Stars of Icarus News

[p]Greetings Captains and Crews,[/p][p][/p][p]We’re so excited to say we’re going to be at PAX West with a first ever public look at Stars of Icarus! You’ll be able to get stuck into streamlined 3v3 combat live on the showfloor. [/p][p][/p][p]We’ll be at Booth 339 so be sure to stop by, blow up a few ships (your own accidentally or others intentionally), give some feedback and even be in for the chance of some goodies! [/p][p][/p][p]See you in the skies & see you at PAX[/p][p]Matthew[/p][p][/p][p][/p]

[p]Hi again! We’re busy prepping for Pax West at the end of the month. If you’re in the Seattle area, come check out our first convention for Stars of Icarus! So this week we’re going to talk about something a little different and do a look into the realities of game production, and why developers do things like closed alphas, technical tests, and betas.[/p][p]We’re just wrapping up our very first Pre-Alpha technical test with a small segment of the community. We learned a ton from it. And we got to show off the game to new players for the first time, who had a blast! (If you didn’t get a chance to test things out, keep an eye out, we’re planning to have some larger tests in the near future.) Keeping early tests small is a critically necessary part of scaling well. So let’s dive into what a technical test is for, how it’s different from an alpha or beta test, and how our first one went! Hope it gives you a bit of insight into why you see games have these long and complicated pre-release periods.[/p][p][/p][h3]Breaking Things at Scale[/h3][p]Often the earliest development version the public is likely to see from a game is a “technical test” version. In short, a technical test like the one we just ran is one designed primarily to see what breaks. Generally you see them in multiplayer games, because scaling a multiplayer game is really, incredibly hard. You see scaling break games all the time. No matter how much time, money, or testing goes into a game launch, you can’t escape day 1 server issues. Developers scramble to put out endless small patches, put up long queue times, and do emergency downtime maintenance just to try and tread water. Years of incredibly passionate work by skilled developers, new indies and veteran AAA alike, struggle under an unpredictable and untestable strain of excited players. We’re certainly no strangers to the experience.[/p][p]Guns of Icarus had its own uniquely turbulent launch. After several months of closed and open beta periods, launch day approached in October of 2012. But meanwhile down the coast, so approached Hurricane Sandy. A huge influx of every beta tester, all the kickstarter backers, and all the new players just getting in on the excitement jumped on to shoot some airships out of the sky. It brought the GoI master server to its knees. And horribly, hilariously, it slowed the match start countdown to a fraction of real time. Every nominal second of countdown took 10 to 20 seconds to actually tick down. Myself (just a community moderator at the time), and the rest of the moderator team at the time, thankfully were able to manually kickstart matches and skip the timer with cheat codes. But randomly pinging in global chat to summon a mod was hardly a real fix, and the dev team was hard at work trying to figure out what broke and how to fix it. But out their windows, Manhattan was being hit with a hundred year hurricane. And while a bug fix was fast to find, deploying it required a server sitting offline in an office downtown, and the floodwaters were making the city streets do a passable impression of Venice. The closest programmer took it on themselves to retrieve the build machine from the office, convince security to let him into the building as the city flooded, and the day was saved. A great story! Stop by our booth at PAX to get a much better rendition from my boss! But also the kind of thing you really never want to have happen.[/p][p]So, you do everything in your power to try and prevent things from exploding. You plan, you review your processes, you test, and you scale up slowly to make sure you catch when and where things break. You try to remove as many single points of failure as possible, like the GoI build machine. And just as importantly, you find out things you didn’t even need to know.[/p][p]With our Stars of Icarus technical test we made two pretty good discoveries right away. The first was just a bug where we’d never actually request a second server from our backend when we actually needed it. So we had a max of just one game per region when we first launched this test. Our second discovery: we actually had no idea how we push out patches in a live environment without doing full downtime. It’s something we’d chatted about before, but never actually had a full plan for. And so we were pretty rapidly learning, experimenting, and breaking things in real time, within hours of opening the test. But we were doing it in a very low risk environment.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][h3]Just the Right Amount of Risk[/h3][p]Risk is why we do such a small scale initial test. We only alerted a small portion of our community about this test, and made them jump through a few hoops to get in, just to make sure we were only testing one step at a time. Keeping things small is a necessity, because we know it will break, we just don’t know how yet. So when things absolutely, inevitably go wrong, the worst we can do is disappoint the 200 people we first invited. Thankfully for these testers, our big issues were handled nearly seamlessly, but only because we managed that risk properly. If we were under the weight of hundreds to thousands of concurrents, the game would have been entirely unplayable. Even if we had launched during peak hours, instead of mid workday, we’d have caused a fair bit more trouble right away. With any larger a test, we would have learned a lot less in the process, as we scrambled for the quick and dirty fixes trying to keep things running under strain.[/p][p]Another risk we’re basically always managing at this stage of development is PR. They say all press is good press, and that’s often true, but we were definitely staying a little camera shy for this test. It’s not that we don’t want to show things off, we’d love to, but we’re still at a point in development where there’s going to be really notable differences between what’s visible now, and what we launch with. From experience, what we put out now will stick with the game for the rest of its life. We once put out a few early development screenshots of our game Embr, and we had players and press sharing them well into release day news coverage. It looked almost like a different game at that point! [/p][p]Since this technical test was our biggest experiment since announcement, we don’t know what might explode and look terrible. So we played it safe, which allowed us to stay focused on technical needs. There’s still a lot of people that haven’t heard of Stars of Icarus yet, and we want their first impression to be a good one![/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]This was up all the time, so even if someone didn’t read literally anything we said, this would still show up in the screenshots. If it leaked, we had it plastered on the image that it wasn’t meant to be shared yet.
[/p][h3]Mission Accomplished[/h3][p]So for us, the technical test was a huge success! We broke just the right amount of things. And from what we saw, our testers were having a good time too. Far from perfect, but we were happy to see some good laughs and good matches at this point in development. There were also still a few total game breakers for some people’s PCs, and a couple big bugs that could ruin a match. Again within expectations, but still frustrating to deal with for testers. But when it all worked, we got some great gameplay feedback as well, even if it wasn’t the focus of this test for us.[/p][p]So what’s next? Alpha, beta, release? Well we’re still working on scheduling all of those things. We wanted to see how this test went before we went any further. We need to take full stock of what issues we still have, what feedback we need to action, and what we want to test next on the tech end. But given how the test went, the next time you see us testing we’re likely to move onto closed alpha testing.[/p][p]Compared to this technical test, an alpha means practically: letting more people in, focusing on more of the gameplay and balance changes we’ve been working on, and further increasing scale to something more in the shape of the final game’s server and backend needs. An alpha to us means the major systems are in. And in the background we finish game content, and start balancing the game for the complete design.[/p][p]Further down the line, beta is when we really nail down everything that’s going into release, make our final changes and fixes, and send as many people at it as we can get, to really find even more ways to break things under stress. Because building a game is all about breaking things one step at a time!

