Hello Honorary Spearhead Members!

This week was all about rounding off sharp edges.

Bug squashing and polishing!
As we get ready to finally update the public build of Project Cyber, the team is hard at work on improving the overall feel of the game, and is eliminating as many bugs as possible. We want you to have the best experience from the get-go. The art team has been focusing on swapping the placeholder assets for more visually-appealing ones. Meanwhile, gameplay and engineering started to reduce the amount of new features inserted in the game to work on refining the game’s core.

The team has chosen the Stalker character to be the benchmark in quality and features for all the remaining characters. Let us know what you think about how he looks and feels here.

Red vs Blue, every Thursday!
The pre-Alpha tournament is going in full force. Every Thursday at 7pm EDT, you are welcome to find out if you have what it takes to be the World Champions, right on our Twitch channel! Form your team and follow the instructions here to be part of it!

There, this is an awesome arena.
Directly from inside Yan’s brain, here is the new arena we are currently building. Let us know what you think (by the way, the thing up-top is the device that renders the events on the field, prettyyyy cool).





A robot may not harm a human being, just steal his ball
Great news: you will never feel alone anymore. David has implemented his AI friends to act as backup players whenever needed. They will fill in as goalie, defence, or attacking positions. This will result in less waiting in the lobby pre-game. They’re not at Skynet level (yet), so let us know what you think of them and what you feel could improve them here.

It’s getting cold in here!
A new event is in testing phase! As proposed by the community directly in our design doc, the latest event in development will challenge your ability to maneuver the ball at very low temperature and, more importantly, at low friction. Finetune your skates, you will need them once the new arena modifier is introduced shortly.



Where is Simon?
No, really. Where the hell is he?

Cheers and don’t forget to sign up to the tournament!

Alpha Release Later Next Month

-The Spearhead Community Team

Hello Honorary Spearhead Members!

Let’s talk about implants, you Cyborgs!

We are about to “implant” some modifiers for you all
It’s been a while since this feature has been discussed by the community, but it’s arrival is finally upon us: the Implant System! The UI, gameplay, engineering and art departments (4 people) have been hard at work this week on the design of this system. Before every game, you will be able to pick unique modifiers to tweak and customize your abilities during matches. As you level up, you will unlock more Implants. Stay tuned for more details and, in the meantime, gaze at the visual research Yan has done on this subject.

Tournament!

Starting this week you can compete in the Official Project Cyber Tournaments. Weekly finals will be broadcasted every Thursday 7pm ET on our Twitch channel!

Sign-up instructions can be found here.

The Spearhead Games School of Project Cyber

Players of the Twitch build can now attend Mathieu’s class of rad moves in Project Cyber. The first time you boot Project Cyber, you will asked to complete the Tutorials. The Tutorial flow is in the works and art department will soon double their efforts to make your “classroom” as pretty as possible. You won’t be shy to wave that diploma around!

Up are your exSpectations!

The Spectator mode is now back! This allows one user to witness matches through the lenses of Phil’s cameras. Development continues on that front, so stay tuned.

Invisibility effect enabled

The Invisibility power is now fully functional. The Stalker character (tentative name, don’t worry) is now able to disappear for short periods of time. The opposing players will be left looking at a beacon standing at the last know position of the invisible player. Let us know what you think!

We kinda lost track of Simon’s for a few days.

Cheers and don’t forget to sign up for the tournament!


-The Spearhead Community Team

Hello Honorary Spearhead Members!

Before getting into the nitty gritty of the work that was done this week, we’ve got some something special for you all:

We’ve been hard at work since PAX East to revamp and improve the gameplay of Project Cyber. Now that the characters and their abilities are being solidified, it’s time to bring back the competitive aspect of the game. To do so, we are organizing weekly tournaments!

To participate:

1. Form a team of three (3) players. (Need extra players? Post here).
   
2. Sign up to Challonge!
   
3. Create a new team here (only 1 member of your team needs to do this).
   
4. Add the 2 other members of the team in the Administration/Members section of your Team Profile.
   
5. Sign your team up to the Project Cyber Summer Tournament (Week 1) at http://challonge.com/tournaments/signup/mgxSNXwMpn

You have until June 18th (6PM Eastern Time) to sign up. We will announce the brackets and details of the tournament on the Project Cyber Community Stream on June 19th. Stay tuned to the Community Stream during the week to see some of the matches and the finals!

Winners will get to face Team Spearhead, who have been training real hard, and win some cool “prizes”.

New Arena Look!

Yan and the Art team have been hard at work on a new look for the arena, that is now integrated in the game. Give us your feedback on the new arena here.

Enter the Stalker!

