to opt-out of initial flight training
5. Center the mouse crosshair upon loading the game, so you don't start by spinning out if your mouse was off center before joining

It's been a long time coming, but I've finally taken the plunge. Enjoy Kaz Ball free during most of Early Access!

Some launch issues to note:

1. Obviously this isn't final state of the game, so please be kind :)

2. When matchmaking against bots, there has been an observed issue where the bots sometimes seem to wander around, or take too long to figure out what they are supposed to be doing. This is currently at the top of my list of stuff that needs to be fixed! The problem seems to stem from an update to to Unity, and I'm trying to track down a fix.

There are probably other items I should note, but I have too many butterflies in my stomach to conjure them.

Thanks for checking out Kaz Ball!

Join us on Discord!

It's been a while since I've posted an update on the Steam page, so I'd like to take a little time and reveal some new plans for the Early Access release.

I've decided to release Kaz Ball for FREE during the Early Access period. There are several reasons for this, which I'll outline below.

1. This will (hopefully) allow me to grow the player community rapidly. Part of the release delay has been due to my terrible marketing skills, and my inability to find a great PR firm within the confines of my budget. Since this is a multiplayer game, it's a good idea to grow a community around it early on, before trying to capitalize on it.

2. I also feel that paid Early Access has become way too common in recent times. Asking players to pay for an unfinished project has the potential to bring on even more negative reviews by players who feel cheated out of their hard-earned money. I feel like players will be a lot more understanding, and forgiving of an unfinished title that was received for free.

3. Honestly, I'm just tired of sitting on this game. I enjoy working on it, but all of this work is for nothing if people can't play it, even if I don't make any money off of it while still in development.

This means, however, that I need to rethink a lot of the back-end services that allow Kaz Ball to function. In the current state of those services, I'm not sure that they would be able to support a massive influx of new players. I want to make the release as smooth as possible, and that means leveraging some different techniques that will take a little time to set up.

This does not represent any sort of shift in my promises to deliver a game without micro-transactions, or anything of the sort. During the E.A. period, and beyond, there will still be absolutely no extra paid ships/skins/content/etc.

I'll add another update once I have migrated some of these back-end services, and will update everyone with an E.A. release date very soon.

Thanks to those who have continued to express their interest in this project, along with all of the emails, Steam discussions, and Discord chat.

This release includes the initial version of a brand new cruiser model integrated with the hangar. There's still some work to be done, but it's pretty cool to look at for sure!

There are also more placeholder sound effects that give you some feedback for when players get hit, their shields drop, and for when you score a hit against another player.

The leading target indicator has also been improved by taking into account your network lag. It should help you be more accurate when chasing down, or intercepting other players.


Discord
@KazBallGame

Greetings,

Most of the changes for this milestone have previously been pushed to Steam, however the matchmaking system has had some rework due to the implementation of a party system.

Players can now create parties, and join matchmaking with a group of friends for both PvP and bot-play.

I need to do a little more work on the bot matchmaking systems so that players can jump into bot play even if the queue has not completely filled up. Perhaps some time limit, or something. This will also open the future ability to play private bot games with friends.

I would like to implement private PvP games so that we can have some sort of league system where two teams of five pre-arrange matches with each other.

Anyhow, since most of the updates for this milestone were pushed to Steam in with a previous announcement I'll keep this one brief.

I have a lot of back-end stuff that I need to start working on for the unique ship systems, so I'll get back to that!

Later!

For a detailed list of the current milestone, and other backlog items, please check out the public issue tracker

Discord
@KazBallGame

I just wanted to hop on here and give a progress update on the 0.1.1.7 milestone.

This milestone brings about several large mechanical changes to the game. Currently, I am about halfway completed with the milestone, and the features that have been completed have already been pushed to Steam.

A list of pushed changes are:

Holographic field of play

There is now a holographic astral-pitch that gives the game more of the sports-feel that I'm going for. Along with this addition, the boundary sphere has been modified to be less distracting now that we have an actual field of play.

Ships can take multiple hits before dropping the ball

Each ship now comes equipped with a shield that allows pilots to take more than a single hit before the ball's grappler fails. I'm still tinkering with the numbers, but now that the actual mechanic has been implemented, these are simply configuration values.

Onboarding, and tutorial updates

This was probably the first part of this milestone to go live, but there have been some changes to force players into going through the basic flight test training so that the very basics of the game are learned. There is a bit more to do here, but I'll knock those out in another milestone.

Battlecruiser durability, and new game objective

As we crept in battlecruisers last milestone, it was now time to give them a function. You must now disable the opponent's battlecruiser shields. You can do this by either shooting the ball into the goal for a large amount of shield damage, or by taking pot-shots at the carrier. There's plenty more work to do on the battlecarriers, but it was just really important to make sure the basics were covered so that I can iterate on them. I should probably update the flight test courses to include battlecruiser mechanics, too.

I have plenty of work left for this milestone, but I'm working as fast as I can to get it all knocked out!

For a detailed list of the current milestone, and other backlog items, please check out the public issue tracker

Discord
@KazBallGame

The initial implementation of the battle ships has been deployed to the playtest server! Please tell me what you think. Keep in mind that this is the initial release, and there're a lot of numbers to change around, and refinement necessary.

There are some pretty big changes coming in the next couple of releases to include different ship statuses with unique weapons for each, damage to players ship causing the player to eject, and fly back to the carrier to get a new vessel.

Also a new mechanic will soon be introduced where the goal of the game isn't to simply score 10 points, but each goal scored will actually cause damage to the opponent's battle ship. Player ships will also be able to damage the battleship, and depending on which type of ship you're flying, you may have some tricks up your sleeve.

More information will be forthcoming in the next few days and things get fleshed out.