We hope to see you there later this year, and keep an eye on our discord for the latest info.

See you in the stars,[/p][p]Matthew[/p][p]Muse Games
[/p]

[p]Hello Captains and Crew, [/p][p]Welcome to the second installment of our hopefully monthly dev logs! This week we’re focusing on another big change in Stars of Icarus from the past Guns of Icarus games, the move from airship flight to spaceship flight.[/p][p][/p][p]The jump to space brought with it a pretty big question: how do the ships fly now? As a life long sci-fi and space lover, moving to full 6 degrees of freedom motion was always the goal if we could pull it off. But pulling it off certainly wasn’t a given!
[/p][h3]6 Degrees of Freedom[/h3][p]When we say 6 degrees of freedom, we’re talking about what axes you can control your ship in. There’s 3 spatial axes, and 3 rotational axes. Guns of Icarus was a 3 degree of freedom game. You could yaw the ship left and right, set the engines forward and back, and float up and down with the balloon. Stars of Icarus moves to 3 spatial axes with the addition of lateral thrusters, and 3 rotational axes with the ability to freely pitch and roll your ship.[/p][p][/p][p]Now there’s a pretty long history of space flight games with freedom to pitch and roll, but the vast majority of those have been heavily focused on “planes in space” type flight. Great inspiration for fighter combat for sure, but crewed ships? A lot less history to lean on. Not even that many larger ships with even the ability to roll and pitch freely. (For a personal favorite, see 2002’s Star Trek: Bridge Commander.) So we were treading, as we love to do, on some new ground. And the fastest way to know for sure was to start building it and find out. You can theory craft design all day, but there’s no replacement to having a prototype in your hands, so I got to work.[/p][p]An early 2023 prototype screenshot with crewed ship to ship combat[/p][p][/p][h3]Under Control[/h3][p]We learned a ton in the early stages of prototyping, which informed a lot of our design decisions throughout development. A few of the more important lessons included:  controls, managing the relationship between FPS Crewing to 3D Flight, and orientable level design. We also weighed our lessons against several of our design goals, including maintaining many of the slower, more naval combat elements of the Guns of Icarus series, and making sure the smaller crews of these 2 and 3 player ships got to make interesting decisions without being totally overwhelmed.
[/p][p]For controls, we knew we’d need a good mouse steering system to offer fighters the precision needed to both fly at speed and aim their front weapons at various enemy ships and components. But even moving some of those steering axes off the keyboard, still leaves a lot of bindings. Throttle for forward/back, lateral thrusters for up/down and left/right strafing, controls for rolling, and a few more miscellaneous keys for other game systems, didn’t leave a lot of axes or buttons left anywhere. And I’ve created a new problem… you can’t look around![/p][p][/p][p]What actually helped the most was leaning into the game design goals. The push for broadside combat meant we knew where we wanted pilots to be looking. So we kept building, and designed a freelook system that kept you looking where you set it, letting you line up a broadside with your camera and rotate and steer your ship relative to your camera direction. (We also built up a control scheme a little closer to Guns of Icarus for players mostly interested in flying those larger ships, freeing up the mouse for freelook in that control scheme as well.) But we weren’t out of the woods yet.
[/p][p]Looking out the broadside at an enemy[/p][p][/p][p]One of the things we learned after a bit, was that the relationship between your FPS-style controls walking around the ship and using the helm, had some limitations on ship design we had to really consider. Early attempts to put guns that fired directly upwards and downwards were cool and thematic, but were nearly impossible for the pilot to keep on target. You couldn’t easily track a target as it went under your feet or over your head. It was also pretty difficult for your crew to be looking in 6 directions for enemies while running around the ship fixing things. So we ended up keeping most of the guns on ships pretty even with the artificial gravity plane of the ship as well.