Pilots looking for fame and glory have one week of dev daily playtest sessions to make their final mark in the current Dorado build!

Beginning Monday, July 13th, we're resetting all public leaderboard stats before our major update hits.

Next Friday's major update includes a ton of new content including, but not limited to, a significant expansion of FPS and ship combat weapons, a new mode, a new map, new avatar archetypes and redesigned battleground interiors within capital ships.

There’s a lot to play, test and derive feedback from within the next major update. And we think that you'll have your hands full if you're interested in helping us decide what to do with all the implemented updates, striking your impact on Project Genesis' game design and development.

Leaderboards

http://www.projectgenesis.com/leaderboards
Get recognized** by reaching the top in any of these stats categories:
- Ship Kills
- FPS Kills
- Objective Points
- Total Score
- Total Wins

**Top three in each category receive a special Discord role

Say goodbye to the Dorado build with us as we host one final week of playtests with devs, twice daily:
- 11am PDT (6pm UTC)
- 5pm PDT (12am UTC)

Once the major update launches, the leaderboards will be reset once again. At which point all scores will reflect stats to the newest update code named Enceladus.

You can find the pre-alpha Project Genesis leaderboards here.

The team is heads down, crunching development for the next major update, Enceladus. So we came up with a fun challenge to test your pilot skills without requiring teammates nor opponents.

This is the Drift King Challenge! You'll need:
- A Scout Ship
- The Enceladus Map

What's at stake?
The unofficial, honorary title of Drift King!

First, you'll want to work your way up to the challenge by sharpening your piloting skills using these videos as a guide.


Map: Enceladus
Ship Type: Scouts or Fighters
Boost: Always On

Begin by asserting control over your ship. And
test your scout or fighter's ability to simply fly
through the narrowest of obstacles. And make
sure you can do this without even scratching
the paint off your ship!


Map: Enceladus
Ship Type: Scouts or Fighters or Heavies
Boost: Just enough to drift

At this point you can perform the drift mechanic
and now you'll test your ability to manipulate
the maneuver around large obstacles. Drifting
between the gap made by terraformers and
their arms can be executed with any ship.


Map: Dominion
Ship Type: Scouts or Fighters
Boost: Always On

When the map rotation arrives to Dominion,
look for either outpost and fly to the top
plate. Once there, time your entry because
that space windmill is unforgiving! Fly through
the middle and drift your way out the other side.


Map: Enceladus
Ship Type: S301 Scout (only)
Boost: Always On

So far this is the mother of all drift king challenges! Once on Enceladus, take your Scout ship to the top of any Terraformer. Your goal is much like the 'Basic' challenge from earlier. However, this time your challenge is to drift through the other side! Give yourself enough space so that your boost will last through your journey. We're looking for flawless execution, meaning not even a single scratch against your ship.

We've only seen this performed with the S-301 Scout. Feel free to try another ship and show us that it can be done! And if it proves to be too easy, raise the bar for us by submitting a more challenging drift for the community.

If you successfully perform any of the stunts above, let us know via any of our social media platforms, including:
- Steam Forums
- Discord
- Twitter
- Facebook
- Reddit

If you can show us video of yourself successfully performing the Drift King challenge, we'll give you a much deserved a shout-out on our social media platforms recognizing your "Drift King" status! As well as the highly coveted Drift King role on Discord to call out your Drift King status!

Severs are open and available 24/7 so you can try the Drift King challenge at any time.

This contest is open until the Enceladus major update goes live.

We've been sitting on this badge for some time. Now we're excited to roll it out!


We want Project Genesis to be the kind of title that encourages healthy competition. And although we’re still a small, growing community, we’ve already identified players who separate themselves from the rest. Now we’re going to enjoy learning from, watching and even broadcasting what happens when our top players compete against one another.

If you're competitive enough to hang with the most elite players in our growing community, then you're the player we hope to see enrolled in our Ace Pilot program.

