Star Renegades News

Hiiii folks *waves*

It’s Softcookie here ːsteamhappyː and YES we are definitely still alive and kickin here. We just have been in quiet mode working on our new demo which will then be a part of the final game. Soooo here’s a quick recap of some of the things that went on in the past few months (that can also be found on our socials).

BITSUMMIT
We were accepted to show Star Renegades at Bitsummit in Kyoto! Bitsummit (June 1-2) is Japan’s leading indie game festival showcasing over 100 indie games from around the world. It was our first time bringing Star Renegades to show in Asia, but definitely WON’T be our last becauseeeee… we took home an editor’s choice award by 4Gamer.net! Thank you so much~
Also... ramen. We had absurd amounts of ramen and it was amazing.



E3
Soon after Bitsummit, we made our way back to LA for E3! We showcased Star Renegades inside the Xbox Live Experience at the Microsoft Theatre- right beside Phoenix Point (our lovely booth neighbours). If you were watching the Xbox Keynote, you may have seen Keanu Reeves. You ALSO may have seen Star Renegades as part of the Xbox Game Pass line up among many other unique indie titles. This means that we are confirmed for PC, Steam, and Xbox platforms at launch and we’ll confirm for other platforms as soon as we can!


TECHNICAL ARTIST
We have a newwwww technical artist! His name is Matt and he will be helping Bryan out with sprinkling his magic on the visual effects. Now our combat animations will look even spicier and sparklier than ever before. All these new visual effects will be revealed in our Gamescom demo.

MUSIC
Our composer Steve London pumped out even more NEW awesome tracks for combat and camping scenes! We posted a clip of it on our Twitter for screenshot saturday. If you look closely, you can see a familiar furry four-legged friendo laying down by Wynn. And the answer is YES you can pet this doggo.



GAMESCOM
We will be back at Gamescom again this year! Mega thanks to Indie Arena Booth for having us really stays dead forever.. (that's how it works riiiight??)



In previous builds, we felt that not only did our demo play too long, but the learning curve (since it threw you right into the heart of the game instead of the tutorial) was a bit higher than average. So this time around, we’ll be adding tooltips and re-designed the UI (again) to make it more intuitive and friendlier to pick up.

You’ll be seeing quick recap blurbs here and there since we’re zoning in around the final stretch for Gamescom prep.

By the waaay.. who from here is going to Gamescom?! If you catch me (Softcookie) around, make sure to ask for some J5T-1N stickers and keychains!

Thanks for your patience and tuning in as always, Rebels!

See ya soon.

Softcookie and Team

LINKS Discord Twitter DevLog 5

Hiya Rebels,

As promised, here's another devlog coming atcha~ Just wanted to let you know that you can play Star Renegades if you are going to PAX East this month! We will be there at Booth #13073 as part of the Indie Megabooth. Come find us for limited merch, pins, and tasty milk candies!

Sooo before all that happens, I just wanted to give you all an update on what we’ve been mainly working on:

• New enemies
  
• New Combat UI
  
• Free Exploration Map Mode
  

So you might recognize this little fella here from the last announcement. We mentioned that we opened up character design decisions to our Discord community and they came up with the following ideas:

• l a s e r
  
• sonic blast rawr
  
• bad breath
  
• guard chameleon doggo
  

Aaaand here were some of the ideas we animated! We loved your ideas so much that we definitely will be dropping more characters in the channel to hear what you think they should do!



In our previous demos, we used blinking blips in the health/shield bars to denote how much damage would be done to units. We thought that it was simple and players could visually see exactly how much damage is being done to their squad. However, for those who are absolutely OBSESSED with numbers and data sheets, we’ve decided to change the health and shield bars to meters with numbers that will tell you exactly how much health/armour/shields you have left instead of approximating it based on how many health blips are left. We felt that this gives the player agency to be extremely accurate with their calculations (so if your squad wipes, that is 100% your fault :P no pressure)

Old Combat HUD

New Combat HUD



I would say this has been the biggest change to our demo so far. We went from a node-based travel system to a free exploration map. Before Bryan (our pixel art machine) would be hand drawing all of these big maps. To avoid bottlenecking his process, we switched to using a layered tile map for our engine so that our team could generate maps and populate it with events ourselves.

