Volcanoids News

The work on 1.17 is progressing and we will soon start testing a functional build with the Volcanoids closed-testing group. Almost all parts of the game reflect the new progression and research system. There were a lot of changes and adjustments to improve the gameplay. It should bring more unique moments and wider decision making based on available options at specific moments.



First implementation of difficulty levels has been done, and the hard settings brings especially interesting challenges. Players will have to advance on their own and hunt down the first drillship by themselves. This may take some time since the drillship has to be tracked down and the crew must be defeated, all before the eruption happens. So it's possible that the submarine becomes your home base for a little longer than just a few minutes at the start of the game.



While playing on hard, there's no “island safe zone” (area 1) anymore and COG units (colored cones) can welcome you right when you step foot on the island.





Each area has now randomly selected COG drillships that are specialized in a certain field. You can distinguish the types based on logo markers and COG units running in the area. Each type has its items and technology players can get to upgrade their own drillship.

Player's progression will often depend on what kind of enemy drillship spawns nearby and how much exploration the player does to get the needed tech.



Every new game and after each eruption, a variety of COG drillships surface on different landing sites. The picture below shows the same area once occupied by Research, Military and Refinery units, while next time it is mainly populated by Production units. The cones with different colors mark positions of COG units, while the cylinder marks a surfaced drillship.





To give you a better idea of how the tech tree progress, see the following concept showing progression from the beginning to the late game.

There are now multiple ways of how to obtain upgrades and intel components. You can either search scraps on the island surface, attack patrolling COG units or directly attack a COG drillship. Some strategies can get you forward faster than others. We are still working with a lot of placeholder items and visuals tho. Right now it is all about setting the technical part of the game.



The same concept applies to all the Island areas, and each COG drillship carries new items and units. Players will have to seek and attack drillships that contain items that they need to move further on the map. Especially the movement upgrades now play an important role, as they can be produced only after obtaining damaged parts from COG drillships.





From now on, players will have to hunt down and completely destroy COG drillships to get the essential upgrade parts. These parts are crucial for upgrading the player drillship and advance towards new island areas. It is important to note, that only some drillships have the required upgrades. Players will have to inspect the drillship first, before taking the time and destroying it completely.



We will keep testing, bug fixing and balancing the current build. We still need to do the art assets, and also the whole tutorial quest line needs to be updated. Once the build is stable, we will make the test build available for further testing in the “preview” branch, available to anyone that owns the game.

If you are interested and want to be notified once the preview branch is ready, join our Discord and join testers in the #role-assignment channel. You will get access to change logs and other info about the build. Please keep in mind that it can still contain bugs and placeholder objects, so please join only if you want to help us find bugs and polish the build before it goes public.

Thanks for reading! As always if you have any questions, suggestions or ideas drop them on our social media or in the comments below.

Hey everyone, welcome to another Developer Update! As always here's what we've been working on for the past week.

Game design for the upcoming update is completed, and we've started with implementations. Majority of things you will see is a work in progress and there are a lot of placeholders. Every time a new feature is being added, we do multiple iteration rounds to make sure everything works well, and only then we do the final visuals and polishing.



A lot of players asked for more weapons and improved combat. Gatling gun and revolver with multiple ammunition types are being implemented, but they're still waiting for their final models. Testing is a lot of fun, especially when attacking a COG drillship with the Gatling Gun, shredding the entire crew and modules to pieces.

https://youtu.be/map3ZZ0JSRM



Apart from new guns, NPCs will also get an upgrade in form of new COG variations for each type. Until now colors defined the difficulty level, but in the upcoming update, each color will suggest a specialization.

Each COG will have its attributes such as speed, damage but also specialized abilities such as spotting player at longer distances. This ability makes the green research COG a priority target to make sure other units don’t notice the player too early.

Each specialization will have tiers, that will be deployed all over the island. The shown pictures are raw concepts to find shapes and visual differences. Once we test them in game, proper texturing and modeling will be added.





COG drillships will also get a lot of new features and will play a more important role in player's progress. Drillships will be specialized for a certain task, such as mining, refinement, research or simply guarding an area.

