Steambirds Alliance News

Hello fellow pilots! Now that the launch insanity has finally quieted down a little bit, we're getting back to our regular schedule of weekly updates. ːsteamhappyː Here's what this update has in store for you:

• The Temple now contains Altar Rooms. On your way to the boss, you'll find two new rooms with an altar, which will trigger a horde of minions plus an evil curse, such as:
  • +50% greater damage received
  • -90% steam
  • Zero health and steam regen
  • +50% greater susceptibility to burn damage
• New enemies: The Altar Rooms have several new unique enemies.
• Small improvements to existing enemy movement

Both the Engineer's turrets and skills have been significantly revamped:

• Turrets fire much more rapidly now, have higher base damage, and their bullets are faster too.
• The turret gun has a cooldown now; it fires for 2 seconds and pauses for 1 second.
• Engineer Skill 1A still causes turrets to lay down covering fire around you, but now the turrets turn more quickly and have MUCH more health when using this skill, in addition to +5% damage.
• Engineer Skill 1B eliminates the turrent gun's 1s cooldown (so it fires 33% more bullets - aka lots more damage.)
• All other Engi skills (2X through 4X) have also been altered significantly, in order to hopefully present more interesting choices.

• Converted Blaster Skill 1A into a powerful stacking maneuver that can give you up to +60% DPS for a limited time.
• Blaser Skill 2B ice burst now has piercing.
• Rebel City anti-lag and anti-grief changes which include disabling maneuvers, projectiles and secondary abilities, both to speed things up and also to prevent hackers and griefers from attempting to use those things to harm an entire RC.
• Reduced visual intensity of new Epic Paladin VFX.
• Imperial zone Sentinel: Lower DPS, larger vulnerability window, and lower spawn rate will hopefully make these less impossible-feeling.
• Lowered DPS of all elemental swords by 10%.

As you can imagine, the vast majority of our engineering time just went into making sure the servers were working OK. We look forward to doing more polish/feature engineering work (plus bugfixes of other types) in the coming weeks!

By the way, in case you were wondering if its "simple" to create and operate an MMO like this one, I thought I'd share the engineering dashboard that we built from scratch in order to help us monitor and improve server health. While we were getting rate-limited by Amazon AWS last week and going nuts trying to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it, we ended up enhancing this dashboard a bunch to help with the troubleshooting process (which it did.) Check it out:



This dashboard is just one of approximately half a dozen tools that we use to maintain this game's backend (others include our database administration system, our anti-cheat system, etc.) The backend to Steambirds has cost us, conservatively, at least several hundred thousand dollars in addition to a few years of our lives. So, yeah, it's not easy.

The next few weeks will have similar updates to this one with nice new (not huge) polish / feature / balance improvements, and then at the end of September we'll do a major update. The contents of that update are still a secret but you can be sure it'll include some exciting, entirely new content! And then, a month after that update, we're hoping to be able to ship the guild system (Flocks) that we've been talking about for a few months now.

Thank you again to all of you who played this week; ya'll are the best! ːsteamhappyː

We are launching Steambirds Alliance out of beta today (August 22). After almost six years of development, it has become a full-fledged MMO with lots of polished content, unique bosses, and a kind of heavily-cooperative gameplay that is rare in today’s world. We couldn’t be prouder to see it finally, officially released!

OK, so that’s what Steambirds is. But this post is about why we made Steambirds. Specifically, why this game? Spry Fox has been making games for a decade. Heck, Daniel has been designing games for over 25 years. We could have chosen to make any number of games, including many that would have been significantly less effort. So… why?


Steambirds was born from a very basic belief: Games can bring people together.  An online game like an MMO is more than just a brief consumed experience like a book or a movie. It’s a shared space where like-minded people can meet up, get to know each other, and ultimately form meaningful friendships. 

The truth of the matter is that in this modern world, there are a lot of people who could use a friend. Or even if they have enough friends, they could use a place to spend more time with them. There’s a ton of research demonstrating that lonely people often suffer from poor health, depression, and/or anxiety. Friendship is the antidote. 

So it occurred to us: what if we made a game that was all about connecting with and cooperating with others? A game with only two teams, and all the players are together on the same side. Many years ago, we had the opportunity to explore that very idea when we co-developed Realm of the Mad God. Our experience making RotMG only strengthened our interest in cooperative games. But then we were forced to walk away from RotMG, well before we’d fully explored all our ideas. And we weren’t prepared to give up just yet. Thus came Steambirds Alliance.


