Name | Steambirds Alliance | ||
Developer | Spry Fox LLC | ||
Publisher | Spry Fox LLC | ||
Tags | |||
Release | 2019-08-22 | ||
Steam | |||
News | |||
Controls | Keyboard Mouse Full Controller Support | ||
Players online |  n/a  | ||
Steam Rating | Need more reviews to generate a review score | ||
Steam store | |||
Public Linux depots | Steambirds Alliance Linux Content [681.08 M] |
Game is not tagged as available on Linux on Steam.
Linux is not in the OS list.
We made Steambirds as a labour of love in hopes of bringing players together and building meaningful friendships between them. In some ways, we feel like we succeeded - we made an experience with significantly less toxicity and greater cooperation than many online games achieve. But in some ways we have to admit that we have failed, as the number of players returning to the game quickly dwindled post-launch despite our efforts. We tried to rejuvenate the game with two major updates (flocks together, and more together) and a number of smaller updates, but ultimately we werent able to achieve our goals. |
Todays update introduces a new endgame boss: the Urchin.
Bugfixes
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The team has been toiling away on a new major Steambirds Alliance update for the last few months. Weve taken the opportunity to take a step back and re-evaluate why we made this game, what were trying to do with it, and how well were achieving those goals. Weve written about this before - Steambirds is best when played with others. While weve tried to focus on this throughout development, our investigation revealed that a surprisingly small number of players were actually playing with others. Some of that can be attributed to lower-than-expected player numbers, but generally there were many ways that the game failed to bring players together. Sometimes, features inadvertently separated players. This goes against the entire reason we wanted to build Steambirds in the first place.
Other Changes This wouldnt be a major update without a list of other changes to the game. Community-suggested changes are indicated with
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This week were shipping our last update of 2019. While it may be last, its still packed with some awesome stuff. Were introducing a new class, the Vampire, a new combat sim mode, and a bunch of other changes!
More Changes Finally, theres also a whole bunch of other changes in this update:
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We're shipping our first really big post-launch update to SBA! It includes a healthy combo of new content, new features, plus solutions to major pain points that the community has informed us about in Discord.
Content-wise, right now, we have a few different scenarios baked into the Sim. In the future, we intend to add a bunch more, including, for example, a Pacifist mode where you have to survive as long as possible WITHOUT killing anything with your guns or secondary abilities. We look forward to adding this additional content in future updates not long from now. Nerfing Permadeath! This is another big one. As we discussed in detail over the past month, weve decided to seriously soften the permadeath aspects of this game. The reasons are pretty simple: a ton of users have told us they dont like the permadeath bits, and our analytics data show that people both new users and veterans alike tend to quit immediately after dying. This game was always supposed to be first and foremost about playing with your friends (and making new friends), but somewhere along the way we became too focused on making it really hard and punishing. Mea culpa. Were going back to focusing on what really matters now. So now, when you crash, you dont lose your plane. You lose some of your upgrades, and all your gear and cargo gets damaged, but your plane remains. The more times you crash, the more damaged your cargo gets. Eventually, it wont be worth using anymore. But you can repair it, and maybe even supercharge it if youve got the right materials, so nothing is truly lost anymore. How do you repair your equipment? You can do it in the Workshop. Itll require a bunch of materials, but most of all, itll require a new currency that you gain by recycling spare equipment that you dont need anymore. Weve called that new currency Scrap, because thats the perfect name for it, and weve renamed the old currency Iron. I know its a bit confusing hopefully everyone will get used to it soon! How exactly do you earn this new Scrap currency? Easy. Instead of simply dropping your trash items like youve always done, now youll use the exact same command to recycle them. You can also select items individually and recycle them at any time. The more valuable the item, the more Scrap you get by recycling it. The most valuable items (T10, Elem and SPEC) are expensive to repair. Not only do they require a lot of Scrap, they also require an equivalent item (i.e. use a T10 to repair a T10) and several Nanites, which are things you can craft by fusing 5 upgrades together. Excitingly, nanites can also be used to Supercharge items, which gives them semi-random bonuses that make them even more powerful than regular, pristine equipment! Since you dont die anymore, we had to change the way we give out pilot XP (which was previously awarded ONLY when you die.) Now you get 65% of your pilot XP in real time, while playing. Which means you can rank up at any time. We know youve all wanted something like that for a long time, so we were happy to have the excuse to do it. You get the remaining 35%, plus Iron rewards, when you voluntarily choose to retire a plane, which you can do from inside the Hangar. Weve tested this stuff carefully, but I will be the first person to admit that its a huge change, with a lot of complex implications, and I would not