Hi everyone! Cosmic Star Heroine version 1.16 is now live. This patch has the following changes: 2 new bonus dungeons. These dungeons can be accessed by talking to Sue & Lauren respectively after certain points in the game. One of these dungeons is designed for max LV charact
Hi everyone! Cosmic Star Heroine version 1.16 is now live. This patch has the following changes:
2 new bonus dungeons. These dungeons can be accessed by talking to Sue & Lauren respectively after certain points in the game. One of these dungeons is designed for max LV characters - have fun!
Various bug fixes (sorry, I don't remember all the specifics since it's been a while. I do know that a major bug with replaying battles has been fixed though).
The game also now takes up drastically less space.
In the hours after the release of Cosmic Star Heroine , after a night of chittering anxiety, a week of frantically digging up lingering bugs, and four years of programming and polish for a project that was originally dreamed up as a Kickstarter all the way back in 2013, art direc
In the hours after the release of Cosmic Star Heroine, after a night of chittering anxiety, a week of frantically digging up lingering bugs, and four years of programming and polish for a project that was originally dreamed up as a Kickstarter all the way back in 2013, art director Bill Stiernberg realized there was something wrong. A fraction of his playerbase were drawing their guns only to watch as some of the enemies on the other half of the screen immediately despawned.
Cosmic Star Heroine is a globetrotting RPG built directly out of the bones of legendary 16-bit adventures like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6, complete with an old school battle system. But now the spectacle of its treasured, multi-tiered combat was broken.
"There’s this [boss battle] against a giant mech enemy where you fight its two arms, and the battle would start with one of the arms disabled because of this bug," says Stiernberg. "They’d be only fighting one arm, and afterwards they’d be like 'well, that was an easy battle.' It drove us crazy. We didn’t know why these enemies were just vanishing."
The culprit was the Bagman—an NPC that self-destructed upon defeat, doing damage to the other monsters in his party. Stiernberg liked the design (it was originally concocted by a Kickstarter backer) but there was one particular programming error left undiscovered during testing. If the Bagman was the last enemy to die in an encounter, it would leave a residual tag on the enemies in future encounters. That meant when NPCs loaded in with that tag attached to their data, their health bars immediately dropped to zero.
Thus, the mystery of the despawning enemies was solved, and Stiernberg heaved a sigh of relief. Perhaps you’re wondering why the bug wasn’t caught sooner, but Zeboyd Games is made up of exactly two people. They did what they could.
"There were only a few testers, myself included, and we knew to attack the guy first because he self-destructs, so you don’t want to leave him alone," says Stiernberg. "That made it really hard to catch."
Undercooked big-budget games get pushed out the door before they’re ready all the time, and crises like Stiernberg’s Bagman are not limited to the indie scene. But still, major games routinely escape rocky launches through the concentrated power of corporate infrastructure. Take Rainbow Six: Siege, a tactical shooter that was lost in the shuffle after its 2015 release. Through the combined efforts of PR liaisons and a multi-continental development squadron, today Ubisoft can rightfully name that game as one of the most successful FPS platforms on the planet.
I don t think I can understate how little sleep I got.
Bill Stiernberg
Zeboyd Games, of course, does not have the same luxury. Stiernberg and his partner Robert Boyd are veterans at working without a harness. Together they’ve made the lovable Cthulhu Saves the World, and episodes three and four of the rebooted Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. So what happens when an indie developer is staring down release-date chaos? What’s it like knowing that your publisher’s paratroopers aren’t on their way to bail you out?
As Stiernberg tells it, it sounds like hell.
"I don’t think I can understate how little sleep I got," he says. "We had this release date that we absolutely had to meet, because we were launching on PlayStation 4 at the same time, and we needed to be available for a promotion they were doing, which is a very important thing for any developer, especially a small one. I was testing constantly in every spare moment, and I was reaching out to anyone who was going to receive a review key. That was stressful too, because there were certain things we wanted to get in before we sent those codes out, which is obviously not ideal."
Don’t Panic
One of the things Stiernberg remembers best is the crucial day-one patch he needed to deliver to the PS4 servers. Neither he nor Boyd had a ton of experience working for the platform, and unlike Steam, where developers can configure their game's code in a moment’s notice, they found themselves stuck in a lengthy licensing phase to get the update online. "We keep getting these errors, and we're going back and forth with these Sony people on email every two minutes," he says. "And at the same time we have people writing Steam user reviews, and we have people on Twitter sending us screenshots of the PS4 pre-loading screen saying, 'Hey look! It says it unlocks in one hour and 15 minutes! I'm excited!' and I'm like, 'I'm excited too, but not for the same reasons!’"
Of course, most of the controversies a developer faces on launch day aren’t quite as heartbreaking or inscrutable as a bugged boss that makes other enemies vanish. For the most part, Stiernberg spent time working with a stubborn trailer that refused to appear on the PlayStation landing page while keeping a watchful eye on bug report threads on the Steam forums. That doesn't mean those smaller issues are easy to brush off. Eventually, Stiernberg says, it will seem like there are a thousand things to do, and that can put a lot of pressure on a small team. Especially in a marketplace like Steam with such a volatile trending page.
This is a panic that every developer faces. Jean-Francois Major co-founded Tribute Games, the studio that released the excellent roguelike Flinthook earlier this year. His advice is to take a deep breath and move methodically.
Nothing else that I ve done has ever consumed my mind in the way this does.
Bill Stiernberg
"It's so easy to panic and want to address every issue or concern. Make a list, communicate with your players and evaluate what needs to be addressed and how. If it's not a critical bug fix, you shouldn't be hot-fixing the next day. Plan how you will implement these changes and make sure they fit your vision of the game," he says. "Some of the comments might also be non-issues. Take the Destiny 2 shader changes for example. It blew out of proportions at launch and quickly died off when people got further in the game and noticed they were drowning in shaders."
