MarZ: Tactical Base Defense News

Hey folks!
We have some exciting news on the development front. As some of you already know we’ve been very busy preparing for full launch, with an array of new features, content and changes scheduled. There’s a lot to do, but it’s totally worth it! The changes we’ve made add so much more to the game, and we can’t wait to share them with you.


But before we talk about updates, we’d like to give you a heads up on an upcoming price change:


As we’re nearing our full release we will be increasing the price of MarZ Rising from 14.99 € / 14.99 $ to 19.99 € / 21.99 $. This reflects the extra time and content we have put into the game since the beginning of Early Access. We wanted to welcome new players with a 10% launch discount, but because of Steam’s rules about pricing we need to change the price ahead of launch day to do this. Therefore, we will submit the new prizes to Steam on Sunday the 3rd of March, while we’re still in Early Access. So if you still want to get the game at the lower Early Access price, now would be a good time to do so 🙂

Now for the latest game news:


Today we wanted to give you a taste of the Marsform map editor, which will be integrated into MarZ Rising upon full release.With this new tool you’ll be able to create your own individual (and suitably hellish) Mars maps.

The development of Marsform started in early 2018 and while it was just a proof of concept at the beginning, it became a tool to create custom maps for MarZ Rising. So the editor grew, and we felt that we should implement it into the game with Steam workshop integration. Our main goal for Marsform was to make it as intuitive and easy as possible, so that users can plunge directly into the map making process. To create a playable map there are a few steps to follow, which are quite simple.

Let’s have a closer look at the scope of Marsform.


Starting a new map, Marsform allows you to create a base terrain procedural. That way you’ll have a strong starting point. Procedural generation allows you to generate realistic or stylized looking terrains. If you prefer to start your map from zero, you can just start sculpting.


We have integrated a variety of terrain sculpting tools into the editor which will help you modify the terrain as you like. Add valleys, hills, mountains, and canyons. Just let your creativity flow!


You can choose between 6 different material presets and 3 different light settings to create the perfect mood for your map.


Every map needs at least one spawn-point in order to make it playable. Additionally, every spawn-point can have multiple way-points to define the exact path for the enemies. There’s also a path width setting for every way-point, which allows you to create wide or narrow enemy route depending on your terrain.


You can hide spawners and also parts of pathes by painting fog of war. It works pretty much as the sculpt tools, you can set the density and color and paint the fog directly on to your terrain.


Once happy with your map you can publish it to Steam workshop and/or play it in skirmish mode. \o/
We’re sure Marsform will add plenty of additional replayability to the game. Also the creation process of a map is so much fun, we reckon that alone can keep you busy for hours! We’re also hoping to see hundreds of new challenging maps in Steam Workshop, and play some of your creations ourselves.

Stay tuned, any support is very much appreciated!
If you want to stay updated about further development of the game you can also follow us on our social media channels:

Marc: Twitter
Miriam: Twitter
MarZ Rising: Twitter
MarZ Rising: Discord
MarZ Rising: Facebook
MarZ Rising: Instagram

Alright, back to work.
Thank you and have fun playing!
Miriam & Marc
Over and out!

Hello dear community, we have news from the development front to share with you. Today we’d like to introduce you to a whole new game mode coming with the full release: OUTBREAK


The outbreak mode is a completely new game mode within skirmish mode. In this mode, the zombies do not approach in waves, but gather to an immense horde to storm the base all at once!

To prepare for this dangerous crowd the mission starts with an extended planning phase that will allow you to build your base, gather resources, explore towers, and so forth. When the time is up, the second defense phase starts. Then it shows if the planning turns out to be good and the base resists the hordes of wild beasts. This new challenging mode will be especially fun for those who prefer to have a more relaxing build phase at the beginning before all hell let loose.


Since the base really has to endure a lot in outbreak mode, you can build barricades to improve the defense. They can be used to fortify your towers and buildings or just to slow down enemies. Enemies will of course try to destroy them should they get in their way.


And since we are already there, Skirmish mode will get a nice overwork. After reworking our balancing and UI/UX, setting up procedurally generated waves will be even more fun.


