Hey, hello, greetings!
Once again it is me, Christian, here to give you guys the latest scoop about what’s been happening at the Stunlock offices.
Patch 0.12
So we released patch 0.12 last week, and with it, Dragon Garden! The reception of Dragon Garden so far seems to be very positive, which was really great to see as we put a lot of time and effort into making it. Hope you guys continue to enjoy it, and look forward to Dragon Garden – Night.
With the patch we also had a larger rework to Jumong. The reception to the rework has been a bit split; most of what I’ve seen is people thinking the new version is more fun to play, but lacking in some areas. This was more of a “feel” rework, to change up how Jumong is played and how it feels to play against him, rather than a rework meant to balance him out. So now we’ll be looking into some smaller changes for Jumong to even him out a bit. The smaller changes should hopefully arrive this week, with maybe some additional touches not long after that. We might give some other champions tweaks as well (Raigon, maybe Pestilus), but I can’t give you anything concrete at this time of writing. Whatever we decide, you will of course be able to read about it in the patch notes!
Gameplay Team
Besides mulling over how the patch has affected the state of the game, the gameplay team has continued additional work on the whole new player experience thing I’ve been boring you all about. They’ve been putting the finishing touches on the very first version and the way forward will be to bind all of the matches together into one campaign. Before now, we’ve been working with placeholder content whilst testing out the design of the challenges, but we’re now at a state where we can start turning those placeholders into the content they’re supposed to be. Progress! In the meantime, here’s a look at one of the challenges I’ve been telling you guys about, in its current state:
This is part of a challenge aimed to teach new players about the importance of the center orb and the health pickups available in the arena. The screenshot is from the final stage of the challenge where the player will attempt to survive as long as possible against an onslaught of attacks.
Besides the above, the gameplay team is also working on some new stuff we unfortunately can’t share just yet.
Esports
Last week we premiered Battlerekt: The Proving Grounds, our latest venture into the world of Esports! If you haven’t heard about it, it’s a tournament series held both in North America and Europe, that will be held over 10 weeks with a total prize pool of $20 000. You can read more about it here. Our eminent Esports Manager, Alexander “GrimGoon” Hermansson, had this to say about our first week:
“It’s great to be able to support our competitive players through NGE’s ongoing efforts with BattleRekt. The first week featured some amazing games combined with a fresh from the oven metagame, which makes me even more excited for the coming weeks as players come up with new strategies and ways to stump their opponents.”
If you haven’t watched it yet and you’re curious to see some of the highest levels of Battlerite around, here’s where you can find the VODs.
Backend Team
During the start of the week our programming team spent most of their time on handling the patching process. Besides taking down servers, uploading new versions and initial testing, they also handled the seasonal change as well. Crunching through all players and handing out rewards along with making appropriate resets takes a lot of time, even when it is mostly handled by a computer. This, along with making some testing to make sure everything regarding the new season was handled correctly, is why we had a downtime longer than usual.
Besides this they’ve also been handling server issues (some of it beyond our direct control) and, once again, maintaining our in-house tools to make sure the development process goes as smoothly as possible for the rest of us.
UI
Katey has been looking at improving the post match experience on the whole, and can share with us one concept for a new MVP screen that only takes place at the end of the match, summarizing both teams statistics during the match.
In other UI progress, a lot of work has been going into the re-design of the lobby/party in order to improve this experience for the new UI. It’s a complicated process with a lot of scenarios to consider (leaving the party, adding friends, choosing champions, selecting game modes, and lots more). The artists will be assisting next week with a new 3D scene for prototyping and further testing.
Art Team
Sadly, at least for you guys, the art team continues to work on new and exciting stuff we want to reveal in a more grandiose manner than the dev blog. So the best I can offer you is another sneak peek.
And that’s it for this week. Thanks for reading and see you around!
/Christian