Fleets - Dev Blog

FLEETS IS OPEN

barigrl — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:04:52 +0000

Fleets is now open for public registration! We’re so excited to share the game with you. We’re glad so many have already registered and hope you will invite your friends to try fleets too. Thanks to the TDZK community for hanging in there and being patient for this day, you guys rock! Have a very happy Fleets weekend!

Countdown to Launch!

barigrl — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 22:13:32 +0000

Yes we are still on schedule to launch in less than 4 days! It’s been a long road, but we’re almost there and are so excited to share Fleets with you and your friends!

What do we have for the community?

The forums are now open! Check out the Metaspace Studios and Fleets forums. We’ll keep players updated, ask for suggestions, and give players a place to connect outside of the game.

We have new Twitter pages. Yup we may have gone to the dark-side a bit on this one, but with the large player base we plan to have this will be an excellent place to communicate with everyone and see what people are saying about us.

Twitter.com/Fleets

Twitter.com/MetaspaceGames

You can check out the Game Guide. Alright, so this may not be a community feature, but our testers helped us put it together.

A Couple New Things:

The Fleets main page had a makeover a few days ago. It’s not perfect yet, but looking pretty spiffy, check it out.
And finally we thought it was time for a new screen shot…

The game had some extreme makeovers the last several weeks: There is a lot of new art; The addition of stationary Pirates; The addition of Satellites and Defense Platforms; We made cool new notifications and more… want to know more about these features? You can read up on them in the game guide today, but we hope you’ll be with us to see them all on launch day!

Fleets to Launch July 29th!

Jerle — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 21:36:53 +0000

Sorry it’s been a while since I posted, but I hope everyone will find it was worth the wait. We’re pleased to announce a release date of July 29th for Fleets! We’ll continue to polish and refine the game up until launch day, but we’re confident that we now have a solid and fun game that’s ready for the general public.

The next two weeks will see the launch of our redesigned public site, and we’ll be opening up the game guide and forums shortly. We’d like to thank everyone who’s been interested and involved with the game so far, and we’re excited to finally take the next step.

Advanced Outposts

Jerle — Fri, 28 May 2010 19:13:25 +0000

Fleets has 4 types of advanced outposts, which you can create by upgrading a basic outpost.

Mining- Gather resources not only from the hex the outpost is on, but surrounding hexes as well.
Research – Greatly boost your empire’s research rate.
Shipyard – Constructs ships much faster than a normal outpost.
Fortress – Create automated senty guns in all neighboring hexes, allowing you to effectively seal a border.

Anyone trying to get to me has to go through three lines of sentry guns.

Zoom Levels

Jerle — Fri, 21 May 2010 22:29:18 +0000

We’ve been working on a major interface revision as part of tester feedback. This is the main reason alpha wave 4 has been delayed; there’s little point to bringing in new people when the interface is rapidly changing when they are trying to learn.

Today’s post will showcase zoom levels. You can change zoom rapidly via the mousewheel, allowing you to focus on any part of your territory within a second.

DNS Troubles

Jerle — Thu, 06 May 2010 16:02:18 +0000

We’ve been using a free DNS provider at http://public-dns.net for the last few years. Their control panel is simplistic and old, but DNS isn’t that hard to do either.

This week their servers have failed twice for periods of 8-12 hours, leaving testers and everyone else unable to access the game.

Time to move! I’ve started investigating paid providers, and we will be switching within a few days. There should be no interruptions in service unless public-dns dies again in the meantime.

Bug of the Week: May 2-8

Jerle — Mon, 03 May 2010 23:18:13 +0000

I know the week has just started, but I doubt anything will beat this for bug of the week. Or month, given my posting frequency.

Scanners

Jerle — Sun, 02 May 2010 02:10:23 +0000

Sorry for the lack of updates on here, the Alpha test has been taking most of my time. I’m going to attempt to get back into a better schedule with the updates, at least once if not twice a week.

Today I’m showing a preview of the scan feature. There’s often times when you’re not sure you want to tangle with an enemy fleet, but by using a scan you can get a general idea of what the other guy’s packing. There are several different types of scans. The simplest just shows the ‘net worth’ of the enemy fleet, and can over or under-estimate. Scans require energy, which is a resource on your flagships that regenerates over time.

Net worth is a concept that will be coming up more in these blog posts. Essentially, it’s a score that’s supposed to show the relative power of a fleet or player. It allows you to gain some idea of what’s going on, but allows for complex strategies since your opponent can never be quite sure what you’ve got until attacking.

Flagships and Crafting

Jerle — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 17:15:28 +0000

Flagships will play an important role in Fleets. These are powerful and unique ships that require a lot of resources and time to build, but have many abilities other ships don’t have. For starter, flagships gain experience and have levels. These levels grant ability points that can be used to customize your flagship, giving it unique abilities, or increasing its stats or weapons. Flagships can equip items which have a wide range of effects, and flagships also have graphical avatars that you can customize (not included in the screenshot yet, sorry).

Flagships also have energy which can be used to for activated abilities. This particular flagship has the ‘survey’ ability, which allows you to scan a system and possibly find additional resources or items.

Fleets also has a crafting system. Many of the items that you find randomly won’t be immediately usable, or will be weak, but you can combine them to create more powerful items. For example, in the above screenshot I’ve equipped a twin-linked autocannon, which is slightly more powerful than the default weapon and didn’t take too many components to create.

The ? images are placeholders for final art, visual improvements are what we’ll be focusing on for the next while.

In other news, Wave 3 of the alpha test is going to start either Monday or Tuesday of this week, so if you haven’t already signed up on Facebook do so now!

Outpost Modules

Jerle — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 18:33:13 +0000

Outpost modules are a way for you to customize your outposts. You can speed up construction or research, allow the outpost to produce higher tiers of ships, or increase its resource gathering speed. There will also be options to upgrade the sensor radius or other useful attributes.

One thing that’s not picture here are that there are different types of base outpost. The generic outpost will have an array of useful modules, but there will also be outposts specialized for resourcing, construction, and warfare.

The green modifiers are bonuses from modules, and the fact that this is my HQ.

Next week we’ll have an update on flagships and the item/crafting systems.