SENTRY News

Hi everyone, for those that celebrated Thanks Giving I hope you had an enjoyable one! Here’s what we’ve been doing in November:

[h3]Navigator![/h3]
There have been two big areas we’ve focused on this month; the first is continued work on the Navigator part of the game which is one of three layers that comprise our campaign.

A lot of this has been improving the messaging for your actions, which gives a much greater sense of feedback. We’ve also been adding a sense of ceremony for when you commence a run or end it (either by successfully escaping or your vessel being destroyed), which is a nice way to bookend your escape runs.

We’ve also been fleshing out the functionality in this mode, so there are additional pickups to replenish crew, derelict ships to collect new unlockables and an additional ‘chaser’. This is a mechanic that provides an increased sense of impetus to your flight – and while we’ve had homing missiles for a while now, we’ve added a variant which is a high powered enemy strike force on a boarding torpedo.


During Early Access we’ll have a lot of fun adding even more content to this layer!

[h3]Upgrades (again) plus Status Effects![/h3]
The second big focus for us this month has been upgrades.

One thing that was especially clear from the Next Fest feedback was how much everyone enjoyed the sense of power that was felt while playing. When we were reviewing how we’d previously implemented our upgrade system, we realized that this wasn’t something the early part of the campaign was delivering – and while upgrading weapons would get you to that same level of power, we felt this was a misstep on our part and made for a weaker first impression.

We therefore felt it important to have a rework of our upgrades. Now, when you unlock weapons their lowest level is what you’d experience in the demo – and we build up from there.

Looking back, we probably got caught up making something clever but lost sight of providing the right sense of enjoyment… an easy trap to fall into with first pass designs. Our new system now certainly leans into the fun more, which after all is why we’re here :)

As part of this, we’ve added a status effect system. Often the top tier upgrades provide some additional twist that makes your weapons and deployables even more effective. Here they are demonstrated by our (un)willing volunteer:


From left-to-right: poison, shock, burn, slow and bleed status effects. The latter is hard to capture in static form because it doesn’t drain health, but performs a ‘stab’ every X seconds so is a bit more explosive/aggressive compared to the others.

While we’ve only got round to applying these to the player’s weapons and deployables, at some point we’ll be giving the enemy these for some payback!

[h3]Upgrade Menu (again)![/h3]
Along the same theme, our previously implemented upgrade menu just wasn’t intuitive to use. We saw how well demo players responded to the Loadout menu and wanted to ensure it was of equal quality.

We’re part-way through that rework, so a bit will blend into December – but it’ll certainly be worth it as it’s much, much better.

Oh, and for those that are curious, every weapon, deployable and ability that you unlock is persistent to your profile. That means the more escape runs you play through, the more you’ll unlock and have available to choose from the beginning of subsequent runs. Conversely, each upgrade is reset at the start of a run, so you can choose what you invest your resources into upgrading during that run. This provides a nice sense of meta-progression as well as progression within a run.


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Reworking big systems like the Upgrades and the Upgrade menu is time consuming – but hopefully it helps demonstrate how important it is to the team that we make all aspects of SENTRY awesome.

December is a weird month in that we’ll be taking some time off for the holidays, but we’ll be sure to keep you updated on our progress.

Thanks for the support, and see you next time…

Hi everyone, we get a lot of questions around our release plans so I thought it was about time to talk about them!

The TLDR is that our goal is early 2024. I’ve got a much more specific time in mind, but I won’t give an exact date until I know it’s locked in. That’s because there are so many moving parts that’ll become clearer over the coming weeks and we’re always going to prioritise what’s right for the game rather than hitting arbitrary dates. As soon as it’s locked in, you’ll be the first to know :)

For those interested, here’s some additional context that has been influencing our thoughts:

• At the start of 2023 we’d hoped to release at the end of the year. That can be a tricky time because you only have a small window between the Autumn and Winter Steam sales, which are times where any release momentum you achieve gets obliterated by countless discounted games! That means you can’t delay from early December to late December; if you don’t make that early December window you need to wait.
  
• Next Fest was a fantastic success and the feedback was brilliant. It added a huge amount of polish tasks onto our already substantial list of work though! We’re a tiny team with one programmer, one artist, one designer and as we can’t throw people at the problem to get things done quicker, that only leaves time/release date as a changeable variable.
  