If you played the Twitch build (he’s the Cone character), you’ll notice how much his shape and animations stand out. Animation and special effects improvements coming up next!

As we solidify the gameplay with tweaks and polish, now’s the time for Art team to shine! Visual feedback for the projectiles and their effects on the players/disc are a top priority. Character animation is also getting some love.

We wish Simon good luck as he pursues his true calling!

Cheers and don’t forget to sign up for the tournament!


-The Spearhead Community Team

Hello Honorary Spearhead Members!

This week’s update is all about art updates and gameplay refinements!

Get educated!
Mathieu has been hard at work on a tutorial system. His goal is to get new players up to speed on the basic gameplay skills needed to succeed with quick and fun exercises. This tutorial section is also our opportunity to reveal a bit more about the world and story of (still tentatively called) Project Cyber! Ideas? Share them here!

VR display just got real!
We have completely rethought the in-game meters and visual feedbacks. You will now get all the important information directly from the VR HUD display surrounding your character. Here are a few images of the current direction. What are your feelings about this? Let it all out here!

Powers, more powers!
Players of the Twitch build will be able to experience the first instance of Toto (not a final name I hope...), a new character with the awesome ability to summon his own personal bot. Once called, the bot will actively try to extract the ball from an opponent's grasp and pass it back to you. We are still in early development on this feature but it looks really promising.

Do you have suggestions for bot behaviors you would like us to test? A bigger bot? A swarm of smaller ones? A bot that can transform into a truck (hmm, sounds familiar)? Let us know here!

Blue team for the win!
In the vein of overhauling the feedback and UI in the game, we’ve made changes to the team colors. From now on, you and your teammates will always be in the “blue team” and the opposing team will always be red. (Good news though, research shows that blue team wins more often anyways.)

The graphical overhaul will soon be integrated in-engine and will be functional by next week. We are currently assembling a new character that will also serve as a quality benchmark. More news will be shed on this venture soon.

On the gameplay side, we are still fully focused on pushing the depth, mastery and variety possible within the game! We’ve made good strides already, but there is still a lot to do.

No traces of Simon this week but we are still actively looking for him. This is what Wolverine, a fellow Canadian, thinks about Simon being away.


-The Spearhead Community Team

Hello Honorary Spearhead Members!

Only one month away from the open Alpha! New features are coming online faster than ever. Here is a quick recap of this week’s progress.

Opening up our design docs to the community was a good idea -- we’ve received very valuable feedback about the invisibility ability by user Soah1086. User Serge suggested something very interesting: “coupled with a speed boost, the ability is now extremely relevant.”

Our design team thinks that this is an excellent direction and we would like to read more of your thoughts on the subject. What other combos do you think would work as well? Follow the conversation here.

Those of you playing the Twitch build might already have noticed that the front end is coming along nicely. We’re putting final touches on the game’s customization system and we can’t wait to share it with you. In the meantime, the UI team has activated the Statistics page to keep track of your wins and losses.

On that subject, what statistics would you like to have tracked and displayed in your profile? We can track it all, so tell us what you would to see to improve your game here.

Artwise, you guys are in for a treat! You are getting a completely new arena with greatly improved visuals. Work on new designs for characters is also well underway and they look awesome. Stay tuned for more news on that!

Below are concepts of the new environments and characters crafted by our creative director, Yan. Let us know what you think of the new direction here!

In continuation with next week, we’re still working on improving the depth and replayability of the game! To hear more about the gameplay improvements, share your ideas and follow the conversation right here!

-The Spearhead Community Team

For those of you wondering why Simon (@TheDarvian) is nowhere to be seen on Twitch these days, all we know is that he is on a secret mission somewhere. The last sighting of him was in some remote town in Sweden...

Hello Honorary Spearhead Members!

Big changes again this week as we are getting closer and closer to our end of June Alpha release.

Design docs are now up and public!

Now more than ever, you are empowered to impact the development of Project Cyber with a direct access to our design docs! With this tool, you are able to track our progress and influence it directly by adding comments to topics you have opinions about. This is an experiment and, to our knowledge, this has never been done before. Let us know what you think about the initiative in the forums!

A lot of new powers!

User Evilhackman from the forums has been heard! You now have the ability to conceal your position from the opposing team for a few seconds. For players on the Twitch build, this power has been assigned to the right mouse button for the Cone character. Let us know what you think about it here.

Ultimates overhaul!

The Ultimates are back (with a twist!). They now have a set amount of time they can be executed per match. We are currently looking at opportunities to grant powerful but limited resources to each team. Think of it like a Joker that can perhaps turn the tide around. Any thoughts on this, Spearheaders?

Replay cam!