be surprised in the slightest if we need to do a bunch more fine-tuning of the economy in the weeks ahead. We have already decreased the droprates of certain items in anticipation to compensate for the fact that people wont be losing items when they die. We have also reduced the loot drop multipliers for dungeon mods to 1x/2x/4x. And lastly, weve tuned the repair and supercharging costs of items to help consume many of the resources in the game that might otherwise become inflationary. But I doubt well have perfectly guessed what every number should be, and thats OK; these numbers are easy to change! Please play for a while ideally at least a week or so, to get a good feeling for stuff and not be biased by short term RNG and let us know what you think needs tweaking. Well be listening carefully to you, as always. New Dungeon: Military Academy! Wait, why do those drones have beaks?? Before Meowza became the god-leader of the world, she was a promising student in the Cat military regime. Much of her training occured in the Apex Military Academy, an old and well-respected educational institution whose instructors had absolutely no idea what Meowza might turn into someday. One of the core training rituals at the academy was an unusual sport in which teams of students were expected to capture spawn points while fighting off guardian mechs that vaguely represented combat class archetypes (like the sniper and the tank). Teams that managed to capture enough points would eventually reach the the Control Unit, a particularly tough mech that tended to humiliate less-prepared students. Design-wise, the Military Academy functions a bit like HFSC. It is accessible to mid-level players, but should still represent a fun challenge (and opportunity!) for higher-level players thanks to some pretty stiff veteran mods. The Military Academy is also home to two of our newest SPEC items:
Foxy Allies! It turns out that the Cats havent subjugated every race other than the birds. At least one other race has resisted Meowzas yoke. I refer, of course, to the Foxes! (Come on, you knew it had to be them.) Yes, you can now select a Fox portrait for your pilot just dive into the Options Menu to bring up the portrait selector, and youll find 9 new portraits alongside the usual birbs. Youll notice that the Combat Sim building is staffed by a Fox as well. We look forward to doing more with the Foxes (lore-wise) in the months to come. And yet more stuff! Theres a bunch of other good stuff in this update that isnt covered above. And hey, weve got a new system for identifying and celebrating changes that were a direct result of community feedback any such change will be preceded by an SBA salute graphic: It means a lot to us that yall are willing to patiently explain what you think the game needs and give us time to address those concerns. You deserve multiple salutes for that.
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Hello fellow pilots! Now that the launch insanity has finally quieted down a little bit, we're getting back to our regular schedule of weekly updates. steamhappy Here's what this update has in store for you:
Engineer revamp Both the Engineer's turrets and skills have been significantly revamped:
Other changes
Engineering As you can imagine, the vast majority of our engineering time just went into making sure the servers were working OK. We look forward to doing more polish/feature engineering work (plus bugfixes of other types) in the coming weeks! By the way, in case you were wondering if its "simple" to create and operate an MMO like this one, I thought I'd share the engineering dashboard that we built from scratch in order to help us monitor and improve server health. While we were getting rate-limited by Amazon AWS last week and going nuts trying to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it, we ended up enhancing this dashboard a bunch to help with the troubleshooting process (which it did.) Check it out: This dashboard is just one of approximately half a dozen tools that we use to maintain this game's backend (others include our database administration system, our anti-cheat system, etc.) The backend to Steambirds has cost us, conservatively, at least several hundred thousand dollars in addition to a few years of our lives. So, yeah, it's not easy. The next few weeks will have similar updates to this one with nice new (not huge) polish / feature / balance improvements, and then at the end of September we'll do a major update. The contents of that update are still a secret but you can be sure it'll include some exciting, entirely new content! And then, a month after that update, we're hoping to be able to ship the guild system (Flocks) that we've been talking about for a few months now. Thank you again to all of you who played this week; ya'll are the best! steamhappy |
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:
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 |
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!
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. |
Hi folks! Sorry its been quiet on the blog; weve been focused mainly on communication via Discord, but will try to be better about communicating here as well in the future. That said, if you havent already joined our Discord community, you really should. We even have a nifty vanity URL now!
Other, unrelated changes: Content:
UI:
Other:
ART EXPERIMENT:
Last but not least, were finally starting to showcase our character art more! Check out this sweet new keyart that were using as the Discord banner. |
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Were back! Weve rolled out a big new update and opened up the servers again. There has been a lot of changes since our last update, definitely too numerous to list them all, but lets have a look at some of the highlights...
