Hiya Rebels,

As promised, here's another devlog coming atcha~ Just wanted to let you know that you can play Star Renegades if you are going to PAX East this month! We will be there at Booth #13073 as part of the Indie Megabooth. Come find us for limited merch, pins, and tasty milk candies!

Sooo before all that happens, I just wanted to give you all an update on what we’ve been mainly working on:

• New enemies
  
• New Combat UI
  
• Free Exploration Map Mode

So you might recognize this little fella here from the last announcement. We mentioned that we opened up character design decisions to our Discord community and they came up with the following ideas:

• l a s e r
  
• sonic blast rawr
  
• bad breath
  
• guard chameleon doggo

Aaaand here were some of the ideas we animated! We loved your ideas so much that we definitely will be dropping more characters in the channel to hear what you think they should do!


In our previous demos, we used blinking blips in the health/shield bars to denote how much damage would be done to units. We thought that it was simple and players could visually see exactly how much damage is being done to their squad. However, for those who are absolutely OBSESSED with numbers and data sheets, we’ve decided to change the health and shield bars to meters with numbers that will tell you exactly how much health/armour/shields you have left instead of approximating it based on how many health blips are left. We felt that this gives the player agency to be extremely accurate with their calculations (so if your squad wipes, that is 100% your fault :P no pressure)


Old Combat HUD


New Combat HUD


I would say this has been the biggest change to our demo so far. We went from a node-based travel system to a free exploration map. Before Bryan (our pixel art machine) would be hand drawing all of these big maps. To avoid bottlenecking his process, we switched to using a layered tile map for our engine so that our team could generate maps and populate it with events ourselves.


Layer on~ layer off~ layer on~ layer off

We felt that node-based travel created too much friction if a player wanted to backtrack to get take a different path and we felt that it broke game immersion at times. We wanted to create an explorable world which gave our players a sense of agency in the universe.


Timeline of our world map process (that glow up)

We also removed the time counter for Imperium reinforcements arrival and simplified it with “turns taken” to perform actions. This should make things more clear for players deciding whether or not to take a certain action while deciphering where the enemy might be traveling to next.


Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!! New Free Movement map travel!

We’re still playing around with making our maps a proper size so that there isn’t TOO much barren space, yet balancing it with enough event tasks and objects so that there is a clear path for you to venture around. It’s all a work in progress but this will be quite close to the build we will be bringing to PAX East.. sooo if you’re going- please do drop by our booth to say hi or poke your fave streamer to check us out.


Thanks for tuning innn!

Softcookie + Massive Damage Team


P.S. We have also posted this devlog on our site if you'd like to see GIFs in their less-compressed glory: http://massdmg.com/2019/03/star-renegades-dev-log-4/

Hiya Rebels!

We promised that we had some exciting news in store for you all and well-
we can finally let you all know thaaat..

We have partnered up with the amazing folks at Raw Fury to publish Star Renegades! ːsteamhappyː



Have you ever felt magic before? That magnetic feeling you get when you first meet someone who absolutely LOVES the same stuff you do and then the more you talk you realize how you’re pretty much the same person and it’s kinda crazy how you managed to bump into each other in a sea full of people? WELL, that’s what we felt when we met the warm and passion-driven folks at Raw Fury! Not to mention- our names sound totally badass next to each other- RAW FURY x MASSIVE DAMAGE ?! UHH HELL YEAH! (btw we totally thought this was a sign from the universe that it was meant to be)

So yeahhh~ what does this all mean for Star Renegades?! Welll- since we have increased scope and budget for developing the game now- we have changed the release date from 2019 to early 2020. That way- we will be able to create all the things we have dreamed of for Star Renegades.

We just wanted to say THANK YOU to everyone who has supported us so far on this journey. We also have more *EXCITING* upcoming news to share, but that won’t be until later on in the month- and announced most likely on our Twitter!

BY THE WAY… a snippet of what we've been working on..and what I'll be talking about in the next devlog 😉
Hint: it rhymes with shmree shmexploration



Meanwhile, if you join our Discord community, you may find our dev team lurking about and occasionally dropping a few work-in-progress GIFs here and there as well as asking for YOUR input on character design- like this alien doggo here. He is the goodest boi and some of his skills have been ideated by our awesome community peeps. <3



Other than that, we have been working on the demo for our next show and are about to wrap things up soon! So- that means I'll finally be able to finish that devlog highlighting some major changes to our map exploration world.