Making SBA a great game where everyone can enjoy time with friends is easier said than done. Online games can easily become toxic places dominated by trolls and cheaters if you don’t make enough effort to prevent that.

So we’ve spent a lot of time building pro-social mechanics and tech into the very foundation of Steambirds. Things like:

• Jump in and play: There’s no minimum amount of time you need to play Steambirds per session. You won’t ruin it for anyone else if you pop in and out in 15 minutes. We want Steambirds to be like a club room (or the bar “Cheers”, if you remember that) where it’s easy to hang out for 5 minutes or for an entire evening. 
  
• Shared XP and Loot: No kill or loot-stealing. No dividing up limited XP– everyone gets 100% of the pie. We don’t want this game to make you angry at others.
  
• Ad Hoc grouping: Teleport instantly to other players. There’s no real waiting and arbitrary gating. 
  
• ‘Better together’ game balancing: You almost always benefit from playing with another player. Even if they are playing “selfishly”, there’s a decent chance that they will end up helping you accidentally. And eventually, there’s also a decent chance that they will realize they’ll be more successful if they stop playing selfishly!
  
• Trade: You can trade most of the things you can find in the game. You can even trade gold, the game’s “hard currency.” Trade has brought people together for thousands of years – it shouldn’t be a surprise that it can do so in games as well.

This is just the start. We’ve got big plans to expand the social features of Steambirds in future releases. We’ll be experimenting with new ways to have fun with the people you care about. Helping people build and enjoy friendships is the most important point of the game from our perspective. 


You often hear a common complaint on forums across the Internet that game developers are greedy; that they just want to make money. But money isn’t what defines success for us on this project. For us, it goes back to the ‘why’ of building Steambirds.

Every single member of the Steambirds team could be earning a lot more money doing something other than making games. You don’t become an indie game developer because you love money (unless you really don’t understand probability!) You become an indie game developer because you love games, and hopefully the people who play them too.

We’ve funded Steambirds out of our own pockets. There’s no “evil publisher.” There’s no venture capitalist demanding a return on their investment. It’s just us and our life savings.

We could have taken our earnings from our previous games and put them in the stock market and retired a little earlier. Instead, we took that money and we made you this game. Because we want you to have a fun place to be with your friends. We want to reduce the loneliness in the world a little bit if we can. 

For Spry Fox, success to us means achieving three big goals: 

• Earning enough to pay for hosting and ongoing development. We want SBA to keep running for a long time. In-game purchases go towards making SBA self-sustaining. There is very little chance that it will make us rich, but we hope that it will at least pay our bills, take care of our teammates, and let us keep this game alive for you. 
  
• Entertaining our players for years to come. We want SBA to be a joyful place for you to hang out! You probably have a lot going on in your life. SBA should be a place where you can take a break, have a laugh and feel welcome. And maybe blow up a giant cat mecha while you’re at it.
  
• Helping players build and enjoy friendships. This also means we’ll try to have low tolerance for toxicity.
  
  • Please help us with this. If you see someone being toxic, ask them politely to cut it out. If they won’t, you can report them. Spry Fox will do everything we can, but we’re just a handful of people and we can only do so much.
    
  • In general, try to be the best and kindest person you can be. Everyone has a bad day (or week, or month) sometimes and they could use our understanding and support too.
    
  • TLDR: if we want this community to stay awesome, we have to work together to do it. Everyone plays their part!
    

We’ve been building towards a game like SBA our entire careers. From the very first day we started Spry Fox, we’ve tried to live up to our motto of ‘Making Happiness’. 

And part of that is making a fun game. So we’ve spent a bunch of years learning to make polished, fun games. Games that at this point have been played by tens of millions of people.

But that isn’t enough. We also want to make the world a better place. Not just provide a few minutes of hedonistic pleasure, but an actual, positive change in the world. 

We learned how to build MMOs. We started with RotMG, and Steambirds is built off a similar design philosophy. But building MMOs, especially real-time bullet hell MMOs, is very hard. Probably the hardest type of game development by an order of magnitude. The sort of thing that big companies — like EA or Bungie — still struggle to pull off with teams and budgets massively larger than ours. MMO development can kill a company. 

It took us much longer than we thought it would, but we persevered. We don’t always get everything right, but we care enough to at least try as hard as we can. And we are going to keep trying, and keep improving, for as long as the world allows us to. We can imagine no better way to spend our time on this planet than growing a positive, low toxicity community with all of you. Because you matter to us more than you can possibly know.

So here we are. Steambirds is on the verge of launch. Let’s see what the future brings!

With all our love, 
Spry Fox

The moment has arrived! In the next couple hours, we will be shipping our first major update of the open beta. You already know about some but not all of it… we wanted to surprise you!