Just scored an awesome goal? Now you can rewatch the last few seconds of the play with the new replay cam. As always, this is a work in progress and improvements will be coming in soon.

New character designs!

Two new team members joined us this week. Cedric will be helping us drive the visuals further with his artistic/technical expertise, and Matt is the senior character modeler in charge of the complete redesign and improvement of our characters. We are super excited to have them onboard! Welcome to the team!

That’s it for this week, folks. Be sure to tune in everyday at 7PM ET on http://twitch.tv/spearheadgames for the latest updates and to get a chance to be heard directly by the devs.

Have a great week.

The Spearhead Games dev team.

Hello Honorary Spearhead Members!

We are now reaching the end of R&D week 2. While we didn't make freakin’ spectacular gameplay improvements like we did last week, we are in the process of testing tons of abilities and powers!

Those of you who follow us on Twitch know that many of our tests were inconclusive/underwhelming/absurd. However, manipulating the gameplay gives us precious insights that allow us to progressively refine our understanding of the gameplay dynamics.

Here are some of the powers we tested:

• Stun: paralyzes an opponent for 2 seconds
  
• Clothesline: creates a disk-deflecting wall linking 2 characters
  
• Whip: creates a disk-deflecting wall that extends and retracts
  
• Strike: stronger push that takes more time to charge
  
• Teleport back to goal: self-explanatory ;-)
  
• Bricklayer: lays an object that can bounce the ball back
  
• Forcefield layer: same as the brick layer but with a force field
  
• Dash: propels a character in a direction
  
• Asymmetric movement: WASD have different speeds and accelerations linked to them
  
• Jetpack: faster movement that requires more skill – also mouse-based

Overall, we are progressing well and are quite confident that, in less than 10 working days, we'll have the core direction nailed for 3 or 4 unique and interesting champions.

Honestly, this part of the process is the most exciting part of a project for a game designer. If you are interested in learning more about our uniquely iterative, prototyping development methodology, come see us on Twitch at 7PM – there are only 2 weeks of prototyping left!

Community feedback and ideas

Dr_Zaius[/b]
Vex: Not liking that strike. It is too easy to predict where it goes for the other team, it's really fast and hard when it works but I found it quite easy to catch the ball knowing exactly it's path. If keeping it maybe a charging animation instead?

We are actively working on finding the right balance for this guy. The goal is to reward players who manage to get enough free space with a ''better shot,'' but it's a delicate balance to find.

TheMaicDwarf[/b]
Mathieu's Face is the most FUN to play.

Yeah, right now, there are characters that are geometric shapes with faces from people on the dev team. Don't mind them, it's an artist from the studio trolling us... they won't be part of the final product! ;-)

Have an idea on a cool power we should try? Now is the best time to propose it! :-)
{LINK REMOVED}Click here and be heard!

Cheers,

Team Spearhead

By the way, we really appreciate the way you take time to analyze and give your feedback on each of our tests individually! :-)

As we end our first week of post-PAX R&D, we are actually super impressed with the gameplay dynamics we managed to secure so far.

After trying a lot of different directions, we managed to identify a couple of core gameplay elements that create much stronger teamwork and pose quite interesting choices at all times for the players. Here are the few of the core elements we have identified so far in our formula:

1- Adding Character Collision:

By adding a collision to each player we made strategic positioning a much more valuable move and made obsolete any attempt of brute forcing the disk through a player.

2- Character Movement Momentum:

Players now have acceleration, so it takes them some time to reach maximum speed and change directions.

3- Hold RMB to Grab, Release to Throw:

While we always hesitate to map a double-function move on a single button, it seems like this one works remarkably well. This action is both super fun to use and extremely rewarding for people who make strategic team plays. Additionally, it finally brings ball possession and dribbling notions that have been at the core of many discussions in the community!


We are really happy we found a core gameplay direction that received approval so fast from both the dev team and the community.

While this gameplay is still rough around the edges and needs to be solidified, our next step is to start looking at how to create interesting asymmetric gameplay, then propose a nice variety of Champions. In other words, we'll start testing different types of powers and abilities to evaluate how synergetic/disruptive they are in regards to our new core gameplay.


@RIKIMARU
"Having the puck free moving and interactible with skills is okay, but I feel like there should be a "dribbling" aspect to the game. Dribbling and passing are key with just about any sports that this game relates to. The passing right now isn't really passing everything just feels like a shot to the goal, so you can't really set up any assist plays."

Your wish are our command, sir! ;-) This dribbling mechanics is now in the dev build, on its way to become one of our core mechanics!


So far, the best expression we have found to describe Project Cyber is ''Soccer MOBA''.