Stiernberg agrees. "The more you do, the better you feel. Even if it’s little stuff," he says. "If you’re on a team, keep in regular communication with them, because they’re going through the same thing. And keep making progress, it goes a long way [to calm] your anxiety."
No plan survives contact with the enemy
If you spend enough time reading about this industry you’re eventually confronted with the unassailable fact that building a game from the ground up is one of the hardest things anyone can do, especially if you’re working without a publisher. There is no real contingency plan in a Kickstarter mandate, and truthfully, Stiernberg and Boyd don’t have to live like this.
They could pack up Zeboyd and go get jobs at a much larger company, where they could off-load a lot of the responsibilities they held themselves accountable for during the Cosmic Star Heroine cycle. Jobs where they don’t have to run the marketing, the programming, the art, the writing, and the press relations all while making sure an enemy called 'the Bagman' is working properly. This is true for dozens of indie game developers, but despite how punishing this business can be, they remain. Stiernberg tells me he couldn’t imagine it any other way.
Flinthook's developer stresses the importance of planning and prioritizing what you fix after launch.
"I could never get away [from game design,]" he says. "Nothing else that I’ve done has ever consumed my mind in the way this does. I'm constantly thinking about, 'How can I improve this, how can I do this better, how can I push this further?' If it didn’t mean that much to me personally I don’t think I could do this… it’s a double-edged sword. It can be crushing to be responsible for all of these things, but the satisfaction, the sense of pride in how you were able to do all of these things, is hugely important."
Bill Stiernberg stayed up for a week straight. Every moment was another microscopic disaster. He got himself high and low on reviews, he pored over the same code he stared at for years, and he says it was worth it. He and Robert Boyd were doing it all. Keep that in mind the next time you find yourself struggling to play through a buggy launch.
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We've been hard at work on Cosmic Star Heroine since launch - we're up to v1.14 now! Besides bug fixes, we've also added a number of features including Steam Achievements, Steam Cloud support, in-game tutorials, a run/walk toggle setting, and more! For full patch notes, check the
We've been hard at work on Cosmic Star Heroine since launch - we're up to v1.14 now! Besides bug fixes, we've also added a number of features including Steam Achievements, Steam Cloud support, in-game tutorials, a run/walk toggle setting, and more! For full patch notes, check the stickied thread in the Steam forum!
Thank you everyone for your support! We have more improvements in mind for the game for future updates! Stay tuned!
We've been hard at work on Cosmic Star Heroine since launch - we're up to v1.14 now! Besides bug fixes, we've also added a number of features including Steam Achievements, Steam Cloud support, in-game tutorials, a run/walk toggle setting, and more! For full patch notes, check the
We've been hard at work on Cosmic Star Heroine since launch - we're up to v1.14 now! Besides bug fixes, we've also added a number of features including Steam Achievements, Steam Cloud support, in-game tutorials, a run/walk toggle setting, and more! For full patch notes, check the stickied thread in the Steam forum!
Thank you everyone for your support! We have more improvements in mind for the game for future updates! Stay tuned!
Cosmic Star Heroine , the new retro-styled RPG from Cthulhu Saves the World developers Zeboyd Games, has finally arrived. Citing Chrono Trigger and Phantasy Star as RPG inspirations, Cosmic Star Heroine tells the tale of a superspacespy who goes rogue to fight a conspiracy she un
Cosmic Star Heroine [official site], the new retro-styled RPG from Cthulhu Saves the World developers Zeboyd Games, has finally arrived. Citing Chrono Trigger and Phantasy Star as RPG inspirations, Cosmic Star Heroine tells the tale of a superspacespy who goes rogue to fight a conspiracy she uncovers. Zeboyd’s games are good stuff, so this it’s grand to see this out, even if it is a few years later than planned during its 2013 Kickstarter. Here, check out the launch trailer: … [visit site to read more]
It took a lot longer than expected for the turn-based sci-fi JRPG Cosmic Star Heroine to arrive. The 2013 Kickstarter listed a 2014 launch date, which eventually became 2015 , and then in 2016 we got an E3 trailer . But now it's 2017, and the day is finally here: The tale of an o
It took a lot longer than expected for the turn-based sci-fi JRPG Cosmic Star Heroine to arrive. The 2013 Kickstarter listed a 2014 launch date, which eventually became 2015, and then in 2016 we got an E3 trailer. But now it's 2017, and the day is finally here: The tale of an outer-space super-spy on the run is live on Steam.
Cosmic Star Heroine follows the adventures of Alyssa L'Salle, who at one time was one of the top secret agents at the Agency of Peace & Intelligence on the Planet Araenu. "But when she uncovers a horrible conspiracy, she has to go rogue in order to save the day! Can Alyssa save the galaxy when everyone (and everything) is out to stop her?"
The retro-styled game promises "brisk pacing that respects your time," including the ability to save anywhere. Combat takes place directly on the map, rather than on a separate battle screen, with multi-character combo techniques and a turn-based combat system "that focuses on flow and strategy." If you can't tell, Cosmic Star Heroine has some Chrono Trigger in its DNA, and Wes dug the battle system quite a bit when he played a demo.
You'll even get your own spaceship that you can crew up with recruitable agents, and if you dig the music in the trailer, there's plenty of that, too: More than 100 minutes all told, created by HyperDuck Soundworks, the team behind the score for Dust: An Elysian Tale.
Cosmic Star Heroine is currently available for 20 percent off on Steam, taking it to $12/£9/€12 until April 18.