Layer on~ layer off~ layer on~ layer off

We felt that node-based travel created too much friction if a player wanted to backtrack to get take a different path and we felt that it broke game immersion at times. We wanted to create an explorable world which gave our players a sense of agency in the universe.

Timeline of our world map process (that glow up)

We also removed the time counter for Imperium reinforcements arrival and simplified it with “turns taken” to perform actions. This should make things more clear for players deciding whether or not to take a certain action while deciphering where the enemy might be traveling to next.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!! New Free Movement map travel!

We’re still playing around with making our maps a proper size so that there isn’t TOO much barren space, yet balancing it with enough event tasks and objects so that there is a clear path for you to venture around. It’s all a work in progress but this will be quite close to the build we will be bringing to PAX East.. sooo if you’re going- please do drop by our booth to say hi or poke your fave streamer to check us out.


Thanks for tuning innn!

Softcookie + Massive Damage Team


P.S. We have also posted this devlog on our site if you'd like to see GIFs in their less-compressed glory: http://massdmg.com/2019/03/star-renegades-dev-log-4/

Hiya Rebels!

We promised that we had some exciting news in store for you all and well-
we can finally let you all know thaaat..

We have partnered up with the amazing folks at Raw Fury to publish Star Renegades! ːsteamhappyː



Have you ever felt magic before? That magnetic feeling you get when you first meet someone who absolutely LOVES the same stuff you do and then the more you talk you realize how you’re pretty much the same person and it’s kinda crazy how you managed to bump into each other in a sea full of people? WELL, that’s what we felt when we met the warm and passion-driven folks at Raw Fury! Not to mention- our names sound totally badass next to each other- RAW FURY x MASSIVE DAMAGE ?! UHH HELL YEAH! (btw we totally thought this was a sign from the universe that it was meant to be)

So yeahhh~ what does this all mean for Star Renegades?! Welll- since we have increased scope and budget for developing the game now- we have changed the release date from 2019 to early 2020. That way- we will be able to create all the things we have dreamed of for Star Renegades.

We just wanted to say THANK YOU to everyone who has supported us so far on this journey. We also have more *EXCITING* upcoming news to share, but that won’t be until later on in the month- and announced most likely on our Twitter!

BY THE WAY… a snippet of what we've been working on..and what I'll be talking about in the next devlog 😉
Hint: it rhymes with shmree shmexploration



Meanwhile, if you join our Discord community, you may find our dev team lurking about and occasionally dropping a few work-in-progress GIFs here and there as well as asking for YOUR input on character design- like this alien doggo here. He is the goodest boi and some of his skills have been ideated by our awesome community peeps.


Other than that, we have been working on the demo for our next show and are about to wrap things up soon! So- that means I'll finally be able to finish that devlog highlighting some major changes to our map exploration world.



Thank you so much for your patience. Aaaand thanks for tuning in!
Softcookie + Massive Damage Team

*static noises* KRRRSHH KRRRSH- “Massive Damage HQ to Rebel Command- do you copy?!”

It has been Day 68 since we’ve last made contact after our last ship landing at 47.6062° N, 122.3321° W

Shortly after our return home from the epic ambassador mission at PAX West, an Imperium Admiral overheard of our success, and they tried to foil us by sending over a bio-magnetic storm to our home planet! This hyper-localized storm brewed its way to our secret cave, trapping us devs inside with our computers. We had no other choice but to stay put and work on Star Renegades until the storm passed.

Luckily for us, the it only lasted a short while. But during this time, our team worked incredibly hard to get Star Renegades to a more polished state than before by filling it with MORE quests, game mechanics, new enemies, a new planet, re-skinned UI, new music, and much, much more!