Thank you so much for your patience. Aaaand thanks for tuning in! <3

Softcookie + Massive Damage Team

*static noises* KRRRSHH KRRRSH- “Massive Damage HQ to Rebel Command- do you copy?!”

It has been Day 68 since we’ve last made contact after our last ship landing at 47.6062° N, 122.3321° W

Shortly after our return home from the epic ambassador mission at PAX West, an Imperium Admiral overheard of our success, and they tried to foil us by sending over a bio-magnetic storm to our home planet! This hyper-localized storm brewed its way to our secret cave, trapping us devs inside with our computers. We had no other choice but to stay put and work on Star Renegades until the storm passed.

Luckily for us, the it only lasted a short while. But during this time, our team worked incredibly hard to get Star Renegades to a more polished state than before by filling it with MORE quests, game mechanics, new enemies, a new planet, re-skinned UI, new music, and much, much more!

We also recruited a droid named J5T-1N who will be (with minimal effort) assisting your team while at the same time tossing in snarky remarks and laughing at your misery. Don’t mind him though, his empathy resonators have been on the fritz since the time some Imperium troopers cruelly used him for a game of gravity pong. I’m sure he’ll eventually come around!


“I have conveniently relocated your holo-armour underneath this pile of Shneep droppings.”

Sooo, now that we have finally completed a segment of our game. I just wanted to give you a preview of how the game looks now. Make sure you’re sitting down for this! It looks quite different from the last demo we’ve had! Alright, J5T-1N, show ‘em a preview of what we’ve got!



…...woooow. Rude!! Guess we’ll probably catch him later at a better mood after a nano-nap. WELP, I guess I (Softcookie) will just show you folks for now what we’ve been adding to the game so far!

Note: What I’m going to show is still a small snippet of the game. We can’t show you everything as we’d like to keep some things for a big reveal in the final version of the game.

Since the combat demo we showed at Gamescom and PAX West, we’ve done the following:

• Gave the UI a MAJOR glow-up
  
• Implemented a more robust adversary hierarchy system
  
• Added a whole new explorable, beautifully pixelized planet with a complete set of quests

Combat Timeline HUD

Sooo If you remember from before- one of our very first demos, our UI panels were purple and pink. We realized pink and purple was kiiiiiiiiiiiind of a dominant colour theme in our game- and with purple and pink panels definitely won’t help make information more legible especially in a game that relies heavily on stats, info, and text. Soooo, we decided to take it all in the opposite direction! Make EVERYTHING see-through! So we switched to a glass-look with a holographic-y interface (that’s how the iPhone Infinity is gonna look in 2030, CALLED IT). And soooo- here we are- this isn’t the final product of course, but definitely a step closer in the visual direction that we want it to be.



The adversary hierarchy system will help you keep in check the movement of the Imperium as they recruit, rank up, or even demote their lackeys.

If you ever run into Draze Zem the Bounty Hunter and defeat him, this screen will pop up to show that you knocked him off the Imperium hierarchy (gooo Rebels!). Alternatively, if you are defeated by the Imperium, you’ll be able to see all your enemies rank up off of your defeat.


Draze also rates Bounty Hunting as 0 stars by the way.



For this build, we created a new explorable planet called Pahzaj XII. You’ll also be meeting J5T-1N for the first time and he’ll act as your little sidekick walking you through missions. So for this new mission, you will have to head towards either the east or the west region of the planet to retrieve a key that will unlock the big tower in the middle of the map with a giant laser beaming into the sky. Before that, there are switches to activate an old rundown subway that will take you to the ruined cities to retrieve the keys.


Where the west key is held! Surprisingly their broken subway system runs better than our city’s..

All in all, this is what we’ve been working on so far. There are some more mechanics we’d like to refine in the future before showing (like our relationship system, elemental damage on weapons and characters, setting up camp sites, etc.)

I know you folks must be asking.. But WHEN DO WE GET TO PLAAAY?! Aaaand the answer is actually....closer than you were before! This demo has been getting to the point where we’re like “hey, this spoonful of pie filling tastes pretty good- it’s almost ready for baking- might be better if we add more pumpkin spice and sugar.” But before then, there are still a number of mechanics, polish, and balance we’d like to add to make our demo feel like a nice thick slice of pie. We’re also still figuring out a bunch of things on our end like whether or not we’d like to go with a publisher or if we’re doing a kickstarter!