As we’re nearing our full release we will be increasing the price of our game to 19.99 € / 21.99 $ to reflect the extra time and effort we have put into the game since the beginning of Early access. We wanted to welcome new players with a 10% launch discount, and because of Steam’s rules about pricing we need to change the price ahead of launch day to do this. Therefore, the price increase will take place on the 4th of March while we’re still in Early Access. So if you want to get a great deal you now have the chance to do so and buy the game before the 4th of March!


There’s currently a lot going on regarding development and we can’t wait to share all the new stuff with you. We’re also very thankful for our community which contributed some awesome ideas to the game. Stay tuned for more exciting news from the development front and as always share the news, tell your friends – any support is very much appreciated! If you want to stay updated about further development of the game you can also follow us on our social media channels here:

Marc: Twitter
Miriam: Twitter
Discord: Discord
MarZ Rising: Twitter
MarZ Rising: Facebook
MarZ Rising: Instagram

Thank you and have fun playing!
Miriam & Marc
Over and out!

Hello dear community! As promised we’re now starting the news series from the development front. As we’re heading towards the full release we plan to add plenty of new exciting features you can already look forward to. We are currently working full throttle rebalancing things due to new features. This post is all about one of the big upcoming new features: tower specializations. With these new bonus upgrades, the towers will be given a S.U.P.E.R.B.O.O.S.T. \o/


Thanks to new tower specializations each tower will get another 2 expansion stages, which can be unlocked after tier-3. This way all towers receive a unique bonus feature and the possibility of being equipped with an automatic repair drone. But this comes of course with a cost. The specialization upgrades can only be unlocked by building an additional uplink building – a new building, which of course cost resources, uses one energy hub slot and requires a crew member to work.

Tower specializations are definitely adding a new layer of depth and will significantly change things from a gameplay perspective, especially in the later stages of missions. Let’s have a closer look at each of them:



The special upgrade of the machine gun tower adds a very strong minigun with a super high fire rate to it. It’s great fun blasting all those zombies away!



The rocket tower gets a nice long-range mortar installed. While being quite slow, it is very effective against larger groups further away.



The prism upgrade causes the laser tower’s beam to split into multiple smaller beams which allows it to target multiple zombies at once.



With this nice new feature a tesla tower can teleport zombies a few meters back from their current position. This buys more time and makes the tesla tower even more effective, especially in combination with other towers.



The special upgrade for the drones tower adds mines around the tower. These mines are quite harmful and are automatically re-spawned after detonation. Nice!



In addition to the tower specializations we’re also implementing repair-drones. The repair-drone can be built for each tower and automatically repairs a damaged tower, even while being attacked and without exposing its function.



And last but not least the new uplink building which needs to be built in order to unlock all those new special upgrades, including the repair-drone.




Additionally we’re happy to announce that we’ve localized all text and the game will support 8 different languages at full release, which are English, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Polish and Simplified Chinese.

So heartfelt thanks to our localization partners Level Up Translation & Riotloc Studio who both did an awesome job and helped to provide an authentic version for all languages.


That’s all for today. We hope you like what you have seen! Stay tuned for more exciting news from the development front and as always share the news, tell your friends – any support is very much appreciated!

If you want to stay updated about further development of the game you can also follow us on our social media channels here:

Marc: Twitter
Miriam: Twitter
Discord: Discord
MarZ Rising: Twitter
MarZ Rising: Facebook
MarZ Rising: Instagram

Thank you and have fun playing!
Miriam & Marc
Over and out!

Hope you guys have had a great start to 2019!
We’re starting this new year with an update which adds new stuff and optimizations based on feedback we’ve had recently from you, our community. This update especially improves our crew behaviour, as well as the amount of clicking needed in the game, some optimizations and small fixes here and there. Let’s have a closer look:




We’ve worked on some crew optimizations which includes:

• Group selection and movement
  It is now possible to move a selected group.
  
• Group selection shortcuts
  It is now possible to assign a selected group to a shortcut. By default this is set to LEFTSHIFT and numbers 5 to 9. You can of course configure this in the options by yourself.
  
• Group selection healing
  When you have a group selected and you click on the lander, the crew member with the lowest health will be sent to the lander for healing first.
  
