Hello everyone, this is Vermillion Digital team. First of, we'd like to thank you for the continuous support for M.A.S.S. Builder. We've finally reached a 100,000 units sales, and without your creations, your "builds," and your kind words even when we're this late in providing a promised major update, we would not be here, able to do the things we loved. We'll continue working on M.A.S.S. Builder to make it into one of the best game of the mecha genre, and we hope you'll continue to look forward on the contents and updates we'll be pushing out in the future.
With that out, let's see why 0.8.0 was delayed to such extent. First, let's talk about what 0.8.0 brought to the table. A lot of systems upgrade, a few new missions, new Quarks, some more launchers, a new armor set, and almost a total rework of the game's balance through difficulty, mechanics, status tuning, and tech nodes.
While that might not look like much, each and every one of those additions and fixes required time to be tuned to their best interest of both us and you all. Bullet Launcher positioning system has slight differences from the accessories system, new missions were crafted with new requirements and methods, enemy mechanics needed to be different and fun, projectile barrier needed to not be annoying but an engaging mechanic that allows us to keep power into ranged playstyle.
One of the most prominent changes and additions were new bullet launchers and energy launchers rework. We needed to make something new, different, and fun to use. We've had sessions talking, voting within our team on which energy launchers we're doing. Someone even wanted a drone to plant itself into the ground at a targeted location and explode itself (we'll keep that idea for a later time) and some of us wanted more utility as we also wanted melee users to be able to use them. These took a long time to work on and we're happy that you were excited to use and praising them.
I'd honestly want to say that we've rebalanced the game two to three times in itself during the whole update cycle, as we've brought out some update ideas into the M.A.S.S. Builder Discord channel and our players expressed concern on how it'll turn out. Weight was the first one, we didn't think to remove them at first, but after hearing about it in feedback, we yielded.
The second was when we introduced Quantum Break nodes that had chance of activations and ranges of benefits, they weren't popular and we had some heated discussions with us saying we wanted some kind of fun and weird nodes alongside a few players and others wanting a certain consistency for speedrunning and min-maxing purposes. We then took another look at all our rebalancing and changed them one more time, separating most chance from nodes into another node in itself. And in parallel to that, we were required to test them extensively alongside Quark status changes. Those were the months with nothing but testing day in day out, changing numbers, and more testings. But they were not enough, as you can see that we've done a huge balance update in 0.8.5. Thank you for all the input and feedback.
That should be all for 0.8.x. We've gone on longer than we have expected now. We hope you all have fun, and again, thank you for your support throughout our second year. We hope to continue to fulfill wants and desires of a mecha game, your feedback is always appreciated as it had helped us in our journey for as long as we remember. Next week, we'll talk about what's coming in 0.9.0 as most of you are surely wondering, what is the first step towards our multiplayer update.
Discord: discord.gg/quS7E46
Feedback Hub: bit.ly/3wpWofe