[/p][p][/p][p]Staring at the floor… turns out it’s not a fun way to fly a ship[/p][p][/p][p]But those limits also clearly answered our questions about how these larger ships can interact with a 3D space and mobile enemy ships. They succeed by positioning themselves to engage swaths of the map with their broadside, aiming both the ships and the guns to keep targets in sight, and then moving the ship through the map to tactically change those engagements, coordinate with teammates, and try to keep control of the fight. All things we wanted to recapture from Guns of Icarus! And it also gave some really interesting shape to fighter v crewed ship combat. Fighters have some safer sides to approach from on the top and bottom, but if they make themselves too much of a problem, or fly poorly, a broadside will be quick to line up and take them out. And after adding a few other gameplay systems, we really brought out the hit and run fantasy of flying a fighter against these crewed ships. And on the crewed ship side, we managed to maintain the fun of flying a large ship with its tactical positioning and weighty firepower. All while the crew still kept the experience of manning the turrets and managing repairs.[/p][p][/p][h3]Designing Maps in Space[/h3][p]We learned a ton of new quirks of 3D level design as well for this game. There’s a lot of options when you make the leap into the void. Similar to ship layouts, we first tried playing around with everything fun it had to offer. From big spheres, toruses, and tubes, to dense asteroid fields, space stations, and caves. What we’ve found were the most successful designs though, were maps that had a really identifiable up and down direction. Without that visual reference locally, it’s a lot harder to know where you even can look, and which directions are useful to fly towards. On a large scale, it’s easy to get lost when so many directions and orientations look the same. So while we can bend and twist the levels, to give them some uniquely 3D combat environments, human beings still need to know roughly where the floor is. And while we were a little worried that limitation would make flying less interesting, there’s still plenty of obstacles and routes to navigate in 3D that matter a lot. Having a good grasp at flying through these levels without keeping your belly to the ground will let you pick options you couldn’t fly any other way. But your eye does need something to settle on, and clue you into what’s happening. We achieve that a little differently on some levels, but we try to always make it obvious which way around you’ve ended up.[/p][p][/p][p]Surprisingly, knowing where the floor is is more important when you’re upside down[/p][p][/p][h3]Zero-G Combat[/h3][p]Another thing that changed with the move to space was, well, a lack of gravity. And that had some impacts on the gunplay that we knew were going to need some attention. No gravity meant no bullet drop, which was a fun aspect to manage in Guns of Icarus. Thankfully another natural fit in a space setting ship combat game is projectile inheritance. While Guns of Icarus also featured projectile inheritance, the faster speeds of some ships, additional vertical movement, and additional rotation means that it plays a much larger role in gun combat in Stars of Icarus. Fighters, being the fastest, and being in direct control of the ship and gun at the same time have to be careful managing their momentum, much like an airship has to manage its height. Meanwhile the crew and pilot have to communicate and work together to prioritize targets, manage linear speeds and angular velocities, and manage ranges in order to get gunners in arc and firing without their shots flying wildly. It’s certainly not a one to one replacement for bullet drop, but we feel it adds a similar layer of skill to our array of weapons.
[/p][p]To hit a target all you need is bullet velocity, your own ship’s velocity, your rotational velocity, your enemy ship’s velocity, distance to the target, and some linear algebra. What could go wrong?
[/p][h3]Fighters vs Crews[/h3][p]Now I’ve mostly talked about our larger ships, but I did want to touch on fighters again really quickly. Fighters avoided a lot of the harder problems we ran into for larger ships. You’re pretty much always facing ahead, you move and reorient yourself more quickly. Plus we had a lot more reference points from both older and modern games to draw on to make flying a space fighter fun and intuitive. We didn’t end up with a fully Newtonian freely drifting gun on a gimble, nor did we end up with a WWII fighter in space, but somewhere in between with its own set of quirks and nuances you’ll need to pick up on. But once you’ve mastered it, you’ll be speeding through enemy lines, and drifting your way past an enemy frigate with your guns raining lead and plasma. Getting a grasp on managing your momentum and using your thrusters without overheating them will make you a difficult target to pin down, despite the fragile frame between you and the vacuum of space.[/p][p] So I hope that gives you some insight into the changes and attention we’re putting into adapting the Guns of Icarus series to full 6 degree of freedom space combat. It certainly wasn’t a fast process, and we’re still constantly learning how to make navigating these spaces and combat situations even more interesting, fun, and tactical. But it’s incredibly exciting to be able to make something really original, that still captures the magic of ship combat that makes the series unique.

