Steambirds Alliance News

We’re back for the third week in a row with another update! This update is primarily focussed on more polish and bug fixes to help you with your all your Steambirding needs. We hear Parker over in the pub is looking more snazzy than ever and keen to see you again!

• Fixed Paladin sword issue (hotfixed)
  
• Fixed Dagger Knight cooldown shield issues (hotfixed)
  
• Fixed some more issues with cooldowns (hotfixed)
  
• Unique art for each dungeon key
  
• Optimized meshes to improve event boss and dungeon performance
  
• Skill balance: Wasp 2B: Changed on-kill reward from health to steam
  
• Skill balance: Medic 2B: Lowered health penalty
  
• Skill balance: Raptor 2B: Lowered DPS penalty
  
• More updates to VFX / polish improvements: Venom Compound, The Vault, Temple of Bast, Super Secret Base, The Dig
  
• Added new attack phase to Bast Statue miniboss
  
• Fixed bug where high-tier Shield Blasts and Flak Cannons were considered common
  
• Reduced Tesla arc range by -16%
  
• New NPC poses for conversations in the Rebel City
  
• A few more plane variant names/descriptions
  
• No longer possible to double-interact with items in storage.
  
• Reordered friends list context menu.
  
• Fixed issue preventing players from being unblocked.
  
• Teleport to Rebel City defaults to back/share on controllers.
  
• Secondary fire now on right bumper/R1 on controllers, as well as face button.
  
• Modifier text on keybinding is more visible.
  
• Fixed double keybinding bug
  
• Fixed some issues with healing after death resulting in powerful undead players ;-)
  
• Fixed issue with portals spawning on top of each other
  
• Fixed some crafting bugs
  
• Fixed some inventory bugs where items might disappear or become inoperable
  
• Fixed exploit where fizzling items’ skills are still active
  
• Cap Paladin heal auras so they don't stack (only the strongest aura will apply)
  
• Fixed Medic’s "on heal ally" skill trigger
  

Last week we rolled out a nice big update, with a huge collection of big and small changes. This week we’re hitting you with a much smaller update, including a number of polish and bug fix updates from the feedback we’ve been getting. We’re still working hard to get more of the bugs and polish items fixed, but we didn’t want you to wait for these.

Note: we haven’t finished all the fixes for the controls menu, but if you’re experiencing weird issues with that, we ask that you try reset controls to default and see if that cleans things up for you.

• Changed base storage from 12 to 16 spaces, so there’s a more storage space for everyone. All current players should get another 4 free spaces.
  
• Added all variant skins to the store - grabs those Dagger Knight and Siege Tank skins now!
  
• Fixed friend list lockup/crash when opening menu
  
• Fixed navigation getting stuck in small inventories.
  
• Fixed bug causing friend information to show on other button hovers.
  
• Quick Heal added to shared controls.
  
• Moved fire, secondary, superspeed and maneuver out of shared controls into separate plane controls.
  
• New conversations in the Rebel City, for the first time you visit the various buildings.
  
• Fix some bugs with guns on skills - no more missing or delayed bullets from skills
  
• Add cloud triggers for remaining Medic skills
  
• Add more secondary mods for remaining Duster and Bandit skills
  
• Nerfed DK and sniper skills that lowered gun reload times to fix broken DPS
  
• Nerfed Bandit 4-B skill to not be so OP
  
• Range mods from skills also affect Arc ranges
  
• VFX/polish updates: Ancient Arena, The Dig, Reducation Camp, Temple of Bast, The Vaults, Super Secret Base, Venom Compound
  
• Ancient Arena wave 10: You fight 2 of the same miniboss simultaneously
  
• Fixed flak cannon being basically free
  
• Added flak cannons T1-T10
  
• Balance change: Merlin: Increased health by 10%, increased turn speed while speeding
  
• Balance change: Medic: Decreased health by 10%
  
• Balance change: Engineer: Increased health by 10%
  
• Fixed some spawning bugs (hotfixed already), and make the system more robust so small errors in the future.
  
• Added small safe zone on islands near spawning point
  
• Make sure you can’t fire a death gun more than once per plane - once that fires off, it’s tickets for that plane.
  
• Some other smaller bugs and minor crashes.
  

We’re back! We’ve rolled out a big new update and opened up the servers again. There has been a lot of changes since our last update, definitely too numerous to list them all, but let’s have a look at some of the highlights...





This update brings two new classes, the Dagger Knight and Siege Tank. Both of these are dual-stick classes and both bring new ways of playing the game. The Dagger Knight can pop a shield and dive in to do some quick short range damage. The Siege Tank can use its flak cannon to wipe bullets, or change into siege mode to get extra damage and a lot of extra range at the expense of being immobile.





