Last week we put out a new update for Marauders: The Red Baron Update. I wanted to write a little to reflect on how it all went as well as share a bunch of cool stuff that happend.
We only had one month from the launch of our previous update (The Health Update), so we were definitely against the clock with this one. Development by itself is a lot of work but there was also a bunch of other areas that need to come together at the same time; development, testing, marketing, business etc. We knew it was tight but we really thought it was important to get a content update out before the end of the year. I’m proud of what we did, I think we managed to make meaningful changes that pushed the game in the direction that we want.
Launching the update went nice and smoothly and was seamless (no downtime of the game). However, shortly after the update, we found a bad bug that was blocking progression in the core campaign. We started work on a hotfix for that and a couple of smaller issues including an exploit that we found. We did more testing and roughly a day later we launched the hotfix to everyone. It’s great that we have got to a point with all our internal pipelines that we do a complex thing like this so fast and fluidly.
We made a bunch of changes to the game, but one of my favorites (and the name of the update) was the introduction of the Red Baron boss. We had talked about adding boss AI to the game for a long time, so we were excited to get a chance to give it a go. We knew we wanted them to be hard and fighting them needed to be a tense meaningful experience. So we went about creating a new difficult AI, who wore new unlockable clothing, had new unique armour items, used a new weapon (Mauser Special) and flew a new ship (the Striker Frigate), with a unique moody ship interior.
He is hard as nails and shoots pods out of the sky, so you really need to ambush him or disable the ship first just in order to breach him…then you gotta fight the Red Baron himself! Here is a funny video of youtube creator SpicyBeanDip progression on trying to solo kill the Red Baron:
And another funny video of the Red Baron on a pod killing spree:
We worked on so much stuff for the update, across all areas of the game, sound, settings, more match stats in the end menu, optimsations and fixes etc. It would take too long to chat about them all, but you can check out the full patch notes here on Steam and read a bit more about what we release in our Dev Blog #002 - The Red Baron
There are a few things I thought might be interesting to break down a bit in terms of development:
Contracts Rework - Things never felt quite right with the old contract system. A few examples being; it could get frustrating when you didn’t get the raid you needed and the UI in the main menu always felt hidden away. So we had a rethink and decided to split and rework it into 2 new systems: In-raid Contracts and Market Trades, which I think work so much better now.
Now every time you enter a raid you get given three random In-Raid Contracts based on the raid areas available in the match. This is cool because your contracts are always relevant and it helps push players towards points of interest, creating more tension and conflict. For completing these missions you get cash and faction XP, in the end match menu which feels like a much better place to receive your rewards. Then the new Market trades system sits in the main menu shop. Every 24 hours you are given 6 random deals. For these deals you trade items and money to get different better items back. For me the main work for these systems was in reworking the UI and it took me a while to find something that worked, I had to iterate through a bunch of ideas before I got to what we have now (which still isn’t perfect). The biggest problem was the amount of info that had to be got across to the player in a small amount of space!
Increasing The Player Count - We wanted to increase the number of players per match to work in tandem with now having a larger space play area and double raid spawns. We also wanted to keep the same level of chaos that players felt when things were smaller. With the update, we can now have a maximum of 10 crews per server (4 players per crew so a maximum of 40 players in a full server). In the runup to release we tested the server capacity changes with a large number of players (with the help of Team 17) and had a few teething problems. We had to work on a bunch of optimisations (mainly networking) but got everything straightened out and were happy enough with the performance to release!
Below are some screenshots of some of the bigger elements of the new update:
Marketing Art
We launched the update with a bunch of Red Baron-related marketing art, again timing was tight but we managed to get some cool results:
Overall, creating the Red Baron update was hard work but it turned into something cool and people seem to be enjoying the update!
Christmas is looking like it’s going to be a bit more chill so we can all take some time to rest up before things kick up a gear again in January!