For the meantime, if you’d like to stay updated with our alpha/beta periods, sign up with our mailing list.

We share extra exclusive content with our mailing list community that won’t be seen on other social media (more secret sauce news for our super fans!).

If you like what you see here and you’re a new discoverer of our game, feel free to wishlist us on Steam and join our Discord!

Thanks for tuning in! We're pretty happy with what we've done so far with Star Renegades and can't wait to show you more soon.


Cheers,

Softcookie + the MDI team

⭐ Heeey Renegades ⭐

It’s been a while! So this devlog is going to be a B I G one. The last few months have been one heck of a ride preparing for Gamescom and PAX back to back. Just wanted to give you all a bit of an update as to what we’ve been working on and what’s coming up next!

First off, we’d like to thank you awesome folks for sticking with us on this dev journey. During these past few months, we’ve recruited at least 2500+ fine rebels to join the Star Renegades community mailing list from CGX, Montreal Comiccon, Gamescom, and PAX! Your support resonates so much with us, and we cannot be more excited to show you what we’ve been working on!

Anyways, before we get started on all that, here’s a collage of pics of usssss!



Now onto the juicy dev stuff!

Please note: all of this could be subject to change because we’re still iterating on many aspects of the game

We’ve been describing Star Renegades as a tactical rogue-like squad-based RPG (sounds like a mouthful right?!). In our screenshots and videos, you see a lot of squad turn-based combat going on, but what we haven’t shown online yet is some of the underlying systems that make our gameplay more robust.

To give you a rundown of our demo, here were the highlights we chose to showcase:

• Overland Travel Map Functions
  
• Character Progression and Camaraderie System
  
• Equipment and Merchant System
  
• Story-based Events (will be proc-gen in final version)
  
• Combat Loop

For the demos we took to Gamescom and PAX, we wanted to basically show off our core combat loop and watched peoples’ reactions to the mechanics. So far so gooood! This slice of our demo took our players on a journey through the explorable overland map to beat the Big Bad Bomb Boss Jomath. It was incredibly difficult to beat at first (something only Peter and Garry could beat aka difficulty level: insane genius) and the success completion rate was 3% on the first day for our players. We had to bug Peter to decrease the HP and shield amounts for certain mobs so that the rest of us normal people could enjoy the game a taaaaaad bit longer before getting wrecked- haha.

Despite some random bugs that we encountered here and there, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive so we think we’re on the right track! We totally loved how small groups of friends would walk by our booth, stop, do a double-take on Bryan’s pixel art process (we had him work on more Star Renegades characters and livestreamed it onto our TV), and sat down together at one of our stations to figure out how to beat Jomath- the final boss in our demo.


Spot our PIXEL ARTIST KING BRYAN! ːsteamhappyː

Our demo ran through one rebellion cycle or at least 30 minutes if you’ve been hanging on (even by a thread). The beauty of it is that you could win a fight, but lose half your squad, yet land on a node with a merchant and hire new mercenaries to keep on going. We’ve seen some players come back with one player left only to hire a new squad with new equipment. We also had two selectable squads from the start (different from our CGX demo), which offered different strategies to beat enemies. In the full game, you must defeat the Tyrant (not in demo) to bring a period of peace (20 years) before the next Tyrant rises up and rebuilds The Imperium.

The UI is something we’ve thrown together as placeholder while we tested out the combat, so it is already something we’re polishing for our next milestone. We know that improvements needed to be made with equipping items, hiring mercenaries, and leveling up heroes even before showing our demo, but focused primarily on combat mechanics and feel for this demo.

In the next section, I’ll be talking about the game outlined in a bit of high-level detail.


In our CGX demo, we put people through the tutorial. We had a sort of holographic-looking map with three nodes that you can travel to. It was pretty simple. However, since Bryan, Colin, and myself (Jacq) are avid lovers of JRPGs, we fell in the love with the idea of an overland travel map heavily inspired by Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy. We wanted all our players to feel like they’ve been hit right in the feels with JRPG nostalgia as they are exploring a giant map with their squad. Sooo we had a huge overhaul with the art, animations, and node mapping for the travel screen. It was a huuuge hit, as we saw many peeps stop at our booth to watch the gameplay video playing on loop.

