Hey everyone, we are back!

Its been quite a while since you last heard from us. But now were back with some good news. Get comfortable, because the Screeps: Arena project is coming back to life! The past two years have been challenging for our team. Towards the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, a key member of our team became critically ill, was on a ventilator and went through a long rehabilitation period. When the war started, as a Russia-based development team at the time, we were starting to facechallenges faster than we could resolve them. Services we relied on for development and communication ceased cooperation with Russian entities, refusing our payments. CircleCI irretrievably deleted our build system. Zendesk blocked our account without warning, preventing us from exporting support data. Our hosting provider stopped accepting payments from our bank accounts. Finally, Steam stopped sending us payments. All this happened against the backdrop of our team members grappling with adapting to a new reality and significant changes in personal life. But now, thats behind us. We've relocated our business to Armenia, and some team members have moved out of Russia. Weve re-established our development and business processes and are ready to share exciting updates about Arena, upcoming major changes, and the games future release.

What's new in this update

Season change

The core gameplay of Screeps: Arena and its primary distinction from Screeps: World lies in its seasonal system. Accumulating rating and fame points, leaderboards, and matchmaking between new and experienced players only make sense within a structured and time-limited seasonal format, when arenas are replaced regularly. We lacked this replacement system before. The key innovation in this update is the implementation and refinement of the season-changing mechanics in Arena. Were pleased to announce that starting today, the game is officially in a season called Beta. The previous season is now called Alpha. Well see how the naming evolves in the future. We havent drastically altered arena mechanics but have adjusted them just enough to render old written code suboptimal, necessitating adaptation without requiring a complete rewrite. In the future, well introduce more unique arenas and rotate them every few seasons. Your feedback and suggestions are very welcome. The season change also means all ratings and leaderboards have been reset, and old keys are no longer valid. Each season will feature unique seasonal items: Keys, Key Fragments, and Key Upgrades. Read below about what to do with outdated items. Arenas from past seasons are available in read-only mode for viewing ratings, player profiles, and saved replays. Playing them is currently impossible, but were exploring ways to implement this.

UI animations

This took longer than expected, but after a lot of trial and error weve finally found our footing and successfully integrated the Rive library to the game client. Now we have a way to start creating dynamic, animated interfaces in the game UI that don't hog your CPU like SVG animations do. You can see this on the start screen already, and we plan to add more engaging animations to almost every other game screen in the future. Using this library also helps our designer work more independently and accelerates our design/development workflow.

Crafting

Weve significantly expanded the crafting system and plan to enhance it further. We aim for Screeps: Arena to be more than a programming competition and include meaningful game mechanics. These primarily revolve around crafting and earning Fame. This update introduces two new item types: glyphs and paints. Combining them allows you to craft badges that are shown on your creeps and profile.

Quality-of-life improvements

Now you can launch a series of multiple Fame games with one click. You won't be able to interrupt this series so you better make sure you are not going to lose your reward, but this can greatly save time when you gain your Fame points.
With six arenas available for simultaneous play, keeping track of ongoing games can be challengingespecially since some games can last up to 10 minutes. To improve this experience, weve added active game indicators at the top of the window. No matter which game screen youre on, youll see your ongoing games in any arena, track their status, and quickly navigate to the desired one.

Node.js update

We have updated the arena runtime Node.js version from 16 to 22 (and V8 engine from 9.0 to 12.4). This brings new JavaScript and WebAssembly language features to your scripts.

Contests

Weve improved the contests interface. We hope they become a convenient way to play Screeps: Arena with friends, colleagues, and organize special events.

Coming soon

Dust

We plan to introduce a new type of crafting soontransforming any item into a certain amount of Dust. Dust can then be used to craft random rewards similar to a level 1 Fame chest. This is a great way to dispose of obsolete season keys or unwanted glyphs and paints.

Fame Modifiers

The Fame system will be expanded with new items called Fame modifiers, obtainable from Fame rewards. One such item can be used per Fame session, providing a bonus during the session:

• Strike: Winning three consecutive games grants an additional +1 chest level.
• Boost: Winning adds +2 chest levels instead of +1.
• Safety: Losing only deducts one chest level instead of two.
• Super Safety: No chest levels are lost upon defeat.

As regular items, Fame modifiers can be traded, sold on the Steam Community Market, or converted into Dust.

Release Roadmap

We believe were closer than ever to the games release. Theres still work to be done to optimize both the game client and servers, as well as several features and mechanics wed like to implement before releasesuch as those already mentioned. Well also identify areas for improvement in the season-switching mechanism as the Season Beta develops from scratch. However, most of the work on the game is already complete, and were confidently targeting coming out of Early Access and release in 2025.

[ 2024-12-19 19:10:59 CET ] [ Original post ]