Anyways I’m off. Need to go finish up some work on a sign up sheet for our first… well… you’ll see soon enough.

Stay tuned, and see you in the stars,[/p][p]- Matthew[/p]

[p]Hi everyone!

We’re super excited to finally be able to talk about what we’re working on next. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably watched the trailer, read the steam page, but still have some questions. We’re probably not ready to answer all the specifics, but we want to share with you why we’re making this game, what Stars of Icarus is at its heart, and why it’s still a Guns of Icarus game. Hope this blog helps you understand what has us so excited! Because we’re diving in deep![/p][p][/p][h2]Assemble Your Team[/h2][p]Stars of Icarus, at its heart, is a game about teamwork. Teamwork is something of a running theme for Muse Games, but even more so for the Guns of Icarus series. Every ship in Guns of Icarus was, at its best, a well oiled machine, a coordinated dance of gunfire, communication, and repair. But Guns of Icarus was also strict, and its worst it was drudgery, it was talking to your crew and forgetting about coordinating with your other pilots, it was not playing because you didn’t have 3 friends all online at the same time, it was failing because your one crew member messed up their one loadout slot 20 minutes ago. And that’s not even a criticism, because that’s that fantasy of a militant steampunk balloon that could fall to pieces at any moment, but could also be a gloriously brutal machine of destruction.[/p][p]But Stars of Icarus is our look at teamwork from a new angle. Stars of Icarus is coming at it from the other direction, where maybe you already have a crew, you have however many friends that are online, and you have the other players in your match. It’s about making it all work despite the fact you didn’t start this game with a Navy platoon and a copy of Art of War in your back pocket. Stars of Icarus is about the asymmetries of combat, and the power you bring to the table by working together, and leveraging the unique strengths of every ship, every player, and every decision. And it’s about making sure every player, in every role, is making meaningful, impactful decisions that feel coordinated, cohesive, and cool as hell.[/p][p]One of the key questions that really inspired us to this particular new design, is what Guns of Icarus’s teamwork looks like when you’re alone on a ship? What does that mean when you don’t have a crew? It means that your teammates, every ship in the game, has to pick up that slack and work together to keep you intact, and you have to work to keep them alive. When you’re in a fighter, you’re fragile, your firepower is a fraction of a larger ship, and if you aren’t with your team, you’re space debris. And despite all those weaknesses, you’re still valuable when you do work with your team, communicate, and coordinate attacks and retreats. Fighters are an expansion of what teamwork means to the game, not a contraction. [/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]And now we get to the really interesting consequences. Because bringing a fighter in, supporting more variable sizes of player groups, means your team isn’t just “two airships”. In just a 5 player team, you get squadrons of 5 fighters, or a 3 player frigate and a 2 player corvette, or a team of 2 corvettes and a fighter, etc. And then you put that against an enemy squadron. What do you do when you’re 2 crewed ships against a squadron of fighters? What do you do when you have a fighter running interception on your team and they die? Teamwork gets some very exciting new wrinkles, and they spread well beyond the efficiency of your own crew.