The Ace Pilot program will help drive Project Genesis' evolution toward its aspirations of a fun and competitive title. The program invites the most competitive pre-alpha pilots, matching them against each other in weekly organized events. Ace Pilots will play a critical role in helping us balance gameplay as well as identify opportunities to address around team dynamics.

Although the Ace Pilot badge is awarded by invitation only, anyone can get noticed by their ranking on public leaderboards and by playing regularly in Dev Daily playtests held twice every weekday:
- 11am PDT or 6pm UTC
- 5pm PDT or 12am UTC

Ace Pilot only sessions will begin by being held once a week. With scheduling to be negotiated between all available Ace Pilots worldwide.

Once a player accepts their Ace Pilot invitation, their account is accredited with an Ace Pilot badge that progressively ranks and appears in several locations:
- In game on combat ships, inside assault pods and on score cards
- Official Leaderboard
- Role designed within official Discord community

We're giving each Pilot Badge a cosmetic overhaul which you'll soon recognize on combat ships, inside assault pods on performance stats and leaderboards!

And we have an official badge to recognize contribution to the Project Genesis pre-alpha community within one of four categories:

- Moderating
- Testing
- Content Creating
- Competitive Balancing



Ambassadors fulfill the role of moderators and hosts for new community members as well as extend that role across platforms. They excel at helping others have a great experience with Project Genesis and play emcee within our growing pre-alpha community.



Test Pilots enjoy breaking things, are obsessed with quality, and will help reproduce and sleuth bugs. They will often get the earliest access to builds to verify the game or run new features through testing to ensure a stable enough build state for wider release.



Creators are the content creators in the Pilot Program: artists, partners, streamers and content producers. They are the kind of early adopters who blaze trails in new territory for others. They examine and demonstrate what is worth experiencing in Project Genesis to their audience in fun and creative ways.



Ace Pilots are competitive community members who help refine play balance, find and quash exploits and help create the most visceral experience that is ‘easy to play, hard to master’. They often have experience as competitive players in shooters or space combat games, and may even find themselves on ranked lists in their favorite game genres.

Let us know with a comment below or on Discord!

You'll notice a quick update!

That's because we fixed the 'fake bomb issue' as you've been calling it. But we also snuck in some menu items to support the last update which include video, notes and graphics.

We've been closely following your feedback since releasing Early Access last week. And here's our first attempt at critical fixes. Plus new content!



Highlights

• Reduced player name tag distance to support smaller maps
  
• Reduced projectile distance to support smaller maps
  
• Fixed payout screen (level to next) sometimes not populating data
  
• Implemented low risk solutions to test against spawn camping
  
• Addressed objective markers missing in flight
  
• Hotfix for crashes related to voice comms, changing teams and menu bugs
  
• Hotfix for breach targets appearing available to breach when unavailable from a destroyed pod to that breach target
  
• Added disclaimer where progression and unlocks are shown
  
• Hotfix for lockon staying on screen when ships move behind cover
  
• Implemented jump pads in FPS

Full Patch Notes

• Fix for Discord presence not updating
  
• Fix for bad collision on dominion capital ship bridge
  
• Fixed level up delay issue for first item to reveal instantly
  
• Modified progression animations
  
• Updates to loading screens and its animations
  
• Polish to various weapon animations
  
• ZOrder changes to level up screen
  
• Visual work to Jump Pads
  
• Increased revolver ammo to 8 from 6
  
• Decreased revolver vertical recoil
  
• Moved revolver ADS closer to camera
  
• Reduced shotgun damage per pellet from 13.5 to 12.5
  
• Reduced shotgun pellets from 12 to 10
  
• Made ion disruptor projectiles smaller
  
• Updated ship boosting to last around 50% longer for all ships
  
• Increased the regen time for ship boosting to a bit longer at 0.4-0.5
  
• Removed removed one interior dominion point to The Ring map
  
• Added jump pads for testing on The Ring map
  
• Scaled up jump pad trigger box
  
• Updated turret display offline material
  
• Updated lightmaps and adjusted fog settings for better parity between high/low quality settings on The Ring map
  