• Despite being an Early Access game, our first launch is important to get right. Making SENTRY as good as it can be really matters to us as a team, so we’d rather err on the side of caution and overshoot quality than risk anything else.
  

We’ll leave the demo up longer so you’ll at least be able to get your SENTRY fix while you’re waiting for release. It’s getting a bit out of date versus the version us and our playtesters are enjoying, however we need to be careful that updating the demo doesn’t detract from us making the main game. It’s certainly something for us to ponder.

I hope this helps provide transparency on everything we’re considering and trying to balance. Please know that every decision we make is always with sincere intentions for creating the best game as possible and as I mentioned above, we'll continue to communicate our plans as soon as they're locked. We’ve also got a lot of cool stuff in the pipeline we can’t wait to show you :)

From everyone at Fireblade, thanks for the support!

Hi everyone, another month whizzes by! Here’s what we’ve been doing in October:

[h3]Next Fest![/h3]
It feels like a long time ago now, but we released our demo on the 5th October and Next Fest commenced a few days later on the 9th. This week-and-a-bit was absolutely crazy – but in a very good way! You can read about how Next Fest went for us here.

There’s a lot of logistical work during these periods: we need to track who is covering us and what they thought of the demo, as well as logging every single piece of feedback that was posted on the Steam forums and our other channels. We’re already working through this list and we are incredibly appreciative of every comment because it helps us either improve the game or confirms where we’re on the right track.

We were very humbled by all of the people that played the demo and we never dreamed of being the 24th most popular Next Fest demo (out of 2336 games)!

[h3]Level Polish![/h3]
We’ve been running some private playtest sessions on our Discord server. Thus far these have been a combination of testing improvements to the two levels in Next Fest, as well as two other levels (Mess Hall and Engineering).

[h3]Optimisations![/h3]
Adam has done loads of optimisations since the Next Fest demo. While generally performance was good it could dip at busy moments (like the final wave). It’s these dips that feel especially bad so AI performance improvements were prioritised. There’s still more to be done here that we’ll squeeze in before release.

[h3]Main Game![/h3]
Focus has also naturally turned to the main game, so there’s been a lot of work on the campaign and a profile-based save system.

[h3]New Weapons![/h3]
We got asked a lot about upgrade systems and more weapon unlocks and in case you missed my responses or previous posts that discuss these – yes, we’re doing all that :)

These are the next few weapons in the pipeline to get made:


We’ll let you speculate on the primary/secondary fire of these…

Although not a player weapon (yet) we’re also in the process of expanding the alien weapons so there is a greater variety between enemy classes.



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See you next time...

Hi everyone,

Firstly, we wanted to extend a massive thank-you to all the people that played the demo for SENTRY. It was fantastic to read all of your comments and feedback. In most cases I've left a reply but rest assured we read each and every post even if I haven't responded.



I've been collating all the feedback into a giant mega-document that we'll go through and prioritise accordingly. If we don't get through everything before our Early Access release then we'll continue working on it through EA.

As the opening screen of the demo explains, this is but a taste of what is to come in the main game and we're excited to show you everything else that's coming. It won't be long to wait now...



As a small, self-publishing indie it can be hard to anticipate how well we'll do in these sorts of things. Next Fest completely surpassed our greatest expectations however - here's some stats:

• Over 40K people downloaded the demo!
  
• Obvious things to improve, but the vast majority of people had fun playing the demo - which is ultimately why we're all here :)
  
• We smashed through the 80K (net) Wishlist barrier! This is important, because hitting certain milestones here helps with future featuring on Steam. At the start of development I (half?) jokingly told the team we wouldn't release the game till we hit 100K Wishlists - it's in sight now!
  
• At the end of each Next Fest Valve posts up a top 50 list... and we made it to 24th! Considering there was 2336 participating demos, that's not bad...
  

An even more impressive achievement considering the game is being made by one programmer, one artist and one designer (not forgetting the one-week-per-month sound design and music, plus myself handling everything else). But ultimately, none of that happens without you and your support - so thank-you once again, and keep those Wishlists coming!

Gary, Alex, Adam, Sean, Mark & Barry

PS - we'll be leaving the demo up for a while to give people that missed it a chance to play. We'll give you a heads up before it comes down, most likely in November.

What better way to start the week and round out Next Fest then watching Team Lead Gary Burchell play through the SENTRY demo!