Hey Bombernauts fans! Bombernauts has been out on early access for a week now and it's been pretty fun watching people learn and enjoy the game. I found a lot of balance and other issues throughout the week and have been fixing them. I patched the game 7 times since it came out! You can read the full patch notes from the week here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/246920/discussions/0/541907867749521725/ but its crazy how much the game has improved in just the first week.

This is the reason we are doing early access. I don't have any previous expierence making multiplayer games so I had no idea what kinds of weird scenarios people would get themselves into. I had no idea people would stalemate on bounce tiles, or be sometimes be content mostly using the bat in duels, or stalemate on regen tile levels when the tiles grow back too fast, and many other little things I wasn't expecting to happen. So most of the balance fixes this week have been focused on making breaking stalemates easier, and allowing the powerups to shine.

We also ran a cool fanart contest on Newgrounds and gave away a bunch of steam keys to the winners, which you can see here http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1396086!

Whats Next?

PLAYER COUNT

Its no secret that Bombernauts's concurrent player count right now is a bit low right now. I sorta expected this with doing an early access release, so I really do appreciate everyone who is sticking around to play with new players. The game will pick up over time I'm sure of it (just need people to help spread the word!). But in the mean time I have a few ideas for how to concentrate the playerbase a bit more. We got a decent core of fans right now but it doesn't help when everyone plays at different times or different days, so I'm working on some design things to encourage people to play on weekends. They will be simple things at first, like a steam achievement for playing for a few hours on a weekend, but also...

HATS

Yeah I know people want hats. We want hats too. Rather than charging money for dumb cosmetic hats I am going to use them to reward players for desirable behavior in game, like playing on the weekend, or sticking around for a whole first-to-five round, or showing appropriate devotion and dedication to King Server (all hail). It'll be a little bit of work to get enough hats in game that this ends up being effective, so I'm not setting a timeframe for it right now. But we're working on it, and it's happening.

GAME BALANCE

I have a few options I want to add in to help with game balance, but they will be *options*. Specifically, there will be an option for a game timer, implemented as meteors. Meaning, if a DUEL goes on for longer than 2 minutes or so (you'll be able to customize the time, and whether or not it triggers from overall match time or duel time), then meteors start falling from the sky and destroying the map, picking up speed and power the longer they've been active for. Meteor kills will count as kills for King Server.

Another option I want to add is "Super Smash Bros Damage Percent Style Knockback" but oh man do I need a better name for that. Basically people keep asking for it (more robot damage = more knockback) so I want to add it in as an option, but it will be a bit of design work because I don't want to discourage people from using bombs for bomb jumping or other strategic purposes. Perhaps having this on a global timer would be better. Dunno, it'll be something interesting to try out either way.

NETCODE / STABILITY

Netcode + Stability is PRIORITY ONE for me right now. Meaning, right now I am not going to add any features that make solving netcode/lag/crash issues harder until I feel like the game is stable. This locks out a few features people really want (game modes, local, bots, etc) because having those features in game make doing netcode work harder. If you find any bugs or weirdness with the netcode please let me know! Its hard to fix issues if I don't know about them.

DESIGN

There's a lot of small design things I want to do to make the game better. I want to make it more clear when someone else is still alive, and make it easier to find them if they're off-screen. I want to make it more clear when someone gets a kill, and when someone respawns as a zombie. The reasoning here is I watched a lot of people react like "Wait, how did I win?" when the final deaths happened off-screen. While a little bit of that is okay (as can happen in a chaotic free-for-all), I do want to make it more clear what's happening in game without having to pay attention to the chatbox.

CONTENT

I can add powerups and maps easily enough without making it more difficult to work on netcode, so we will be adding some soon just so theres constantly some new things to play around with in game.


It's been a fun week and I hope you all stick with us for the rest of our stay in early access
- Tyler