M.A.S.S. Builder News

Hello everyone, how are you doing in these times of quarantine? For us here at Vermillion Digital, we've been working on the upcoming patch non-stop while keeping ourselves safe, so no worries, we'll try our best to deliver the update in due time.



For this week's update, we wanted to give you all a sneak preview on the new armor set coming in the next updates, the "Hammerfall" set portraying a larger extremity and its glory in all the bulkiness. We're aiming to deliver two more variants of this to complete a set of three as we'd always done, but here is the first variant. We hope you do like it. Again, if there are any concerns you'd like to voice to us, don't be afraid to send us a message anywhere. We hope everyone stays safe and having a good time!

Back to another work in progress preview for M.A.S.S. Builder. We're still working on the next update during these times and we hope you all are alright, for now, have a look at the new missions design that are coming for the next update!

Hello everyone, today we're presenting to you our new development roadmap. Let's have a look at it first, then we'll talk about it.

New Roadmap - End of May or Early June (0.4.0)
- Story Mission 10 - 13 (End of Chapter 2)
- Hunting Grounds +2
- Development Nodes tier 4 unlocked
- Enemies' AI and Stats rebalancing
- 1 New armor set
- Lots of new shields
- Some other reworks and rebalances

End of August or Early September (0.5.0)
- Story Mission 14 - 15
- Development Nodes tier 5 unlocked
- 1 New armor set
- Energy Launchers Rework

As you can see, it only covers update 0.4.0 and 0.5.0. This is due to our decision on shorter term works as we incorporate reworks of systems that are less popular while working to create new contents, in example the close combat system and the unknown yet upcoming energy launchers rework. Now, let's talk about each update invidually on what we're trying to achieve with each update.

With 0.3.0 being focused on close combat reworks fully, we weren't able to complete as much content production as we had wanted in the first place, thus 0.4.0 will solely be based on content production and less new system/features work. So what's in there for the contents we are looking forward to?

Missions: We are aiming to release more story missions than in other updates, the number we can finish is still unknown but at least 2 must be completed alongside more hunting grounds. This is because most progression are locked behind story progress, thus by working on more story missions, tier 4 nodes will be unlocked, more parts can be created and unlocked through newer missions, and many more things can be introduced.

Enemies: Well this is something that has been much requested by our players and agreed by our developers that we will need a better enemy, both in mechanics and numbers factor. We have seen complaints on how the new boss behaved and its numbers being too over the top. As the problem tends to continue further if left alone, we have decided this update is where we'll start working on it.

So, in this first phase of the rebalancing, we will try to introduce some kind of mechanics to create more attack gaps and attack patterns (formerly they are calculated through an AI system to decide which attacks they'll use, we'll add a pattern into play on that to make it more predictable and less chaotic mess). We will also shift balance base more towards a fun boss fight instead of the whole mission being deadly, but we cannot disclose any changes being made in specifics yet.

New armor set and shields: Since we did not release any new armors in the last update, we are sure to work on one this time. The idea this time, and going forward, is to be more extreme in our designs. We have already established standard looking ones before, thus we decided we should shift in some extreme looking designs into the fray for a more distinctive look for customizations. With that said, the first phase of shields have been finished and we decided to add in a few more just so you all would have more choices to create from.



Roundup Rebalancing: This is the UNSURE part, but we'd like to put a word out that we are going to look at some aspects that have received complaints and suggestions throughout the last patches. Since a lot is going to be done on contents, we might be able to perform some changes in regards to established features and systems within the timeframe. Things like Magazine Cap and Energy Cap status being too negligible in early levels, things that are unclear or low clarity. Expect a lot of things to change for the better, and if we are sure about each aspect that we are able to finish it, we'll be sure to show them during our weekly Saturday WIP update!

That should be all for 0.4.0 and we will talk more about 0.5.0 when time comes. For now, you'll only have the topics to wonder upon, and we hope to deliver as soon as possible. Expect 0.4.0 to drop end of May or early June. As always, if there are any concerns or if you'd like to talk to us directly, feel free to join our official discord channel set up by Sekai Project!

Welcome back to another post-update manifesto. We've decided this is where we explain our thought process behind the major changes we have done to the game after a patch, instead of a "what's next" thing so expect a wall of text! That will be discussed later when we finish our new roadmap in a week or two. Again, we do apologize for all the delays and bugs that have happened, there weren't enough testings that we were able to do to reproduce everything and fix it in time. Now, here's to some long readings.