• Crew risk
  The possibility of a crew being attacked by an enemy is higher.
  
• Lander improvements
  Crew members won’t jump directly into the lander when they are sent next to it.
  

We’ve reworked the tower enemy prioritization and in this context we’ve also fixed some targeting bugs. Towers are constantly checking for enemy prioritization based on attacking/not attacking, strong/weak and max health/low health – this makes them more effective.



We’ve worked on the balancing and the overall “feel” when a rocket tower shoots. The rocket tower feels much more powerful now.



In order to reduce the click amount in the game we’ve added additional shortcuts you can set to speed up your base building. It is now possible to select buildings directly by pressing a shortcut. All shortcuts for each building can be set in the options menu. We’ve also added direct ring menu shortcuts which can be pressed as soon as your mouse is over a building. If you wanted to upgrade a building before, you had to click on the building first and then select the upgrade button in the ring menu. Now it’s possible to simply hover over a building, press the direct upgrade command and the building gets upgraded. Please be aware that for compatibility reasons, those shortcuts needs to be set by yourself in the options menu as they are set to none by default.



So what’s next you might ask? As we’re working full steam on our full release, we plan to reduce the regular update amount to fully concentrate on the development of the new features. So pretty much like the calm before the storm 😉 We will of course keep you all updated on what we’re working on, and what you can expect for the full release. Let us know in the forum if you have any great suggestions and feedback for the game.

As always share the news, tell your friends – any support is very much appreciated!

If you want to stay updated about further development of the game you can also follow us on our social media channels here:

Marc: Twitter
Miriam: Twitter
Discord: Discord
MarZ Rising: Twitter
MarZ Rising: Facebook
MarZ Rising: Instagram

Thank you and have fun playing!
Miriam & Marc
Over and out!

• New: Crew group movement
  
• New: Crew group assign to shortcuts
  
• New: Select building shortcuts
  
• New: Direct ring menu shortcuts
  -------------------------------
  
• Optimized: Better crew move next to lander precision
  
• Optimized: Group selection click on lander, send crew with lowest health first
  
• Optimized: Better tower targeting
  
• Optimized: Better rocket tower feel
  
• Optimized Demo: Endscreen demo video – audio fade in
  -------------------------------
  
• Bugfix: (hopefully fixed) Fixed a bug where sometimes the level got stucked at the end
  
• Bugfix: Tower targeting bugs
  
• Bugfix: Some smaller bugfixes
  

The European Santa came yesterday and brought a free demo for all of you. We’re happy to announce a new update which introduces a new German voice for captain Tobin, and a free demo available for download right now!



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCwU-M-f7pE
Due to a lot of the feedback we got regarding the German voice of captain Tobin, we have replaced it with a new one. May we present to you Matthias Weidenhöfer! He’s quite a well-known German TV actor and played in a German TV Show called Tatort.
Check out this awesome video of him recording some samples!



It’s happening! We have released a free demo so everyone can now enjoy the first 3 missions of our campaign. The demo doesn’t have any time restrictions and should give you a nice glimpse of what the game has to offer. But remember, only the full game includes all the awesomeness!



We have finally created an official MarZ Rising Discord server. A bit late to the party, but better late then never, right? 🙂
Discord allows us to build up a community and is also a great hub for everything related to the game. Come by and say hi, we'd love to see you there!
https://discord.gg/p5Bb5AK



We’re working full steam on the full release, working on the map editor, implementing Steam Workshop, balancing the outbreak mode for skirmish, preparing the localization files, adding more features aaand polishing.

As always share the news, tell your friends – any support is very much appreciated! 🙂

If you want to stay updated about further development of the game you can also follow us on our social media channels here:

Marc: Twitter
Miriam: Twitter
Discord: https://discord.gg/p5Bb5AK
MarZ Rising: Twitter
MarZ Rising: Facebook
MarZ Rising: Instagram

Thank you and have fun playing!
Miriam & Marc
Over and out!

• New: German voice for cpt. Tobin
  
• New: Demo version
  
• ——————————
  
• Bugfix: Some smaller bugfixes