I’m a day late on this one but I kind of just crashed yesterday right after work. I’m thinking of flipping my sleep schedule around to accommodate that post-work fatigue I’m always getting. It would also help me get more writing done. I don’t know why, but I’m much, much more effective, energetic, and creative in the AM hours.
Another thing I want to address (for posterity) is the lack of daily posts. I’m not working from home anymore, at least not for money, so my schedule’s been condensed. My adjustment period has been pretty rough, too, but I’m at the tail end of it. All that to say I’ll be working my way back into my daily posting routine, probably starting next week. That’s assuming I can get my sleep schedule just the way I want it so I’m up from at least 10PM to 4 or 5PM. The more morning hours I can claw back for myself, the better things will be.
Anyway, time for some updates.
The Site
I’ve been poking around with the mobile view for PR, since that’s never looked good and I’m getting sick and tired of it. Testing isn’t easy since I have to use my actual phone and updates don’t propagate quite in real time, at least not consistently. Relying on Divi’s previews isn’t consistent either, so changes that look good from my PC (in mobile viewing mode) look hilariously bad on my phone and vice versa. I’ll figure this crap out, but I’m not even going to pretend this isn’t a frustrating process.
This is one of the big reasons I don’t actively draw traffic to the blog. An audience deserves your best and as far as presentation goes, I’m just not there yet. I’m not going to heap all the blame on Divi; I could probably fix most of this in a few sessions if I focused solely on that, but I haven’t.
That’s something I’m aiming to fix this month.
Space Engineers
For the time being I’m putting pretty much all of the Kaiser projects on hold, including the entire Admiral Hipper class, the Magdeburg, and anything else related to them. The goal is to wait for three specific releases for Space Engineers and then incorporate them. The first is Grid AI, from Keen, Space Engineer’s dev team, the second is Cheerkin’s general use Autopillock script (the newer one), and the third is Ribera’s SBY thruster mod. I need to see how each of these can be incorporated before I’ll be ready to release them.
I am considering some WIP releases just to get some traction on the workshop, but all three of these are releasing relatively soon, so it probably won’t be more than a couple of months before I’m fully back to work on the Kaiser faction ships. I doubt I’ll have another small grid ready for the workshop unless it’s the Cosmo Messer F2 or maybe the EQ Drone Messer, and the latter would really benefit from the Autopillock script and Grid AI anyway.
Writing
I’m breaking this into multiple sections and addressing the current writing projects in each one.
Lydia’s Golden Treasury
The purpose of this new Chapter 2 was to expound on Enya’s backstory before her regrets started cropping up in Chapter 3, but as the B plot, it wasn’t designed to completely carry the chapter on its own. I wanted a conflict to run alongside Enya’s past coming up and to prompt the use of the titular item, the Lyre of Binding. For that I initially had a medical emergency in mind, but I’ve been rethinking things.
Originally Lydia’s Golden Treasury was going to have a male lead. I changed it to a female lead to completely eliminate a small issue coming up that would get in the way of the story right around Chapter 4 or so. Making the lead female also let me have a little fun with the rest of the cast. That’s something I’ll explain someday, but for now I just want to say that I’d like to include that original male character even if it’s just for this one chapter, essentially as the driver of the A plot.
So the medical emergency plot I had in mind is getting shelved. Maybe I can use it somewhere else in the future, but the Lyre of Binding is now going to focus solely on these two characters.
Artorius
There are a couple of battles in the middle of the story I have to figure out technologically, given how the Aeon setting is with space battles. In a nutshell, it’s very similar to real life. In some circumstances, it’s actually stupidly easy to take out a large warship in one go. In others, it’s next to impossible.
Since Artorius is going to be one of if not the first Aeon stories to feature space battles, I desperately need to get these depictions right. That said, with the rest of the outline done, I just need to start cranking out the story scene by scene. It’s on the horizon.
Remnants of the Elders
There’s less development here on the story I’m trying to write, but like the rest of the things I’ve got ‘queued up’ I am going to be doing at least some work on RotE in December. I want to round out the year by putting down at least a few pages for all of my current writing projects, not just one or two. Everything I want to have released by the end of next year is getting some due attention here and now, and RotE is included in that.
Frame Ops and Riaz Royals
Frame Ops and Riaz Royals have a slight overlap in cast and chronology, but FO is more self contained, while RR affects the Aeon setting as a whole, so while I’m lumping them in together, RR is quickly becoming the higher priority. The first chapter, A Fond Farewell, is about 80% finished. Frame Ops is coming along a lot slower, but I think the further I get into RR, the easier writing FO will be.
We’ll see. At the end of the day, Riaz Royals is about some very important clones making their way in the Jovian Sphere, and Frame Ops is about a team of professional e-sports players rising to prominence.
Fleeing Victory
I’m not adding any new chapters yet. I’m actually going through everything that’s been written so far and doing so major editing to try to clean up the story, trim down some of the more verbose areas, and update the narrative style so it’s more consistent throughout. There might be a few changes thrown in to make the story ‘better’ but in general I’m just cleaning things up and tying things together more closely.
Closing
That’s everything for now. I doubt anything substantial is getting finished this month, but I’ll keep chipping away. ‘Write and rewrite … until it is done.’ If I can reclaim my mornings, things will go a lot more quickly, so that’s priority #2, after survival.
Hello everyone, this is Vermillion Digital team, once again having our postmortem or, in our words, the Afterwords of major updates.
VD’s no happier with the multiplayer release than the rest of us, but I personally don’t think it’s that big of a deal. This was their first attempt and it actually works. PvP’s going to be an absolute nightmare to get right, but at least the basic concept works.