Old map:


New map:



In this demo, players were able to level up their characters and unlock more abilities with EXP they have obtained from fights and random narrative events. During combat, if your characters attack in a specific sequence, a camaraderie bonus unlocks between them. YEessss that’s right!! <3 This reveals a new duo combo attack between both chosen partners. We were very much inspired by Fire Emblem to implement this sort of relationship system, and plan to insert more supporting narrative to give our characters that extra flavour.


That's TEAMWORK, baby!


Our equipment system works similarly to Diablo in which the traits for the weapons/armour can fully transform your skills. For example, the Enlightenment Chip transforms all single target buffs to AoE but loses 50% of its potency (still a great item though). This item is particularly strong on Xurx with his shield-generating abilities and attack buffs. We have little trade offs on traits on items so that no one item can make a character too OP (no winfinity gauntlets here sorry!).


You get a shield, and YOU get a shield, and YOUUu get a shield. SHIELDS FOR EVERYONEeee!


Many people have asked whether or not Star Renegades will have a linear storyline with multiple endings. That’s still something we’re deciding at this moment. For the full game, Star Renegades will contain a multigenerational storyline. In our current demo, there are narrative events that pop up on each node your squad travels to. These events are procedurally generated and can alter the course of your mission based on what you choose to do. Right now, we’re leaning towards not having a rigid linear story, but rather supply our players with elements in game that allow themselves to tell their own story. That way, players have individual stories that they get to personally craft around each rebellion and the emergent story that is driven by the Rebellion Engine’s procedurally generated content, enemies, loot, and events.


So our combat is based around an info-centric (Peter: that sounds like a hip millennial term) battle system where you see your enemies plot their actions on the timeline. Interrupting, defending, and guarding are suuuper important in combat. If you don’t interrupt the Firewulf’s Immolate skill, your team will get roasted. And ooohhh boy- we’ve seen lots of peeps get punished when they weren’t careful in planning their next turn.


NOoOOOooo Wynn...!!

Oh and you’ll never have to worry about whether your heavy attacks will miss an enemy because there is no RNG in combat. Everything is under your control on the battlefield. You are the master tactician (so if your squad wipes, that is 10000% on you 😛)

Sooo this is what’s available in our demo for now. Of course we have a few other systems that we’re working on (that we’re keeping under wraps for now), but we definitely would like to tighten up and balance combat a bit more as well as heavily refactor our controls for UI and repolish all of our current windows. These are the things we will be working on for our Closed Alpha (ETA: to be determined)! Everyone on the team is working very hard to get Star Renegades to a playable state for our fans.

AAAAAAAND… when that happens, shortly after we’ll be ready for our first Star Renegades Closed Beta! WOOOOoo. To get in on this exclusive opportunity, make sure you sign up on our Mailing List and join our Discord for announcements as we get closer to that date! We will also be drawing some names for raffles to win a copy of Star Renegades as well. We’ll be posting announcements on our Twitter and Facebook as well so make sure you’re following us to get these updates!

Also, here are some pre-alpha reviews we’d like to share with you:

“This is the best game of the whole [Gamescom] show.” – Dedicated Fan (who came back five times to beat the demo with a different squad and also brought his brother to play)
“I like how there is no RNG. Everything is under my control. If I lose, I accept that it is entirely my fault.” – Awesome Fan of no RNGesus
“I may need to abduct your pixel artist :P” – Facebook Fan (jokingly of course)


Aaaand that’s it for now folks! Thanks for joining our community and tuning in to our channel to hear what we have to say. We’re well on our way to working on our next milestone, but we’ll be sharing secret snippets with peeps in our mailing list! So make sure you sign up for that 🙂



Cheers from your Friendly Neighbourhood Community Manager ❤,

Softcookie ^^’



P.S. Ummm sooooo…. Peter and Garry are STILL duking it out (since February 😮) for using “Read-and-React” vs. “Reactive Time Battle System” to describe our current combat system lol.. * P L E A S E * HELP US OUT and vote for either one of the terms and explain why you like it?? Are you #TeamPeter or #TeamGarry?!? Let us know in the comments~


P.P.S. We’ve finally watched Avengers: Infinity War. On the plane. To Gamescom ❗

Star Renegades development is heating up!


Hi all,

It’s Softcookie here from the MDI team!  For those of you who are new to our upcoming game, I am the UI designer/community manager! Our UI developer Linda has stepped away on maternity leave for a bit, so I have been giving a hand in the UI of STAR RENEGADES (i.e. the game we've been obsessively working on).

