Hello everyone and welcome to another block of text named the "Post 0.4.x Update Manifesto." Once again, we're here to talk about the reasonings behind the latest update as well as what's next on the M.A.S.S. Builder game development schedule, looking ahead to another update that we'll be working on from today onwards. Well then, not to take anymore of your time, let's start from the various features we've added to the game in 0.4.0.
Stamina System and enemies' AI
The stamina system was a system that we've planned to add into the game at one point to further the depth of our enemies. As many of you had expressed to us, the earlier versions of our enemies are very lacking in depth and they'll just run into you mindlessly, where all you had to do is kite them easily with ranged weapons or just rush into battle with a melee weapon in an "either-you-or-me" battle. We were never able to make our AI smarter due to the fact that a system that could gate their strength like the stamina system wasn't finished.
With the stamina system introduced into the game, we were also able to improve the enemies' AI to be a tad bit smarter or being more aggressive yet still having a workaround, and provide more depth to the difficulty system than just simply being a numbers game. With that said, there were still concerns throughout the week after the patch drop about numbers being too high or low, scaling being a bit weird, and we understand that our tuning have not been excellent. We will continue to monitor your feedback for them and hopefully perfect it by next update.
A change to the blueprint drop system
This was a very controversial topic to talk about, and a topic that was given an extreme amount of ideas to work with. The one question many had in mind was, why a drop system like this? Simply put, we wanted our players to always discover something new, a new armor blueprint, a weapon, something to say that "you're making progress in unlocking more things in the game" rather than having a new set of armor or weapons player can just easily choose to buy and leave the others out.
Now, the old system was too harsh and its algorithm made some very frustrating work of those final pieces of a blueprint undiscovered instead of providing reward. We wanted to implement this new algorithm patches ago, but was only able to make it work correctly with 0.4.0 (ask our community members how we tried it last time and failed, where we reverted it back). The new system would provide rewards either through credits gain, or obtaining new blueprints without that much grind needed, and players will now be able to create a M.A.S.S. unit to their liking much easier, and that's what we liked to see.
Players' tuning and property damage system
Throughout 0.1.0 to 0.3.0, there had been concerns of how weak some play styles, particularly the uninteresting status regarding ammo loads and property damages being too negligible. With 0.4.0 our aim was to bring the spotlight to them, providing newer playstyles for our players to test and try. We've seen its strength on the first days and immediately had to balance them, which was a fun experience to see a lot of messages saying they're too good.
All in all, the past few days had shown many of you discussing on which type of damage being stronger and an optimal playstyle for each of you. We liked to see that, as it meant our balancing was able to get different people to say that their build was better than the other. On that note though, some of our players are still struggling with ammo on certain bosses and we'll consider making some changes in some missions on normal difficulty to make them easier to complete.
Onwards to 0.5.0
Now here comes what's next. We know a lot of you are interested to see what will be coming in the next update. First, to remind all of you, the old 0.5.0 mentioned in our roadmap will be shifted back, and this new 0.5.0 will be something we weren't able to finish in time for 0.4.0 alongside something new we'll be able to prepare in time. The update period should not be as long as the 0.4.0 wait, but we are not able to announce the time frame at this time so keep an eye out, maybe we'll be able to do it soon. So, what's coming?
- Few new missions alongside hunting grounds: These are the main focus of the 0.5.0 update and we're sure to make them spectacular. With that said, we're exploring new mission mechanics that are different than what you players had to work with before (investigating objects, destroying all enemies, etc.) and we'll be sure to show our WIP of those level designs as soon as we can. If things goes as planned, we will be able to finish Chapter 2 with some intensifying plots.
- More love towards ranged weapons: We'll be introducing two new firing types that were planned since a long time ago. As some of you might have known from our resident developer within our discord, we've just finished a framework revamp and are now able to create new firing methods with less work thus they'll be inserted here to provide some love to ranged playstyles that have been stale for a good while now.
A lot of other changes are still being discussed internally but those two are the main focus of the new update at the moment. We know it might seem not much, but as we've said, we're aiming to provide this new update as soon as possible, and we'll be sure to say when it is available as soon as we can set a date for it. For any questions, you are very welcome to come and talk with us in the M.A.S.S. Builder discord channel!