Join us on Discord!

This release mostly consists of a new leader board system. It was a big enough feature to require its own milestone.

On the early Access front, I've decided to push the release date back a few weeks. This game is severely under-marketed, and I feel like it will be a quick death in the reviews if there's no one online to play the game. I'm currently speaking with a few PR / Marketing companies that also agree that it's a good idea to just push everything back until they have a chance to build a community around this game.

I'm really excited to get some professional advice on the marketing matter, and look forward to seeing what they can do for the community.

This also gives me a chance to keep plugging away and add more features to the game to make the E.A. release even better.

I'm currently working on the battle cruiser implementation, and after I finish re-working the bots to navigate around obstacles, I'll be pushing that out, too.

Give it a couple days :)

As always, you can drop by Discord if you want to hang out!

This release focuses on more Early Access features and presentation. The core changes are:

• Added a simple tutorial as suggested in Discord.
  
• Add simple camera transition for when launching game from hangar. This prepares us for the next milestone when parties will be implemented.
  
• Option to disable locking of cursor to screen during gameplay
  
• Matchmaking queue VS bots.
  
• Update the game level so that there are more well-defined "soft-boundaries". This should help players stay oriented and know where they are at all times. The boundaries are marked with the team colours so you can also tell which territory you're in.
  
• Update the ball icon to be more representative of a ball. Added team goal indicator so you don't lose track of where you need to run in order to play some defense.
  

Here we go! The game is finally going to become publicly available on the 4th of May.

It's been a long road, and there's definitely more work to be done, but I'm certainly proud to be able to release the game in this early state.

Look forward to seeing you in the game!

Public issue tracker

Discord

The focus of this release is to bring the game closer to Early Access readiness. The changes include:

• Bypass Unity launcher and go straight to game. You can change graphical settings from inside the options menu now.
  
• Partial controller support (in-game only).
  
• Some UI bugs, and updates.
  
• Allow enabling / disabling afterburner camera shake.
  
• Global chat system in the hangar.
  

Controller support for gameplay has been pushed to the public branch. There is still some work to do for making the UI controller friendly, but the "Controls" section in the options menu now sports new mapping options for controllers.

I've got some more work to do for adding the ability to set your default button icons in the menues, but I think I'm off to a good start!

I'm still offering pre-Early Access keys -- you can claim yours at http://keys.kazball.net.

Don't forget to visit us in Discord!

Controller support for gameplay has been pushed to the public branch. There is still some work to do for making the UI controller friendly, but the "Controls" section in the options menu now sports new mapping options for controllers.

I've got some more work to do for adding the ability to set your default button icons in the menues, but I think I'm off to a good start!

I'm still offering pre-Early Access keys -- you can claim yours at http://keys.kazball.net.

Don't forget to visit us in Discord!

In order to seed the game with players before going into a public Early Access, I'm offering 1,000 keys on a first-come-first-serve basis.

You can claim your key by simply going to http://keys.kazball.net, and signing in with Steam.

That's it! See you in the game :)

Don't forget to visit us in Discord!

In order to seed the game with players before going into a public Early Access, I'm offering 1,000 keys on a first-come-first-serve basis.

You can claim your key by simply going to http://keys.kazball.net, and signing in with Steam.

That's it! See you in the game :)

Don't forget to visit us in Discord!

This release focuses on some quality of life UI changes in preparation for Early Access release.

You can visit our public issue tracker to see what's in the works.

You can also visit our Discord channel and request a key to enter the private testing circle :)

This release focuses on some quality of life UI changes in preparation for Early Access release.

You can visit our public issue tracker to see what's in the works.

You can also visit our Discord channel and request a key to enter the private testing circle :)

Hello!

This release bring us a little closer to Early Early access with a full persistent statistics tracking system.

There's still a little bit more that needs to be done before we can should go live with Early Access, and we're hard at work to complete them!

You can visit our public issue tracker to see what's in the works.

You can also visit our Discord channel and request a key to enter the private testing circle :)

This release features:

* Hangar music, game music playlist.
* User interface now scales properly with higher resolution displays (thanks Mario_Tobias for helping test @ 4k).
* Regional matchmaking with low latency dedicated servers.

Since we currently have a low volume of players testing the game, the static playtest server will remain online for quick testing sessions, or drop-in gameplay.

The other night we performed some pretty successful playtesting. We had guys from Australia, United States, and South Korea all playing on a U.S. server. No one was even able to tell there was any latency, and the game felt buttery smooth. It was a really vindicating moment in Kaz Ball history, and I look forward to a lot more fun coming up.

While some of the features below have been in the develop branch for a while, I'd like to go ahead and list some of the new updates for the 0.1.1.0 release that was merged into master, and is currently available for playing on Steam:

#138 - Bug - Ball indicator not tracking world position of gameobjects
#129 - Enhancement - Add support for multiple thrusters
#128 - Enhancement - Update and verify working on newest Unity version
#115 - Enhancement - Replace score screen with Noesis and remove username select from load screen
#127 - Feature - Basic ship switcher frontend
#137 - Enhancement - mask latency when grabbing, and shooting the ball
#136 - Enhancement - Better netcode
#134 - Feature - Steamworks integration
#133 - Feature - Explosion with getting hit by projectile
#132 - Feature - Camera shake when afterburning
#120 - Game executable icons

Feel free to drop by our Discord Channel to snag yourself a key for playtesting, or just hang out!

Kaz Ball has come a long way in the five years since it was conceived. We still have a lot more to get done. The game has been through several iterations over the years, and I feel like we definitely have something worth sharing.

While we are still in "Coming Soon" status, we are surely handing out playtest keys. So please, bring your friends and visit us in our Discord to snag yourself a copy.