Crew Menu and Getting Your Name in the Game!

Hi everyone,

I thought I’d write a post that covers the new Crew Menu as it’s an addition that doesn’t deserve to be buried in a monthly Dev Transmission. It also relates to how you can get your own name in the game, something which we’ll detail below.

First, a bit of context: We had a rough plan for what Major Updates 3 and 4 would entail, fleshing out the core loop of the game and providing greater depth and variety. The first part of this was the Hazards and Rewards system, which we made available to test on a beta branch at the start of the month. Hazards essentially made combat spikier, with Rewards predominantly providing bonuses in the areas outside of combat.

For MU4 we’d planned a Crew Menu and a new player perks system that would replace Passive Gear, providing an additional layer to combat. Combined, all these systems should lift the core loop to a much better place whether it’s your first campaign or you’re a veteran.

While we were working through the much-appreciated feedback you’ve provided for the Hazards and Rewards system, we felt that the general impact of this new feature on the campaign meant the Crew Menu was needed sooner rather than later, so we’ve brought it forward into MU3. Our Discord Playtesters have this new system to test now – and the public Beta Branch should be updated once it's had some testing.

[h3]The Crew Menu[/h3]
Crew were previously just a numbered resource, whereas they are now characters. Characters whom you can rename, equip with armour, revive deceased ones – and once we’ve implemented it, equip with new uniforms/skins. Here’s a glimpse of the latest WIP version of the Crew Menu:

Previously, armour was a piece of Passive Gear equipment that – once discovered – started at level 1 and you could upgrade to much greater effectiveness. Now, for a small materials cost that SENTRY gets the top level version and you can choose to replenish it in the crew menu as the armour gets destroyed over the course of your escape run.

This means armour is no longer a piece of Passive Gear, and as we’ve also given the Jump Jets as a default player ability means only the Bandolier remains. As I mentioned earlier, Passive Gear is being phased out for a replacement system with much greater depth and gameplay possibilities.

We had fun making a more beefy armoured SENTRY, while ensuring that the base version still looked cool. We did see what a SENTRY looks like with zero armour plating and just wearing the red jumpsuit, however this basically looked like they were wearing pajamas. Not cool, but it was amusing and I’ll share an image of that someday…

You can also now spend research to revive a deceased SENTRY, which is a benefit to those who have been losing campaigns due to running out of crew. It’s also helpful to those in co-op who have one crew member and don’t want their friend to be in spectator mode until they find a crew pod on the map.

These changes to armour and revivals provides much greater control over how you want to play your campaigns.

[h3]Getting Your Name in the Game[/h3]
Which brings me to the crew names. On our previous game, we allowed crew names to be taken from a special database derived from our newsletter subscribers:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/551860/view/3580850447657046527
This proved very popular, so we’re doing it again!

(Please note as Abandon Ship released several years ago and is updated infrequently, we closed new newsletter signups for that game. Just mentioning that in case you go to sign up on the link in the post above, as it’ll lead nowhere)

If you sign up to our SENTRY newsletter then the name you submit will be added to a database that crew names are drawn from. We’re running this in a similar way to our first game:

Newsletter names are added to a special database, and crew are assigned names split between this and the “default” database
Names are randomly picked from each database
If you don’t want Newsletter names in your game, then there is an option in the “Interface” part of the Settings menu where you can stop them from being generated
All names can be manually edited in the Crew Menu
Our Newsletters are occasional (a handful a year) and not spammy in nature
Any bounces or unsubscribes get their names removed from the database
Every time we update the game we’ll update the Newsletter Names database so that it is current
Any rude names won’t be added to the database. This relies on me picking up on them though, so if you spot any please let me know – on Abandon Ship someone snuck past “Dickson Balzac” and it was several months before I twigged…

We’ve been running the newsletter for a while now, but haven’t really pushed the whole “getting your name in the game” aspect until the Crew Menu was ready.

When you see the Crew Menu, you may note that we include a randomly generated occupation for each crew member – this is a bit of fun, but also helps to reinforce a narrative purpose; that a SENTRY is an escaping civilian drafted into service – not a soldier, and certainly not a robot/android that we’ve heard the occasional person mention! We’re happy to receive suggestions of occupations from the community too :)

As I mentioned earlier, once we’ve got our Discord Playtester feedback and had the chance to do any fixes we’ll get this rolled out onto the Beta Branch for some broader community testing – and as usual there’ll be a monthly Dev Transmission soon that rounds up all the other latest SENTRY news.

Thanks for your support!