- On changes to close combat controls and its attack patterns, we've first thought that a few combos, chaining from one combo into another was enough for the time and it could transition well into the new rework. It was not, we accept that mistake. For that, we decided to move on to giving full controls (as players have been expressing their frustration on they cannot control the combos and it made the game needlessly difficult alongside some nodes that required end of combo attacks) towards the combo system, allowing players to transition into a longer or stronger combo with a one-button press system.

Now, why would we not give just another "heavy attack" button instead of this? We gave some thought on it but due to the lack of buttons available with all the systems like guarding, dashing, jumping, quantum breaking, and etc., we think this combo alternate button is the easiest to understand and get familiar with, while still giving players full controls over the M.A.S.S. unit movements (that's why we did not put it on a button that usually uses the index or the ring finger on default even though some of us instantly changes the button).

Another thing we'd like to answer on the reworked close combat controls are things like "why don't you give it more depth?" or "why not give it things like attack skills where players can equip into their skillset?" As much as we'd like to do so, it is impossible. We allow players to equip various types of weapons onto their M.A.S.S. which uses a lot of buttons already and if we added another depth to weapons like giving it skills like in MMORPGs, there would be a serious case of limitations like "how each skills behave with each weapon" since a weapon skill that behaves like a chain wouldn't work while holding lances-thing right? It would also turn the game into a skillfest with no use of normal attacks after we thought about it thus we can't do things like that. Then how about turning each press of an attack into a sequence of skill itself? That would be extremely disorienting and unresponsive when we factor in combination of attacks. Aside from that, we also have the problem of growing our animation and weapon set since if we'd like to grow the amount of weapons, we sacrifice the skills part, if we grow the skillsets and animations, then we sacrifice the weapons part. It is something that we cannot do, and we hope that you would understand.

- Now to Quantum Break, a system that we decided to add much later down the line of the reworks. We first thought of giving close combat reworks some kind of "ultimate move" but if we just do that, the amount of works and animations for each type of weapons will be huge, thus we looked towards things like "ultimate mode" or what can be called "over the limit" or things like that and came up with an extreme power-up instead.

At first, there was only one form that does everything, then we felt this is too good, but reducing the numbers down while also giving special buffs did not feel right to us. So we decided to break it into three forms and add one base form with all the numbers there. The basic enhanced form provides great number increments, the accelerate form is extremely fast and potent, the devastate form has a very large AoE (fun fact: at first all form has that AoE but we decided to give other forms a smaller area instead), and the armored form gives ultimate defense and constant regeneration.

- Guarding was a very controversial feature to think of, as many of us has differing ideas. There were opinions on things like 100% guard, with delays before and/or after. How about making it have charges that regenerate over time? How about having a bar that would constantly go down as you hold guard?

In our opinion, M.A.S.S. builder is a fast paced game, and having delays of holding the guard up or lowering it would contradict this pace and disrupt the player experience we'd like to have. Even though it might make the shields more powerful, we thought that disruption would not be healthy to the experience itself thus we did not put any delays on guarding or lowering guards. With that, there will need to be a gating mechanism that would not allow it to be too overpowered, but having charges or bars is not a good choice. Reasons are because players would need to track another thing on their character and there'll be a UI mess as well. We wanted the UI to be as clean as possible and not want some bars to spring up in the middle of the screen notifying how much charges you have left to guard, and when can you guard again, thus we decided to cap damage reduction to 75% and make it a bit more dynamic and active with directional guarding to reward skilled activation.

- Dual Weapons are something that was a much-requested feature, as well as something we had planned for a long time already. We first thought of its functionalities and how will they behave in integration with the game, and how do we make it different, or do we need to make it different? As the philosophy of the game aims to bring in aesthetics with as little effect to true gameplay as possible, we were thinking that maybe we should not make it that much different from using a single hand + shield or both-handed weapons.

We'd also like to repeat once more that this is only the first phase of the dual-wielding system and we'd grow it into something much better given time. This includes using different weapons in combination, ranged weapon dual wielding, and such other things. This is one of the core system and we hope you can wait for us to improve it.

That should be all for this post-patch manifesto. We hope we have addressed all important decisions and answer some questions behind our development thoughts. If there are still concerns on the topics, or some other things, feel free to send a message to us on the discord and we'll answer them accordingly.

As we have entered into a newer version accomodating great number of changes from where we started out, we have decided to update the demo to reflect the gameplay of version 0.3.6 with all the close combat changes, enemy behavior changes, bug fixes, and everything. The demo still caps at 2 missions and a few armor pieces unlocked, but players in consideration of the game can now get a feel of what's the updated game is like.