Since the addition of dual-stick classes, we’ve noticed a lot of players prefer to play these classes, and for many players they offer a more forgiving way to get started playing the game. So we’ve updated the progression of unlocking new classes, putting a focus on the dual-stick classes in the early part of the game. New players will always start with the Quad, but can unlock the plane-control classes as they progress.



When we first rolled out the new pilot skill system, we got some good feedback on the new system, but we weren’t able to get in skills for all the classes and equipment at the time. With this update you’ll find that we’ve rolled out almost all the skills, with just a few gaps here and there (sure to be filled in the coming updates).

This brings the total up to 185 skills, ranging from some that fire extra bullets, to others that let you equip weapons you wouldn’t normally be able to. We’ve also added the rank badges and class unlocks to the skill tree, so you can plan ahead a bit easier.

We’ve done our best to balance all of this while keeping it as exciting and fun as possible, but there are undoubtedly some weird and wonderful issues, so please let us know if you find any broken builds. You're also welcome to suggest new skills that you'd like to see; we're not done adding them.





We’ve put in a lot of work to bring you a nifty new friends system. You’ll find the friends list has been completely revamped, so now you can see nearby players, friends, and players you’ve recently played with.

It should also be much easier to interact with these players now, teleporting or trading with them as you need. Along with this, we’ve also migrated the friends lists over to be stored on the server; unfortunately your current friends lists will get wiped with this update, but from now on they’ll be much more robust to any issues. Having them server-side means we can do some more exciting stuff with this in the future. Watch this space!



We’ve introduced a new modal conversation system. This is designed to give you a much richer lore experience - discover the story behind Steambirds Alliance as you play! It’s currently just in the tutorial and a few select places in the Rebel City, but it will get rolled out to more places in the coming updates.



There has been oodles of content polish revisions and tweaks across the board. A very large percentage of units in the game were touched up and tweaked. Many of the dungeons also received some significant polish passes. There are way too many changes to list here, but we hope you like exploring the world with fresh eyes again!





Art didn’t miss the polish train, also receiving its fair share of revisions and new visual effects. You’ll find many new visual effect and models in the game - hopefully exciting to discover again and witness. We also trimmed down many needlessly-high-poly models, which should help performance on lower end devices.



We’re greasing the economic wheels with a big reduction in trading fees across the board. Get busy trading!

Our goal is to eventually make the trading fees dynamic so that they never represent more than a small percentage of the total value of a trade, but we need a lot more users and data to do that, so for now we'll keep making adjustments manually as needed.



We’ve worked hard to polish the control settings and make them much more usable. We’ve unified many of the controls shared across dual-stick and plane-control classes, added some new defaults we think are slightly better, and give you the ability to bind modifier keys like shift and alt for actions.

• The aiming line now shows your gun range
  
• Crafting workshop improvements, including categories to make it less overwhelming.
  
• Radar improvements, including highlighting players that did “rally to me” emote recently, to make teleporting to them easier
  
• Large bonus damage when a stun bullet hits a stun-immune enemy
  
• We’ve moved the website hosting
  
• Many other smaller changes, too numerous to all mention here
  
• Also probably a bunch of new bugs to join all the new stuff, but hopefully none that stop you having a great time!
  

As the end of the year fast approaches, many of the team members are taking some vacation to spend time with family and friends, so this will be the last big update of the year!

As Steambirds Alliance gets closer to being ready for a more public release, we’ve decided to take down the servers again for a couple months. This will help us focus on making the game as awesome as possible for when everyone returns (and also enable us to take some much needed break time during the holidays without having to worry about maintaining the beta). So from 21 Dec onwards, the servers will be in maintenance mode and the game will not be playable. This next week is your chance to get in as much play time as you can… good luck!

We’ve tried to pack this update full of improvements to cap off 2018 nicely! And when you return to the game sometime in Q1 of 2019, SBA will hopefully be even more stable and beautiful, and should (at minimum) have several brand new classes for you to explore and enjoy. Plus some other nice new features and polish that you’ll simply have to wonder about for now. ;-)

• Iterated and tuned the teleport visual effect a bit
  
• Bunch of new skins, trails, decals, etc. - check the store for these!
  
• New premium versions of the secondary attacks for most classes (excluding the Engineer, Merlin, Raptor, Bandit)
  

• Paladin skill balancing
  
• Fixes on Meowza dungeon
  
• Booby prizes for DPS treasure boxes
  
• Nerfed the "Undertaker": reduced the aux gun mount's dmg by 50%
  

• Fixed issue where skills were spamming the chat log (already rolled out)
  
• Fixed an issue where the consumable health boost item was broken
  
• Fixed a timing issue where sometimes players might not be able to join a dungeon within the last ~10s of the portal
  
• When your connection drops, it will try reconnect to the same server again a few times. Sometimes it will also be able to reconnect to a dungeon.
  