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Content
Polish and Bugfixes
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Content
Audio
Polish and Bugfixes
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Trade
Dynamic Difficulty Were also rolling out a more general-purpose dynamic difficulty scaling system. As with the previous system, the new system adjusts the effective health of enemies to compensate for more players. The adjustment is fairly gentle, so itll still always be better to have more players, but you (hopefully) wont just be able to steamroll the bosses with a very large group. The old system was an experiment, limited to just bosses, whereas the new system rolls this out to all enemies (with different parameters, depending on the enemy). Over the coming weeks well be tweaking these parameters, adjusting them to be a better experience all round. Let us know if you notice any enemies that seem unpleasantly or drastically stronger or weaker after the update. Storage Warehouse
Content
Polish and Bugfixes
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Pilot Rank and other info: All the way to the right is your pilot name, rank and info on how much more pilot XP you need to attain the next rank. Respecing: Right now respecing which skills are active is completely free. We may change that in the future, but this is the current plan, and we hope to stick with it unless we observe that it is negatively impacting the game in some way. Accessing the Pilot school in the Rebel City: If you have spare skill points to spend or you want to respec your pilot skills, theres a new building in the Rebel City that will bring up the pilot skill UI. State of the new system: A steampunk contraption just rolling out of the garage The Pilot School is incomplete and experimental, but we are sharing it early so that you can give it a try.
Future plans Our next big effort is balancing the current skills and fixing discovered issues as they come up. Well also be slowly adding new skills categories. Please dont get attached to any one specific skill since theyll likely change a bit as we have time to live with them and react to feedback. What wed love to hear from you:
Secure Trade We are also adding the first version of a secure trade system in this release. It also isnt complete, but heres what we are aiming for: 1. Fun negotiation between friends and strangers. Trade should be a small conversation, not just a transaction. 2. A secure, stable part of the game. The game should handle the security and every transaction should be reliable. The economy shouldnt explode due to bad economy design, real money trade (RMT) or duping. 3. Social gifting. You still should be able to help a friend. Money isnt everything. Our first pass on trading We listened to your feedback (you can read the previous discussion here: https://community.steambirds.com/forums/threads/261) The result is something that looks a lot like a traditional barter window. With a couple key adjustments:
How to use the trade system Initiating a trade:
Making offers
Accepting the offer
Those are the basics of trade. Give it a shot and tell us what you think. Content and Art
Polish and Bug Fixes
Music & Sound
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Content
Polish and Bugfixes
Audio
Other
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Storage Improvements
Polish and Bugfixes
Audio
Other
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Polish/Bug Fixes
Other
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Polish and Bugfixes
Other
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So we are trying out a new and hopefully simpler system. Now all planes share a single cargo container. When you switch planes, the cargo container is detached from the old plane and automatically bolted onto the new plane. Our feathered engineers assure us this is perfectly safe. Heres how this plays out in practice:
What happens to current players who have items spread across multiple planes? We really didn't want to wipe your collected items in the middle of this beta test. So instead, there's a one-time migration process that will occur in which items are incrementally filtered out of old plane cargo and into the new shared cargo. It is a little weird, and might have some odd edge cases that we havent identified, but we figured it was better than simply doing a wipe. Difficulty Scaling Experiment Another long-standing issue weve had in the game is that bosses become almost trivial if you have a very large group of players. When large group hits a boss, it previously would die so quickly that many players were not even able to qualify for loot. That feels bad. So in this update were also experimenting with some dynamic scaling, where a boss will become a little more difficult with more players. Our goal is that more players will always be better, but you should never be able to mindlessly steamroll a boss. Right now the system scales difficulty along a curve; if you have 10 players instead of just 1, the boss might have just 50% more health. Not 10x health, because we always want you to be happy that you have your friends around. The scaling is dynamic and will adjust automatically if players join or leave the boss fight. Were still playing with these numbers, and for now were testing this only on Meowza. Our suspicion is that difficulty scaling will be especially important near launch when the servers will be a lot busier. Let us know if you think this scaling works well, were eager to get some feedback! Art Theres a totally cool trailer happening behind the scenes, the bird rebels are looking their coolest, we cant wait to show it to you. Not so behind the scenes, the raceboss has new art and quest enemies are getting shined up as well! Content
Polish and Bugfixes
Other
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Zoom Changes Weve selectively zoomed out a bit during regular overworld interactions and a bit more during boss fights. You should now be able to see more around you than before. This is something that weve wanted to do for a while, but we were held back by performance concerns. But with all the recent performance optimization work that we did, it was now feasible to attempt it, so attempt it we have. We'd love to hear feedback on the change! Polish and Bugfixes
Other
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