Let’s start with what you already know: the Meowza 2 (M2) encounter. As previously announced, when Meowza’s infamous mech is defeated, there is a large (but not 100%) chance that Rebel spies will successfully lock onto Meowza’s signal in her inner sanctum. If this happens, a special Rebel carrier will appear which leads to Meowza herself! (Note: it is not currently possible to proactively increase the chances of the special carrier appearing, but in a future update it will be possible to actually help the Rebel spies lock onto Meowza’s signal. We’d love to hear your ideas/suggestions for how this could work, please share your thoughts in our Discord!)

Sarge will not allow pilots onto the special carrier unless they have sufficiently upgraded their planes or have reached a pilot rank of 90. This is to prevent over-eager Rebel recruits from throwing away their valuable aircraft in a completely futile (if courageous) assault against M2 in her ultimate place of power.

Inside the M2 encounter, you will first be confronted by upgraded versions of the Three Brothers. Some of their individual attacks have been upgraded to be more deadly, and they also have new joint attacks that they inflict at key moments in the battle. Those who survive this battle will need to fight their way through a hallway filled with elite unites before boarding a final carrier, which takes you to Meowza’s secret temple.

You’re not fighting a remote-controlled mech at this point. You’re fighting Meowza herself, who’ll be wielding ancient technologies against you that are so powerful, they might as well be magic. I could tell you more, but you might as well just watch the encounter play out:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Meowza currently drops one new Special Legendary weapon (at the usual very low rate) and has a guaranteed T10 drop. There is a small but significant chance that the T10 drop will be a modified T10 armor, called “M2 Armor”, that is stronger than normal and/or has special stat buffs.



This part’s the surprise! In addition to M2, we’ve also added what we’re calling “dungeon mods” to this update. These mods are being applied to all of the hardest (T10) dungeons in the game (except The Dig, which will also be getting mods of a slightly more complex variety in the future.)

Mods can be “normal”, “difficult” and “lethal”. 60% of the time when a dungeon spawns, it will spawn as a “normal” dungeon, which has mods which are intended to make you play a bit differently than you normally do, not necessarily to make the dungeon more difficult. For example, the normal “In Your Face” mod, which significantly reduces the cost of your maneuver but also makes you take a bit more damage from enemy bullets.

30% of the time that a dungeon spawns, it will be a “difficult” dungeon. Difficult mods definitely make a dungeon harder, but also reward you with double the upgrade drops as well as **3x** the drop chance for all other major rewards from the boss. For example, the rare “Nearsighted” mod significantly zooms in the camera, making the dungeon feel claustrophobic, while the “Rush Hour” mod increases your superspeed by +50% while making you take +30% more damage from enemy bullets.



10% of the time that a dungeon spawns, it will be a “lethal” dungeon. Lethal mods make a dungeon extremely dangerous; unprepared players should probably bail on them immediately. Those who brave the dungeon are rewarded with double the upgrades and a **7x** drop chance for all other major rewards. For example, the lethal “Dead to the World” mod completely disables your Steam so you can’t use maneuvers or abilities while also increasing the damage you take by +20%.

At the current time it is not possible to intentionally spawn a lethal dungeon, but in the future we intend to make crafting lethal dungeon keys a possibility.
Other Changes

There are quite a few other changes in this build as well, some of them quite significant:

• Menu buttons have been shrunk a bit so that you don’t have to needlessly scroll a lot.
  
• Teleporting to a player who subsequently enters a portal will leave you at the spot right outside the portal instead of nullifying the teleport or putting you inside a dungeon without warning.
  
• All new Meowza battle music!
  
• Pilot Skills UI can now be filtered by aircraft class.
  
• Grand Lion is no longer susceptible to water damage and no longer drops T9s but its Stiffener drop rate has been increased to compensate
  
• Machine Gun skill 4B (aka “Social Agility”) has been changed to: +20% turn rate, +5% superspeed, and +5% camera view
  
• Hog skill 1B (aka “Stoic”) has been renamed to “Fast Exit” and changed to: On maneuver: +30% superspeed for 3s duration
  
• Sword skill 3B now uses “postAdd” instead of “Add” math.
  
• The max distance you can be from a quest target or a boss when it dies in order to qualify for quest completion and/or XP has been increased by 50%. This should eliminate the complaints we’ve been getting about not getting credit when you should.
  
• Reduced the delay on teleporting to the Rebel City from 3s to just 1s. (The delay for player-to-player teleport remains 3s.) The old 3s delay didn’t seem to impact veteran players, it just hurt new players. Not much point in that. Also, a 1s delay will make M2 a little less terrifying.
  