We’ve been a little quiet on the social media front lately, and that’s because we’ve been holed up in our dev caves working reeeeeeeal hard to submit a build for PAX West and Gamescom! We finally submitted this last week (and on time too lol), so fingers crossed that we get in! Being able to cross off this deadline from our task list has given us a bit of breathing room to come out of our rooms, see the sun, interact with other hoomans, etc.


We look FIIIIINE!

To prove that we’ve been working hard on Star Renegades, here is a list of movies that most of us HAVEN’T seen:

• Avengers: Infinity War
  
• Deadpool 2
  
• Black Panther
  
• Pacific Rim: Uprising
  
• Tomb Raider

(And the crazy thing is these all take place in the same universe, right??)

So, with the point of these DevLogs being to fill you in on STAR RENEGADES, we figured we'd jump straight to the topic of our new combat engine!

(Not that the entire game is combat! It wouldn't be Massive Damage if we didn't have a pile of supporting systems on top of our core game. We've got a super flexible mission and event system, for all your future content needs, plus we've got an AMAZING equipment system, as well as a few SECRET systems that we're working on that we're hoping will blow everyone's socks/pants/boots(?) off, all of which we'll tackle in future dev logs.)


So first off, it bears asking what the heck are we trying to do that hasn't been done before?

Well, the answer is a few things!

First off we've got a built-from-the-ground-up combat engine that revolves around the idea of enemy transparency, that is to say, you can see what your enemies are planning to do at the beginning of a round, and it's up to you to use your heroes' abilities to counter your enemies' actions.  Make a wrong move, get a little impatient, and it might lead to devastating consequences!



Here at Massive Damage, we're calling this system our "Read-And-React" Combat (Peter's term, stolen from basketball, which you can vote for in the comments section) or Reactive Action Battle System (Garry's Term, which you can choose NOT to vote for in the comments section, because it's way less elegant and doesn't really communicate anything).


So, a simple example of one of these Read-and-React (yep, I'm using it! Take that Garry!) moments is say an enemy is targeting one of your squishies with a flurry attack (it does 6 hits, and 6 damage each hit) for a whopping 36 damage, enough to kill your squishy.  Now you COULD choose for your squishy to defend (incoming damage is -50%), thereby reducing that damage to 18 (not great, but as you can probably tell, unlike most turn-based games, you have an actual reason to defend).



Or, let's say your machine gun fella has an Overwatch power, which allows him to return fire on the attacker for each hit (return fire on the attacker for 5 damage per attacker hit). So he does that, AND THEN your damage soaking tank GUARDS your squishy, taking attacks intended for them (allowing her armor to soak up all that dreaded DMG). AND THEN your weird portal-sword wielding robot man conjures up a reflective damage portal vortex in front of your damage soaker, and now each time your tank gets hit, the attacker gets hit too! 


Well that didn’t go according to plan


Anyway, that's pretty much the system. We've got tons of other stuff on top of it, some of which we're pretty sure has never been done before in a squad combat-based system, like personal shields systems that interact with debuffs in interesting ways, and a power selection flow that emphasizes experimentation with an maximization of squad powers so as to really emphasize TEAMWORK. Oh, and interrupts. And SO MUCH MORE!  


And wrapping that all together is a really cool in-house animation system that we're using to build all the nifty and dynamic attack animations anyone could ever want!

And the best part about it is its acronym: C.A.T.T.L.E. (Combat Animation Tool That Lucky Engineered).  Garry came up with that one. You really came through this time with that one, Garry.

Anyway, so that's a wrap for our first dev post! We'll have tons and tons of more stuff coming your way soon as we continue to experiment and tune Star Renegades to perfection!

But for those of you who don't give a damn about perfection, and who might live in the Ottawa or Montreal areas, you should absolutely come on down to CGX in Ottawa (June 23/24) or Comic Con in Montreal (July 6-8th), where we'll be showing a PLAYABLE version of the build.

That’s right. A PLAYABLE version of the build.

Hopefully, that's a deadline we won't regret announcing!


Feel free to join our Discord server or follow us on Twitter and Facebook for more spicy GIFs and updates.

• Discord
  
• Twitter
  
• Facebook

Anyway, back to our work caves. Stay tuned for more updates!



Cheers ːsteamhappyː

MDI Team