M.A.S.S. Builder News

As we're progressing in 0.9.0 development, we'd like to showcase the newest tile set we've created for upcoming missions, the urban tile set.



We've imagined these cities to still hold modern aesthetics, with a futuristic blend here and there, and filled with high and low rises to house the world and its people that must live on despite battles against the Quarks. While these building might seem larger than scale at first, take note that the sample M.A.S.S. unit is standing far away from them up on a platform.



What is the platform for? A special place just for M.A.S.S. units to pit their strength against each other, of course. The cityscape shown here is what you'll see in the upcoming PvP multiplayer modes and will be used first as a testing grounds for multiplayer lobby.



And here's the full view of the city itself. Stay tuned for more WIP update next week!





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During the development of M.A.S.S. Builder, we've seen players create an uncountable amount of M.A.S.S. units. One of them being thematically elemental robots has always caused distress to players with how property damages work in our game, conflicting their interest in making these "God of Thunder Swordmaster Machine" or "Fire Breathing Dragon M.A.S.S." style work since some enemies has extremely high resistances and they felt compelled to just play with a lesser version of their imagination.



So in 0.9.0, we've decide to totally remove the min-maxing element out of property damage and make each element as similar in power (still with their characteristics of BURN/FREEZE/WEAK) as well as only slightly stronger that RAW when their special properties proc. For gameplay discussions, here's what will be happening.

• Removed elemental disadvantages from the game, there are now only either neutral or advantage with property damages.
  
• Every enemy now has almost the same property damage resistance with every property damage. Property advantages will only result in around 5% to 10% more damage when correct element is used now. Players who bring multiple elements can still take advantage of it, but they aren't forced to or be punished now.
  
• Architecture and tech nodes now make property damage much more effective than before. Players who don't invest in property damage will now have around 30% less damage when using weapons with property damage in comparison to raw damage while those investing an architecture node (such as Revenant) will make this number back to 0% less damage. This should allow players to specifically use Architectures and Tech nodes to counter the lowered damage and perform as well as other methods of play through property debuffs.
  
• Balance special debuffs to match the new powers as best as we can.
  
• M.A.S.S. type enemies (including in PvP) is not effected by any status effects, but their property damage resistance are now lower than Quarks.
  

Now your question might be, "What if one property is extremely effective in PvE, how will you fix this? It's always a problem of either too strong or too weak with their special effects like BURN being meta once again?"

We'd like to answer that with "Let them be too strong, as M.A.S.S. Builder development has been going on, we don't think balance is required in PvE. Players must be able fulfill their fantasy and have fun with the game. To the abyss with balancing, fun comes first."

More Quarks improvement this week, showcasing the new Quark that will be in the next 0.9.0 update. As you can see from the design art weeks ago, we're trying to upgrade our Quark Enemies production, making them more detailed, looks better, and maybe, cooler.



And here's a still image of the front and back. There's still more to do on this Quark, making it as close to the menace we've shown as possible with visual effects and animations. Hope we can show you the finished one soon.



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Welcome back to another WIP update. This week, we'd like to share some of the balance update coming to 0.9.0 regarding speed. But first, let us talk about the missions introduced in 0.8.0. Those missions are how we imagined structures and landscapes of the world to be, and we'd like to capture those feelings of an open space rather than corridors. They do make traversing the area quite timely, especially for those with low acceleration, and missions with large gaps in between were not quite satisfying.

With that, we'll be introducing a new feature we'd internally call the boost speed curve. We wanted a method to help players go through each area quickly, but increasing their speed as a whole would effect every other aspect of gameplay, thus we came up with this so called boost speed curve.

Before this feature, players used to have an instant push in the direction they boost and their speed drops to a constant. With the new boost speed curve, players will be able to gain speed after the drop and the longer you boost, the faster you'll be able to go, allowing traveling through wide, open areas much faster, easier than before.



Aside from boost speed, we're also working on improving close combat attack speed. 0.8.0 was a success in making close combat a better experience as many have mentioned they're having a great time playing with close combat weapons, Quantum Breaks, and many other builds of it. We'd like to take it further and improve on the aspects that are still improve-able, thus, we're now looking at the attack speed. We'll be adding in a feature that increases the speed of attacks the deeper a player combos into. Opening hits are still the same, but the farther a player goes into combo attacks, the faster they'll swing their weapon(s). Combine this with the increasing damage multiplier in later combo hits, we think this is something that will further improve satisfaction when using close combat weapons.



That's the two new things we can reveal for now but there's a lot more other balance changes/improvements coming to the game in 0.9.0. As a reminder, our goal is to make the game fun and we're committing to it.

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Let's step aside from multiplayer discussions this week into some short preview. As we've mentioned in our plans for 0.9.0, we're adding in new Quarks to the game. This is part of a long term Quark (and production quality) improvement plan that we've been doing every update and we're just ready to reveal some new designs, artwork only though. We wanted them to be more dangerous than those big ones walking around, basically on a primal level but more, and they'll have more depth with more abilities than just running after you and SMASH.