• The Re-ed dungeon miniboss no longer shoots misleadingly tiny, deadly projectiles.
  

And of course, we did a lot of work on the servers and our backend tools, as usual. That never stops.
Last Word

We hope you enjoy this update! We look forward to your feedback on it and will plan to address any bugs or balance issues that may have escaped our attention in testing over the next couple weeks. Aside from that, we’ll be focused mainly on improving server performance and stability for the next several weeks, plus any balance changes that are needed to the game overall, as we prepare to officially launch SBA on Steam in the very near future. 🙂

Hi folks! Sorry its been quiet on the blog; we’ve been focused mainly on communication via Discord, but will try to be better about communicating here as well in the future. 🙂 That said, if you haven’t already joined our Discord community, you really should. We even have a nifty vanity URL now!

This upcoming beta build has a first rough pass at rebalancing elemental attributes. It is *NOT* complete, but is a large part of the way there and we figured might as well start testing it sooner rather than later. What’s missing is a rebalance of several elemental dungeons (mostly the fire and lightning ones). What we *have* rebalanced is: Frozen Owl Monastery, Super Secret Base, Temple of Bast and Venom Compound.

Things that have changed for the aforementioned elements & dungeons:

• Halved the # of elemental upgrades to max. Applies to both damage and defense.
  
• Decreased the droprate of upgrades by something like 40% give or take across all sources.
  
• Doubled the strength of elemental attack upgrades.
  
• Tripled the strength of elemental resistance upgrades.
  
• Enemies in rebalanced dungeons no longer do combo elemental/physical damage. It’s 100% elemental now.
  
• Enemies in rebalanced dungeons are inflicting 50% more damage.
  
• Enemies in rebalanced dungeons effectively have 50% more health.
  

Other, unrelated changes:

Content:

• Assault’s bash now reduces damage from enemy bullets by 40% for the duration of the maneuver
  
• Quad/Paladin’s maneuver is shielded (temp for Paladin, as we hope to change its maneuver someday)
  
• Duster’s base health reduced by 10%
  
• Dagger Knight: Shorter shield phases on T0-T9 Shield Blasts (lasts longer as you tier up)
  
• Bomb Factory: Many new rooms (which won’t all spawn in any given run)
  
• Bomb Factory: New “bomb fuse” unit, tweaks to enemies to make them work better with bombs
  
• Reeducation Camp: Many new rooms & new “heat vent” traps
  
• Reeducation Camp: Added “anti-rushing barricades” in various places.
  
• Removed XP farm exploit on Soul Collector quest
  
• Made requirements for Vault quest less error prone.
  
• Raised “Prison Box” quest item drop rate
  
• Removed all T2-T6 dungeon keys from store
  

UI:

• Show item info when you mouseover an item in the trade screen
  
• Only show damage number fly-ups for the local player
  
• Added option to control whether clicking a radar icon initiates a teleport. Defaults to disabled.
  
• Tweaked visuals of item equip popups
  
• Raw dungeon names no longer displayed in friend locations.
  
• Fixed item info panel sometimes sticking around after closing Storage.
  
• Immediately join friends on different servers via the Friend List or /tp or /teleport command.
  
• Mini friends online list displays correct number of online friends total.
  
• When you accept or try hand-in a giver quest, make it your active quest
  
• Don’t show events and news in new user flow
  

Other:

• Debug information now has a graph for memory usage (managed memory, assets and similar are not included)
  
• Optimized plane outlines; should look nicer and impact perf less
  
• Added graphics settings option to override antialiasing level
  
• Combined mouse and keyboard controls into one keybinding menu (finally!)
  
• Fixed binding modifier keys (CTRL/Alt/Shift) as solo inputs.
  
• Can now bind individual modifiers + keys (CTRL + A, etc.) Note: some existing bindings have been reset.
  
• Gamepad controls only show when a gamepad is connected.
  
• Extend initial connection timeout to 1s to avoid some unnecessary reconnection attempts.
  
• Minor bug fix where some dungeon room orientations weren’t considered
  
• Lots of random little bugfixes and changes to help future development
  
• Better logging for quests, to help diagnose crafting cancellation bug
  

ART EXPERIMENT:

• Higher tiers of machine guns (up to T10) shoot cooler-looking bullets, but only you see them; other players still see the less-noisy versions we’re all accustomed to. If this seems cool, we’ll do this for all the other guns too.
  