What do you think about this description? Do you have a better way to describe the category our game belongs to? Share your ideas here:

Any ideas? Please post them in this thread.

Hello Honorary Spearhead members!

We finally got the opportunity to let the PAX dust fall a bit, to analyze the demo build, and take a step back on the project.

Our conclusions:

1- We believe that the premise is super strong, and we are convinced that Project Cyber can be the next big thing by providing a fresh MOBA experience with much higher level of accessibility and spectatorship factor - while reaching similar level of depth.

2- We however feel like we are not yet there and we feel like the core gameplay dynamic has some inherent flaws, most importantly:

• Gameplay is mostly reactive: The dynamic of the game doesn’t provide enough options to players and nor does it require that players make enough meaningful decisions.
  
• The teamwork aspect of the gameplay is underwhelming: Teammates rarely feel like the combined result of their action provides a better result and that they have truly worked together.

Hence, we decided to go back to the drawing board a little to re-work the core dynamic of game. We believe that we are very close to creating a real gem and that this step might pay off tenfold in the long run.

This also means that we will entering an experimentation period and for a while, the game itself won’t progress very much.

Given that we only have 9 weeks left until our ALPHA milestone (objective = open game, final gameplay direction with progression), we decided that a reasonable amount of time for this R&D period would be 4 weeks. Yes, we are still crazy.


From @LOGAN
Players could have a special bonus when completing multiple pass (goal multiplier, power enhancer, ultimate fuel?).
The pass topic is something we’ve brought back onto the table. Right now Thierry is working a system that will provide an increasing boost each time members of a team touch the disk. This bonus will be reset when the other team touches the ball. The objective is to create additional incentive for players to pass the ball instead of shooting blindly.

From @DEMOEVOLVED
I think the goal area of each team should adjust in size based on the score in the game. Aka. As one team gets a score lead, the goal of the team that is being beaten gets smaller/tougher.
Interesting idea! We noticed at PAX that when there were matches with high score deltas and the underdogs had no chance of catching up, the crowd’s enthusiasm was super low. So having a mechanic that makes it increasingly hard to extend your advantage would be an interesting (and cheap) addition to make matches more exciting!


What is your most EPIC moment in project Cyber?
Help us to focus on the best and tighten the experience by telling us what you you liked the most in the game! Right here on the Steam forum.

Hello Spearhead Honorary Members!

There is now less than a week before we unleash our first demo at PAX East in Boston! So far, other than the usual 1-2 seemingly random bugs that make our lives hell before demos, we are in good shape to deliver a game worth playing!

Given its nature, we feel like Project Cyber is a perfect fit for this kind of event and we just can’t wait to feel the energy of the crowd trying it. Hopefully, good opportunities and traction will come out of it. Also, we’ll be exhausted! And to those of you who will be at PAX East, come by and play the game on the show floor. We are part of the Unreal Epic booth (booth 1147).

Additionally we have some great news for our European community members. You can now join us at 12:30 PM North America Eastern Time (18h30 Berlin, 21h30 Moscow, etc.) to be part of our playtests, in addition to the usual 7PM ET playtests. You can catch Simon on our Twitch channel.

As always, we encourage you to play Project Cyber and give us your ideas and feedback on our STEAM forum. You can find more players by joining the official Steam group: Global_Cyber_Playtest. Dedicated players are standing by!

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE WEEK[/b]

• SOUNDS! Pressing buttons now has audio consequences! It’s still early, but it definitely makes Project Cyber feel like an actual game!
  
  
• New ultimate power: teleport. The Vengeful Star can now teleport to any position she chooses within the range with her ultimate.
  
  
• Music improvement: Match song has been polished. Music was added to sudden death as well as events.
  
  
• VFX push: powers have gotten much clearer, pretty and impressive. Cinematics are now cooler. It’s PAX time, so we’re making ourselves pretty for it!
  
  
• Projectile power push: Vengeful Star's main is surprisingly hard to nail down as a properly balanced gameplay feature. As always, thanks to great discussions with the community - we are definitely making good progress on it.
  
  
• New sub-forums were created around community ideas. We’ll pull the best ideas from the forum and post them here for closer examination! Check them out here!

CURRENTLY PRIORITIES[/b]

Next week more than half the studio will only be working for 2 days as most of us will be at PAX East to rock the house (thanks Epic Games)! As a consequence, not much progress will be achieved, but we’ll make sure to come back from this event with a couple of trophies - as well as pictures and movies for you to enjoy.

Wish us luck (stamina is actually the one stat we’ll need the most, but it seems like wishing stamina is not really a common practice)!

Stay tuned, we’ll communicate soon about the post-PAX future of Project Cyber.