We also recruited a droid named J5T-1N who will be (with minimal effort) assisting your team while at the same time tossing in snarky remarks and laughing at your misery. Don’t mind him though, his empathy resonators have been on the fritz since the time some Imperium troopers cruelly used him for a game of gravity pong. I’m sure he’ll eventually come around!

“I have conveniently relocated your holo-armour underneath this pile of Shneep droppings.”

Sooo, now that we have finally completed a segment of our game. I just wanted to give you a preview of how the game looks now. Make sure you’re sitting down for this! It looks quite different from the last demo we’ve had! Alright, J5T-1N, show ‘em a preview of what we’ve got!



…...woooow. Rude!! Guess we’ll probably catch him later at a better mood after a nano-nap. WELP, I guess I (Softcookie) will just show you folks for now what we’ve been adding to the game so far!

Note: What I’m going to show is still a small snippet of the game. We can’t show you everything as we’d like to keep some things for a big reveal in the final version of the game.

Since the combat demo we showed at Gamescom and PAX West, we’ve done the following:

• Gave the UI a MAJOR glow-up
  
• Implemented a more robust adversary hierarchy system
  
• Added a whole new explorable, beautifully pixelized planet with a complete set of quests
  

Combat Timeline HUD

Sooo If you remember from before- one of our very first demos, our UI panels were purple and pink. We realized pink and purple was kiiiiiiiiiiiind of a dominant colour theme in our game- and with purple and pink panels definitely won’t help make information more legible especially in a game that relies heavily on stats, info, and text. Soooo, we decided to take it all in the opposite direction! Make EVERYTHING see-through! So we switched to a glass-look with a holographic-y interface (that’s how the iPhone Infinity is gonna look in 2030, CALLED IT). And soooo- here we are- this isn’t the final product of course, but definitely a step closer in the visual direction that we want it to be.




The adversary hierarchy system will help you keep in check the movement of the Imperium as they recruit, rank up, or even demote their lackeys.

If you ever run into Draze Zem the Bounty Hunter and defeat him, this screen will pop up to show that you knocked him off the Imperium hierarchy (gooo Rebels!). Alternatively, if you are defeated by the Imperium, you’ll be able to see all your enemies rank up off of your defeat.

Draze also rates Bounty Hunting as 0 stars by the way.




For this build, we created a new explorable planet called Pahzaj XII. You’ll also be meeting J5T-1N for the first time and he’ll act as your little sidekick walking you through missions. So for this new mission, you will have to head towards either the east or the west region of the planet to retrieve a key that will unlock the big tower in the middle of the map with a giant laser beaming into the sky. Before that, there are switches to activate an old rundown subway that will take you to the ruined cities to retrieve the keys.


Where the west key is held! Surprisingly their broken subway system runs better than our city’s..

All in all, this is what we’ve been working on so far. There are some more mechanics we’d like to refine in the future before showing (like our relationship system, elemental damage on weapons and characters, setting up camp sites, etc.)

I know you folks must be asking.. But WHEN DO WE GET TO PLAAAY?! Aaaand the answer is actually....closer than you were before! This demo has been getting to the point where we’re like “hey, this spoonful of pie filling tastes pretty good- it’s almost ready for baking- might be better if we add more pumpkin spice and sugar.” But before then, there are still a number of mechanics, polish, and balance we’d like to add to make our demo feel like a nice thick slice of pie. We’re also still figuring out a bunch of things on our end like whether or not we’d like to go with a publisher or if we’re doing a kickstarter!

For the meantime, if you’d like to stay updated with our alpha/beta periods, sign up with our mailing list.

We share extra exclusive content with our mailing list community that won’t be seen on other social media (more secret sauce news for our super fans!).

If you like what you see here and you’re a new discoverer of our game, feel free to wishlist us on Steam and join our Discord!

Thanks for tuning in! We're pretty happy with what we've done so far with Star Renegades and can't wait to show you more soon.


Cheers,

Softcookie + the MDI team