Last but not least, we’re finally starting to showcase our character art more! Check out this sweet new keyart that we’re using as the Discord banner. 🙂

What’s happening in those birdplane filled skies? Let’s talk turkey.

The long foretold moment is nearly upon us, the server wipe. But fear not, those of you with keys to the Steambirds Domain, all is not lost; your gold, hangar slots, RC storage, unlocked planes, and stored crafting materials will not be wiped. Be sure to store items you want to keep in your RC storage! What will be wiped is your planes, your Pilot XP, and scrap. So you better spend that scrap!

This wipe will be happening tomorrow, THURSDAY, so prepare yourself! (originally posted here)

Following the wipe we will be having weekend (Friday - Sunday, starting 10 AM PST) closed beta tests to keep the game in tip-top shape and make sure that everything is well tested when we finally open the servers to the world at large! If you have a key, this’ll be your chance to explore the skies before the rest of the flock arrives, and gain the knowledge you need to help the Steambirds Alliance defeat the hordes of evil cats lead by Meowza. Eventually, the weekend beta tests will become open to the public, but that’s at least a few weeks away.



In the land of patch notes, here are last week’s changes:

Art:

• New Icons for quest items
  

Weapons:

• Shotgun: -10% DPS at long range, and up to +55% DPS when fired point-blank (closer to +20% DPS at mid-range). Has not been applied to URs yet.
  
• Phantom Curtain (Nerf): DPS -25%
  
• Scythe of Zed (Nerf): DPS -5%. (Oh, yeah... some items have been named after the Oct Competition winners!)
  

Skills:

• Hog 1A (Nerf):
  
  • Armor below 50%: Cooldown: -42-50%, Secondary Steam Cost: +10%
    
  • Armor below 20%: Secondary Steam Cost: -60%
    
• Medic 4A (Buff): Now only -20% armor
  
• Arc skills (Nerf): Reduced range boosts by roughly -15%
  
• Blaster 2A (Buff): Now only -50% damage
  
• Blaster 2B (Buff): Now only -10% armor
  
• Blaster 3B (Buff): Now only -40% turnrate
  
• Blaster 4X (Buff): Now only -10% armor
  
• Machinegun 1A (Complete rework): Range -10%, Cooldown -21-30%
  
• Machinegun 1B (Complete rework): Range +36-45%, Cooldown +10%
  

Other:

• Nerfed Chariot Judge's race track damage
  

We’ve also had a few mini-patches since the last blog post, so if you’re not in the SBA discord and missed those details, this is all that happened since the last blog post:

Misc:

• Bigger island: Landmass increased by +50%, setpiece boss population +35%. This is in preparation for open beta, when servers will be fuller.
  
• Super Secret Base: Made non-boss versions of Omega squadron, spawns as normal enemy in.
  
• The Vaults: Removed outdated warnings about X-Mines.
  
• Lowered tier of Drill Sgt to fix cat skull showing bug
  
• Fixed units that were talking too much in Catipede Nest
  
• Added 'return home' states to non-boss Overworld enemies
  
• Updated some crafting material descriptions to include instructions for use
  
• Fixed chat / maneuver exploit.
  
• Fixed more of the keybinding bugs.
  

Difficulty updates:

• Difficulty parameters tweaked. Intended result is, brand new players find the game a bit easier, and ultra-pros should find the game a bit more difficult.
  
• Negative difficulty scaling nerfed; should in theory stop giving unneeded help to veteran players with lots of skills and items.
  

Player class/weapon updates:

• Skill: Buffed Old Faithful 3-A and 4-A
  
• Skill: Buffed Machinegun 3-B, now adds steam instead of armor
  
• Skill: Nerfed Machinegun 1-B
  
• Duster spin attack: Now works with Elementals and Ultra Rares. Duster spin attack: Raised low tier damage, lowered high tier damage.
  
• Buffed Engineer's turrets. Stays alive for 50% longer
  
• Fire Orbs I and II: Changed color
  
• Arc guns: Skills that increase arc range have been nerfed by roughly -15%
  
• Engineer turret: Bullet speed increased 2x (range unchanged), turning speed increased +33%.
  

Boss updates:

• Meowza: Added new attack phase "nuke strike," removed final nuke attack after death
  
• Doomsday: Made it so nuke kills all minions
  
• Overseer Charles: Fixed hitbox
  
• Rei: Nerfed grid nodes that were dealing too much damage
  
• Bomb Maker: Slight buff to armor
  
• Noble Politician: Slight increase movement speed
  
• Phoenix: Adjusted gun mounts
  
• Buff to tutorial bosses armor, added fanfare on kill