Blackout Protocol News

Agents,

As Steam celebrates the limitless fun brought by roguelite games with the Endless Replayability Fest, Blackout Protocol is offering a 30% discount for more Agents to join the fray that is Section 13.

If you’re still on the fence about getting the game, make sure you read up on more roguelite elements coming to the game in the near future–such as the roadmap we shared, as well as the recent dev logs like this, this, or this. It’s your chance to enjoy the best of both worlds: the tight gameplay now, and even more fun later!

If you have been a faithful S2P agent, grab your friends and get ready for the great and yet-to-be-revealed content in the future.


- ODS Team

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Hello, this is the Creative Director of Blackout Protocol, Jaeeun Park.

Today, we're going to talk about a new meta that you'll encounter while playing the game: body modifications.

In its current state, Blackout Protocol has two big pillars that shape playstyle: Synaptic Enhancements and Weapon Perks. Both are focused on linear growth, especially damage efficiency. This naturally leads players to optimize their DPS above all else. Also, since both types of upgrades exclusively provide benefits, the task of balancing player damage increase and baseline enemy strength has required meticulous reviews and tweaks.

[The new Body Mod Voucher item and the repurposed terminal]

To address these issues and add more freeform flexibility to gameplay, we’ve decided to implement a body modification system, and make some overhauls to weapon perks.

Upon collecting a Body Mod Voucher and redeeming it at a terminal, you’ll be given a choice between two mods. Each mod contains a random selection of advantages and disadvantages. These aren’t based on your current game progress or persistent growth status, which means that with some lucky draws, it’s entirely possible to wind up with a pretty extreme build—like taking on harsh penalties in exchange for drastically reducing your reload speed, or cranking up your firing speed until your gun is a nonstop laser of lead.

[Body Mod system UI in the current work-in-progress development build. While some text is still in Korean, you can see what type of stats you are choosing from—especially seeing the list of Body Mods applied before the current selection]

Once we finish our work on these four systems—Agent Upgrades, Synaptic Enhancements, Body Modifications, and Weapon Perk overhauls—players can look forward to a wider variety of viable playstyles.

We know updates have slowed a bit lately, and we thank you for your understanding while we work hard on implementing this and other major changes. We will continue to communicate as new updates roll out.

Thank you for your support.


- Jaeeun

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You know all those changes we listed in roadmap? Well, we already set some of them into motion and started putting them into a private build to play and test out. And we wanted to share what we have with you guys!

Our Discord members actually received a first exclusive look today within our server. We shared what Blackout Protocol is currently looking like within the development process.
If you’re not already in our Discord server, what are you waiting for?



If you did miss our Discord stream, don't worry. We’ll also be streaming on Thursday, April 25, 2024, at 3PM PDT on Twitch, YouTube, and Kick, showing off some of these changes and updates that we made so far!
Note: this build is still a work in progress, so we may come across unpolished text, small glitches, etc., but we couldn’t wait any longer and wanted to show you how it’s been going!

Make sure you stop by our stream to say hi and see what we’ve cooked up so far!
We’re hoping to make this a more consistent occurrence where we stream sneak peeks of what the future of the game holds, so make sure you follow us on our socials!
Can’t wait to take you around the newest Section 13.

Until then,
ODS Kangaroo

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Hello, this is Jaeeun Park, Creative Director of Blackout Protocol.

Have you had a chance to look at the roadmap we announced as we hit the PAX East floor?
I hope you give it a read as I tried to give a lot of detail and show you what to expect in 2024, on our road to the official launch.
We received a lot of feedback at PAX but we always look forward to hearing our players' thoughts so please check it out and let us know what you think.

Anyway, in this dev log, we’re going to talk about levels.

Over the last two years of development, our game has gone through a lot of changes in terms of our philosophy of level design.

In our current approach, each level has a conceptual framework (e.g. a warehouse full of shipping containers). This is then subdivided into multiple mini-areas, and we use randomized variants of these mini-areas (or the whole level) to give the player some variety from run to run.



This approach has had benefits. It’s let us make the overall presentation of levels really authored and visually pretty, avoiding that feeling that sometimes arises from roguelikes heavy on procedural content, where it feels like an endless stream of the same content, over and over.

But this approach also has some drawbacks. Now that the game has been out in the wild for a while, feedback from our players has shown us that the way we’ve approached things so far gives us limited flexibility when designing new content.

So: we’re rethinking our overall approach to level design, to expand our toolbox as designers, and provide more interesting gameplay experiences to you, the player.

Moving forward, our current thinking is to keep the levels we have, but remix the structure, by adding a bunch of new branching routes between them. And in these new routes, we’ll crank up the amount of procedural content. Essentially, we’re taking what we already have and building outward and on top of it, in the hopes of a result that gives players the best of both worlds.

That all sounds a little confusing, so here’s a picture that sums it up better (with some tactfully placed question marks to avoid spoilers):



With a top-down shooter like this, the simplest version of procedural generation would be to just string together a bunch of areas with randomly generated interiors – two ammo kits here, 3 standard enemies there, etc.

We actually tried an approach like this about two years ago, back when the game was in alpha. But we moved away from it pretty quickly because, frankly, it was pretty boring as there was no cohesive sense of how these areas were connected.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]



Since those early days, we’ve spent a lot of effort to enhance our procedural generation system, aiming to heighten the fun and overall experience it provides. And I'm happy to report that we’re starting to see concrete results. Instead of merely connecting areas randomly from the start to the end, we are implementing procedural generation of elements such as secret rooms and challenge rooms, fostering exploration of the levels.

While that may still sound a little simple, I believe that by incorporating the unique characteristics of each map into the system, the end result will yield very interesting levels indeed.

All of which is a very long way of saying: We're working hard to get new level content in your hands as soon as possible, and we hope you’ll enjoy it.

- Jaeeun

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Agents,

Our team headed back to Boston this year to share Blackout Protocol once again. Since our last public event at PAX West, we've made so many adjustments to the gameplay mechanics, difficulty balance, and more.

We announced our new roadmap, which shows off what our team has planned for the future of Blackout Protocol. While we weren't able to show these exact changes during PAX, we were still able to show off how the game has changed over time.


We met so many new players that have never heard of Blackout Protocol before, but loved shooters or roguelike games in general. We also got to talk to a lot players that played the game before, whether that was at home or even at a previous PAX. We were so happy we got to see our amazing friends again.


Of course we handed out sweet swag to our players for demoing that game. We handed our red tote bags for you to hold all your PAX goodies, as well as foam swords for those who had demoed Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch.


A lot of you had shared your feedback and even suggestions on the game, which we take to heart. As you can tell, a lot of our game updates have been highly influenced by player feedback, which is something we are proud to say.


We are so excited to continue to work on this game throughout Early Access and beyond. We hope that all of you will come join us for the ride, and continue to share your thoughts with us.

Until we meet again in person, we'll see you in Section 13!

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ODS Kangaroo

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2111870/Blackout_Protocol/