But of course, your own crew still matters a lot, and we’ve put plenty of work into making sure the crew experience comes with a ton of interesting decisions and skillful time and resource management. Coordination between captain and crew is as important as ever. Prioritizing gunning, repairs, systems, and components is a team effort, both with the captain, and the team. Stars of Icarus introduces a few new systems and decision points that both influence how you manage your own ship, and how your ship as a whole is engaging with combat. We’re introducing automated systems into Stars of Icarus that reward preparation and teamwork, and allow your crew and ship to further specialize and coordinate with your team. Preparing your ship for combat, managing those resources while you’re fighting, making decisions about how weapons, repairs, and power systems are prioritized are all key skills. In a lot of ways, we’ve tried to trim out roles that didn’t involve teamwork or decision making. We didn’t want you to be glued to the hull, or never get off the front gun. Because that’s not the kind of teamwork we’re chasing on this project.[/p][p][/p][p]

Now onto what might seem like a bit of a tangent, art style. We know, it’s a big departure from the steampunk of past games. And yeah, anime isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But it’s as core to this game as balloons are to Guns of Icarus. Aesthetics both inform the design of a game, and help communicate those designs and systems to its players. And the world and game we’re building here is one heavily and deeply rooted in the kind of anime that we at Muse grew up watching. The action, the pacing, the themes of camaraderie, all tie in through the aesthetic of 90s anime we’ve chosen.

When a fighter swoops in and fires a laser at your shields and lighting your guns on fire, the sights, the sounds, and the experience of reacting to those events all tie into a shared aesthetic. It helps you understand the game and the world. You see the sci fi laser, you see the glow of the shield, you see the flash of warning lights inside your ship. You understand because of the aesthetic, not through the mechanics. When you and your wingman fly into combat, and they fly too close to an enemy broadside, burst into a mist of metal shrapnel, and you’ve gotta hit the boosters and get out of there, it’s informed by the visuals, the music, the feeling of speed you get. Even the feeling of succeeding at repairing a gun, extinguishing an engine, it’s all tied together the same way. It’s the feeling of sitting, watching a VHS tape of Gundam, or Dragon Ball Z, and seeing the coolest thing your 12 year old brain has ever seen in your life, and wishing you were those characters and their friends succeeding and failing, together. The ships, maps, characters, colors, speeds, sizes, and more all work to evoke those feelings. And they’re serving the same goal as the design, mechanics, and balance of the game.

Because that’s the heart of every Guns of Icarus game. That’s the heart of Stars of Icarus. Working with friends and with strangers, to keep your ship flying, together.

Hope that helped you get a feeling for what we’re trying to build and how we’re getting there! Now for me, I’ve got to get back to work finishing the game. See you all soon, be it on the Discord, on Steam, or hopefully soon in some playtests and betas!

See you in the stars,
Matthew, for the Muse Games team
[/p]

[p]Greetings Captains and Crews of the Stars,

Without further ado, allow us to present… Stars of Icarus.
[/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]Revealed at the PC Gaming Show, Stars of Icarus is a game we’ve been working on for some time now. We couldn’t be more proud and excited to present this spiritual follow-up to the Guns series to the world.

Assemble your crew and take to the stars in Stars of Icarus, where team-based PvP dogfights are your key to conquering the cosmos. Hop into hand-crafted maps and engage in nail-biting team battles of 5 versus 5 players in three different game modes: Team Deathmatch, Bounty, and Capture the Flag. Dodge asteroids, navigate junkyards, complex space stations and more as you seek your objective.

[dynamiclink][/dynamiclink]We can’t wait to jump online and dive into the Stars together in 2026. On that note, be sure to join our Discord, which has received a new coat of paint and where we’ve also put together a handy FAQ about the game. We will be hosting a few play sessions in Guns with the team there and it’s the perfect place to meet new folks to join your crew. [/p][p][/p][p]See you in the Stars, [/p][p][/p][p]- The Team at Muse Games[/p]