Each ship type will have its loot, crew, and symbol so that players can easily tell what type of drillship just surfaced in front of them. Together with that, some item recipes will be adjusted, and players will have to destroy COG drillships to get the necessary components for upgrading their own drillship.



On the pictures below you can see icons for damaged movement upgrade components you'll be able to loot from destroyed enemy drillships.





And to mention some of the smaller features, drillship movement upgrades will have an actual effect on the drillship attributes. Hull upgrades will grant bonus armor to all modules, while tracks upgrades will make the drillship faster both underground and on the surface.





More features are being implemented, but there is not much to show yet. Will keep you updated about the development in upcoming developer updates and on our social media.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/volcanoids
Discord: https://discord.gg/volcanoids
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Volcanoids/

Thanks for reading and if you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments below.

It's almost a week since the game entered Early Access on Steam, and we would like to thank everyone for supporting the game. There is still a long way ahead, and a lot to add, but we are off to a good start.

We went through all the Steam discussions and read the positive and negative reviews. Thank you all for taking the time to write the feedback, it helped a lot to get a picture of what to focus at in the upcoming month.



Main focus will be on improving gameplay outside the drillship. More weapons, difficulty scenarios and improving progression through research and gaining new technology.

Smaller adjustments are also planned, such as making the time between eruptions longer, adding actual meaning to the drillship upgrades (speed, armor) and more.



The difficulty scenarios should ensure that players that are new to the game get all the important information from the captain, while those already familiar with the game, go into the world on their own armed with only the skill and knowledge. That will come handy especially when hunting down your first drillship, no longer served by the captain.

Based on the feedback, the tutorial quests will be adjusted for the easy scenario in a way that players can access them through the radio but are not bothered if they want to progress on their own. If players get lost at any point, the captain will be there to help. The tutorial quests will update with players progress, so it should be easy to get back on track.



We will do our best to deliver the mentioned features and changes in the next update. The exact date is not set, but it should be ready in several weeks. Will keep you informed about the progress in weekly Developer updates, posted every Thursday here on Steam.

Thanks for reading and if you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments below.

First things first, thank you for the support during the Early Access launch! It means the world to us to see that you're digging the game!

We got a ton of reports from you guys and we're doing our best to go through all of them. Thanks a lot and definitely continue sending them through the "Send Feedback" menu or posting them in the bug report section in discussions.

Today's update is a smaller one containing mainly fixes. In case you load your game and your quest is messed up, simply abandon the quest in the quest menu (press L) and get it again from Cap.

Screenshot in header by: ҀЯФИ ↁÆМФИ

• Quest: The first quest to craft door module as well (to ensure players won't block themselves in drillship)
  
• Quest: Moved turret quest after the Add segment quest (to ensure players have a free slot)
  
• Quest: Disabled scrap metal quest
  
• Quest: Contact captain quest won't show when the game finished
  
• HUD notification "Inventory full" now contains info about the trash icon in inventory
  
• HUD notification "Storage full" now contains info about the trash icon in inventory
  
• HUD notification "Landing site occupied" now contains info to pull the blue lever (players kept pulling the green, that did not solve the issue)
  
• Radio device has more HP now
  
• Door has sound on open and close
  
• Refresh rate in options now shows correct refresh rate
  

• Issues with joystick inputs (player should no longer randomly move in one direction)
  
• Submarine ladder stuck issue
  
• Light orb spawned after killing a COG
  
• Drillship call no longer sends drillship out of a lava cave
  
• Player getting killed underground by eruption blast
  
• Multiple typos in texts
  
• Issue with placing production module
  
• Main menu background video is now working on Linux
  
• Main menu background video recompressed to reduce lagging
  
• Achievement: Kill COGs
  
• Achievement: Full extender
  
• Achievement: Multitasking
  
• Core upgrade no longer destroys after placing to Core stats instead to the Core on the wall
  
• Items in submarine and player drillship (had wrong stacks and caused issues)
  

If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments below or on any of these platforms:

Discord: https://discord.gg/volcanoids
Twitter: https://twitter.com/volcanoids
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Volcanoids/

Thanks for reading!