• Mouse works with the radar now (hover to select, click to teleport)
  
• Drag n drop items in storage
  
• Fixed: drag n drop items to world
  
• Fixed: cannot select buttons in some error popups with a controller
  
• Fixed issues where escape would not work or break some UI
  
• Return key works as generic accept/click/confirm
  
• Fixed: UI bug reporter popup position broken in some resolutions
  
• Add bug reporter to bottom of options menu
  
• Fixed: UI input text issues in login process
  
• Fixed: WASD and DPAD did not work in menus
  
• Mouse hover is not delayed anymore
  
• Fixed: purchase popup menu highlights were broken sometimes
  
• Fixed: chat from options menu did not work
  
• Clicking somewhere in the world closes the chat
  
• Fixed: broken try-on feature in store
  
• Fixed: storage does not show the item info panel
  
• Navigation in the generic menus on the left now wraps from top to bottom
  
• Fixed: quest popup was not working correctly
  
• Clicking on an item in the inventory while the context menu is open, opens the next context menu
  
• Clicking on the small inventory on the left opens the full inventory. Clicking in the world closes it.
  
• Gun switch cooldown no longer affects all plane slots
  
• Hide radar when the UI is faded to black, like when going to the tutorial
  
• Filter out /die from chat history to prevent accidental use
  
• Fixed: skill requirements might have been slightly out of date on death
  
• Fixed issue where the pub was empty after completing the tutorial quests
  
• Regularly pulse mission radar indicator a bit
  
• Fixed: some times we didn't clear the quest guidance target correctly
  
• Storage: current sort can be applied to re-order entire storage (with confirmation)
  

This week’s update brings more big changes! From an update to our input system, to the oft-requested ability to apply variant skins to existing planes, we have a lot to share. Let’s get to it!



We’ve done a refactoring of our input system! What does that mean? We’ve restructured how the UI works we’ve improved our mouse support, most notably you can now drag-n-drop in the menus to move items around! This includes the ability to drag and item from your inventory to the world to drop it, you can also right-click an item to drop it. When you’re not using the mouse the cursor will no longer affect your selection as you move through the inventory with the keyboard or controller. These changes should make it easier to switch between controller, mouse, and keyboard, and they should also increase the individual functionality of each of those accessories!

With every big change like this there is a risk of bugs! If you’re an alpha player let us know about any weirdness with the in-game bug reporter (ctrl+r), or in our discord!

• Added a transition effect for when you teleport
  
• Icons for ranks improved
  

• Increased spawn density in the overworld; there are more enemies to fight!
  
• Added a system that migrates obsolete and legacy items to current versions. For example, outdated non-upgradeable ultra-rares will become the maxed out version of the current upgradeable items
  
• Updated Meowza Dungeon entrance. It now includes a nexus carrier, and added an enemy that attacks after 60 seconds so you can’t camp the entrance
  
• Refined Mecha-Deer Behavior, now they run away while shooting, and increased their loot/xp
  
• Added variants of Chuck in bomb dungeon that gives increased XP
  
• Increased damage on Laser Gates in the Dig
  

• Volume adjustments for better overall balancing
  
• New sounds added
  
• Updates to minion sound effects
  
• Fixed an audio looping bug, can now have multiple audio loops playing simultaneously
  

• Increased default radius in which a quest encounter will be triggered, and added functionality for unit-specific changes
  
• Increased experience reward radius when you defeat an enemy
  
• Fixed bug where you couldn’t superspeed with 0 energy
  
• Removed XP limiter for level 20 planes
  
• Players now must have reached level 20 before entering the crafting workshop
  
• Tutorial quests only begin when the first tutorial dungeon has been complete
  
• Dropped loot now slows down more over time so it doesn’t drift as far and get lost
  
• Added functionality to improve name display on units; we can now independently toggle the visibility of health bars and unit names . For example, destructible walls should no longer show names.
  
• Fixed bug where bullets were queued twice
  
• Fixed item-switching exploits, prevented similar exploits in the future with item cooldowns
  
  • If your previous weapon was in the middle of a cooldown and you switch to a new weapon, the cooldown of the old weapon will remain in effect.
    
  • Fixed exploit where Paladins could stack auras via item switching as well as similar item-switching exploits; added functionality to prevent similar exploits in the future.
    
• Fixed random smoke particles appearing in Rebel City
  
• Added modifier to dynamic difficulty for low player counts; boosts damage to bosses
  
• Dynamic difficulty added to some minion bosses
  
• Skills bug fixes: XP modifiers fixed, maintaining health/steam on changes fixed
  
• Skills with stacking effects are now capped at 3 stacks
  
• Hotfix: Fixed missing carrier in first tutorial dungeon
  
• Disallowed symbols and numbers in player name registration
  
• Unlocking variants gives you the option to automatically apply the variant to your plane.