First off, I want to thank everyone who took the time to participate in the third beta. We had over 1,600 people sign up for the Beta! I hope you enjoyed beating up your friends on Ocean Drive. I’m sure you all loved watching me get beaten up on stream! I also want to extend a special thank you to everyone who made clips or memes for the beta– we’re talking about them constantly, let me tell you. But the team is taking things seriously too, reviewing the feedback, bug reports, and data gathered from the beta.
Maps
Something that always surprises me with each beta is how quickly people go into “How Can I Break This Map” mode. I sat in on the call in the Airframe Ultra Discord right at the start of the beta with other players as they did everything they can to break Ocean Drive. Which, as someone who did some Quality Assurance for Akupara Game before becoming Community Manager, is a mode that I fully understand and support. It put a big smile on my face to see the maps broken with shortcuts finessing the out-of-bounds barrier and getting their airframes in unintended areas. Pushing the boundaries of Airframe Ultra is always what the betas are for.
Ocean Drive
In case you were busy over the weekend, Ocean Drive was the new map we released for Beta 3. Players got to race along a massive megashipyard on the narrow highway roads populated by other drivers and then dropped down to the coastline. Some people were wondering if they could shoot down the innocent parashooter just minding their own business over the water. I see you!
Check out this match posted by a community member on the map Ocean Drive!
Some people have learned that if you surrender the quick fight over the water and time it well, you can get a major head start. In fact, if you drive up the wall and time it right you can drive under the map and win the next race for an easy 3 points.
A huge highlight for us with this map was asking the community to contribute to the big wall alongside Ocean Drive! There were over 500 submissions and that wall got populated by tons of graffiti from the community. Just to take a second to highlight a few:
Hiphyro on Discord
Mimic24 on Discord
Supremedorian on Discord
There’s a ton of art and I wish I could highlight them all but Steam might be mad at me if I make a dev log with so many beautiful art pieces so let's move on to Storm Drain before I get lost.
Storm Drain
Storm Drain is the first track that came back to the beta– it was actually the very first map produced for the game! People who played the first beta may remember the very first version of Storm Drain. Well, this version is different! New Storm Drain features a rain mechanic that affects visibility and the water level throughout the map. This is a feature we’ve been looking to test for a while– what happens when the maps are dynamic? When they change from lap to lap? Thankfully, you guys seemed to really love it! There was an area in one arena however that players easily got stuck in because of the water. People who fell in know the spot. Sorry!
Here is a full match from the community on Storm Drain if you would like to see it!
Yet again, players found amazing skips and tricks to break the track. Don’t tell the developers, but I think these are amazing and maybe I will need to use them against my co-workers on stream.
OK, let’s be real, can I talk about Warehouse without talking about Fight Club? Look, Warehouse is in here as a testing ground– where you go when you want to see how the changes have manifested. But you guys just love the club! It started in the second beta by the community and has continued on to the third beta. Fight Club is when people go to Warehouse and only fight in hand to hand combat. No weapons, no airframes, and no where to hide. Just you versus the person in front of you.
They do movement tech that I didn’t even know was in the game. Seriously, I’m pretty sure if I ever dared set foot in one, I’d lose five times before I even land a punch. But I do wanna say for any curious racers out there: They are very supportive to new players coming in and I’m sure they will be there for the next beta and launch.
While some people were getting off their Airframe to go into hand-to-hand combat, there were others who were using their Airframe to lap around the map as fast as they could. Here is a person who completed it on the Vector in 49.26.
Next up, I spoke with Josh, one of the gameplay developers working on Airframe Ultra, about some of the behind the scenes in development.
Hello racers and a heartfelt thank you to everyone that's taken the time to play Airframe Ultra so far! I'm Josh, one of the gameplay developers at Akupara Games. From weapon balance to airframe gameplay and from map design to random bugs, just about all of your feedback gets routed through me, and I do my best to act on it. It's been a blast helping Joar and James bring the world of Airframe Ultra to life, and a huge thank you to them for their patience and dedication, as well as just being fantastic folks to work with!
Let's talk balance.
We seriously appreciate the thoughts y'all have shared with us about certain weapons, and we're taking steps to give every weapon a fighting chance while allowing them all to maintain a unique identity and power fantasy. Two of the most instrumental metrics we're keeping an eye on to keep weapons balanced are total time held and total kills. Through these two numbers, we can deduce how many kills weapons are earning per minute they're held by players (with a million caveats of course, but hear me out). This has helped us quantify how certain weapons are overperforming or underperforming. For instance, during beta 2, we saw all weapons net an average of 0.82 kills per minute. Great! What can we learn from this? Well, we saw that ranged weapons got 0.96 kpm, with the least effective ranged weapon being the rebar fastener at 0.46 kpm and the most effective weapon overall being the plasma pistol at a whopping 2.01 kpm.
That's all good and groovy, but how do we rebalance these weapons? While we're no stranger to tuning damage values, fire rates, magazine sizes, and reload speeds to adjust weapon uptime and time to kill values, we've got an interest in helping each weapon keep its own aesthetic and functional identity. To satisfy that goal, we lean away from big number changes in favor of tuning more abstract properties of the weapons. These changes help the weapons fulfill the roles they play in the universe by buffing along strengths and nerfing along weaknesses.
In the case of the plasma pistol, it was killing players in one shot in betas 1 and 2. To turn this weapon into less of a free kill printer, we decided to discourage players from spraying one-shot-kill fire everywhere by introducing an overheat mechanic as well as quickly degrading precision the longer the trigger is held. We also adjusted the way the weapon's fire works so that it should kill most players in 2 shots rather than one -- but only if those shots keep their target ignited for a short duration. This keeps the weapon feeling super unique and strong while giving other players a fighting chance against it.
In the case of the rebar fastener, we took a similar-but-opposite approach. Rather than tuning the damage of the weapon against players, we aimed to satisfy its power fantasy of the weapon being heavy-duty piece of construction equipment. It turns out that airframes really don't like being impaled by rebar, so we improved their damage against vehicles! The projectiles should also feel heavy and destructive, so we buffed them to cause serious knockback and camera movement on those who find themselves on the action end of the rebar fastener.
And these are just two examples of adjustments we've made between beta 2 and 3! We've taken a similar approach to helping every bike shine in its own area, keeping melee weapons competitive, and dialing in the impact of body type on movement tech. We'll continue tuning these values in the future, and we hope to dial things in just right as we approach launch. I'm sure we'll have more to share about bikes and our design process in the coming weeks!
Thanks!
Once again, thanks to everyone in the Airframe Ultra community who has made these betas possible! I can't wait for y'all to see what we have in store for the future. Don't hesitate to say hey in the Discord!
-Josh
Art
I always want to wrap up any dev log with art from the community. I do appreciate the hard work these artists have put into drawing fan art and I do show what I can to developers of Airframe Ultra who love every single art piece drawn. I will share just a few but there are other amazing art pieces posted in the Airframe Ultra Discord.
The community has created a shared public canvas for Airframe Ultra. The link is pinned in the Discord but here is the progress so far with so many artists adding to it already!
Here are some individual art to highlight as well! Again there are so many art pieces to choose from that I can’t get everyone.
Brkojquag on Discord
Thingamagic_and_co on Discord
Oscarriaq on Discord
Another end to an eventful Beta. The team is still going through the data, numbers, feedback, and bug reports you have submitted over the weekend. Thank you for checking out the beta over the weekend. Without you guys, Airframe Ultra wouldn’t have been developing so well without your feedback and input.