I got around to trying out the multiplayer coop the other day and though the boss had way too much health (that and we didn’t have enough players for a 4vE) it was still alright. This is just the beginning, so I expected bugs and iffy balance, and I got bugs and iffy balance. My biggest complaint is that the M.A.S.S. units themselves are easy to miss at a distance. Sometimes it felt like I was fighting alone and I’d really have to lean back and take in the whole arena to find my teammates. They should be marked on the HUD for convenience.
Anyway, I think it’s better if I just quote VD from here. All of this is in the linked article.
Now! Let’s us use this time to explain how and why it took… almost 10 months to work on 0.9.0. We might have mentioned this before but as 0.9.0 was the update we worked on Multiplayer; the development process was us basically rewriting 50% of the whole game. Before this time, M.A.S.S. Builder was an “offline only game” where every part, every piece of information was calculated and stored within a player’s own PC. They could take that save anywhere, played it offline, and modify things however they like. We still wanted players to be able to do that, but now there’s a catch where multiplayers must not be affected by anyone’s modification of the game.
This made us scoured through every line of code in the game to see if it can be used maliciously. Doing so, we’ve discovered a lot of work that can be optimized, works that our past inexperienced selves have found to be worthy before looks to be something that hinders optimization nowadays, and we just cannot allow ourselves to overlook them. Thus began the optimization. The first few months after we started working on 0.9.0 are all about rewriting codes, optimizing them, merging some parts together, and planning we would structure multiplayer codes alongside every part of the game we did in the past.
But hey! Doing so allowed us to perform a much-needed upgrade to the game. Optimizations we never thought we could do, new systems in place such as the boosting curve, new features and functions that were created to further support tech nodes creation, and much more to come (just like that combo attack curve that faced a last-minute cut, we’ll finish it in the near future we promise).
Now, towards the main feature of 0.9.0 itself, multiplayer. We first wanted to just release a non-playable showroom with no endpoint in playing just for players to show off their units. However, with the rewriting of codes taking that long and speculated to take many more months, we discussed among ourselves if it would be worth the wait to just have a mode like that, and decided it was not. We assigned one of our six to start working on more aspects towards multiplayer immediately, and the best solution was to create a co-op mission that we might use to fully test out our features.
Well, the results are as expected, a buggy mess that took months to finish, an unoptimized mode of play, but at least, a playable multiplayer in the most basic sense. The problems stemmed from using P2P networking, but as we deemed this is the best method for us as an indie developer, it required much more countermeasures in place to make it a good system. Currently, players are mostly being kicked out of a session left and right, mostly because we did not have any locks or thresholds on pings, thus players from regions across the world can still connect to each other with extremely high ping, resulting in the network being faulty enough to disconnect players from each other, kicking people into the lobby itself. Looking at every bug, every complaint, every suggestion, and every discussion made by you, we know this is a long road to walk towards and that it cannot be done within a few weeks to fix for sure, so we’ll leave 0.9.1. in the state it is. We’re sorry how our anticipated update turned out to be, but we’ll strive to make it better by the next major update. There will be systems to better match players into each other, there’ll be more features in the multiplayer system, there will be many things coming to our game.
On one final note, we know that game balance is something that’s controversial in a game like this where we wanted to have a fun game where anyone could just take any build to play in any mission. We still stand by that mission of ours and will be turning easy and normal mode difficulty into some sort of a story mode where it’s almost impossible to fail. We’ll keep hard and very hard where it’s at that players making a mistake can cost a life immediately. Basically, easy and normal will be easier, hard and very hard must achieve what they set out to be, an aspiring content where one can aim for. Everyone must be able to have fun in some kind of way. That’s what our game will be.
Next week, we’ll talk about what’s coming next in 0.10.0. Please have fun with what 0.9.1 can provide for now and as always, feel free to send in your suggestions and discuss the game with us through the official discord channel.
Well! We’ve started the year off with version 0.8.0 and we’ve finally done working on version 0.9.0 at the end of the year and now, we’re ready to release the long-awaited update!
Oh man, I just flat out assumed this would be coming on a Saturday, not a Monday. Overall it’s been a good day, though. I’ll probably have to make another post about that tomorrow, though.
I already posted the patch notes for 0.9.0 on Saturday so for the rest of the week I’m going to be doing some work on M.A.S.S. Builder every day until I finish the Bronze Bullet (a mech from my Frame Ops story). I’ll be posting progress notes and the like.
This week is turning out to be overwhelming and it’s only the start, but it’s pretty exciting. I’m going to make the most of it.
Hello everyone! We’re excited to announce that we’re extremely near the update of version 0.9.0 and there’s only a few things left to be polished before it’s ready.
This is more of a look back over all the previous previews slated for update 0.9.0, but it illustrates just how much is going to change.
We’ve got new customization options coming, from the new accessories and ‘base weapon’ parts, to new poses for photograph mode. We’re also getting more story missions, a new hunt mission, tier 6 node unlocks, the new weak point system for bosses, as well as some tweaks to their attacks to make life a little easier for melee playstyles.
There are also a lot of QoL updates to be happy about.
I’m a bit busier than I’d like but I do want to get more M.A.S.S. Builder content going around the time 0.9.0 releases, so I’ll up that on my list of priorities until I find the right balance between that and my other projects.
Hello everyone, today’s a short preview of the coming multiplayer missions you’ll get to try your hands on with your friends (or enemies, we don’t judge). As we’ve mentioned months before, we’ve decided to add co-op missions into this update as it took a long time and came out with three of them.
As someone who generally likes cooperative gameplay, the addition of coop missions in M.A.S.S. Builder has always been exciting for me. This may only be in alpha, but you’ve got to start somewhere, and I’m looking forward to it.