• Rifle and Pistol 45 degree sprint animations
  
• Fixed an issue where Players that changed Team would remain in the Voice Chat channel of their previous Team
  
• Refactored the Bridge Door Terminal Objective
  
• Made the auto shotgun pellet spread smaller
  
• Increased auto shotgun ammo from 8 to 10
  
• Increased montage blend-in to reduce huge animation kickback
  
• Increased pump shotgun pellet spread size
  
• Lowered KG AR damage to 25 from 30
  
• Lowered KG AR headshot multiplier to 1.5 from 1.65
  
• Lowered tank health to 250 from 300
  
• Lowered techno/toxic health from 250 to 225
  
• Made rogue a light avatar like the hacker
  
• Reduced frag grenade radius to 500 from 850
  
• Lowered frag grenade inner radius to 150 from 250
  
• Incendiary grenades now apply burn effect upon initial explosion
  
• Increased incendiary grenades burn radius to 150 from 135
  
• Turrets now deal damage to Assault Pods
  
• Refactored the Scoring variables on the Player State
  
• Refactored the Team Balancing
  
• Implemented temporary solutions for Team Balancing until we get more sophisticated Match Making Rules with Flexmatch
  
• Implemented a preliminary Spawn Protection system
  
• Ships have a Spawn Protection time of 3 seconds
  
• Avatars have a Spawn Protection time of 1.5 seconds
  
• Lowered kg revolver headshot multiplier from 2.0 to 1.85
  
• Reduced auto shotty magazine from 10 to 8
  
• Decreased auto shotty pellets to 9
  
• Reduced railgun range laser from 300,000 to 210,000
  
• Reduced clusterbomb cooldown from 7.5 to 5.5
  
• Increased laser gatling damage from 8.5 to 9.5
  
• Reduced missile range from 262.500 to 185,000
  
• Reduced ion repeater range from 200,000 to 180,000
  
• Reduced clusterbomb range from 188,000 to 175,000
  
• Reduced missile repeater burst interval from 0.15 to 0.11
  
• Changed FPS screen effect to use the incendiary one
  
• Integrated jump pads to Outposts
  
• Updated lightmaps to Outposts after jump pad integration
  
• Added UI disclaimer tool tip
  
• Added breach locations to detonation capital ships
  
• Fixed an issue where hitting anything and causing damage will have a HitMarker
  
• Updated detonation lightmaps after adding new breach points
  
• Fixed an issue where ObjectiveMarkers would not become visible if they were outside of the distance threshold
  
• Extended the match end period to 30 seconds from 20 seconds for a total end match time of 1 minute
  
• Fixed an issue where weapons would not transition into the reloading state if a reload was initiated while they were in the firing state.
  
• Jump pad audio pass + attenuation shape
  
• Moved the C dominion point to create separation from jump pad landing spot
  
• Increased jump pad attenuation to cover a larger area
  
• Fixed an issue where the profile button on the hangar flight deck was displaying the incorrect experience values for their given level
  
• Fixed an issue where match payouts was displaying the wrong value for the amount of experience that was gained from that Match as a total
  
• Set map world extents
  
• Fixed visual holes in the Terran capital ship
  
• Re-oriented select interior and exterior breach points to relate better

Since we're a brand new title releasing in Early Access just recently, we want to make sure we're keeping player count high in matches. We're running servers only out of Seattle/Oregon (west coast USA) for now to help ensure this objective. Once we start seeing a rise in player count, we'll start running servers in the highest player count locations thanks to some heavy lifting by our engineers. We're fortunate in that we can spin servers up at almost any place on the globe

For now, running out of USA West Coast might result in you experiencing high ping times. We want to let you know we are working on it as it is a high priority. Dynamic server locations are one of the feature upgrades next on our list to tackle.

Currently we are matching folks randomly and mixing teams up between games. Once we finish with the "triaging" necessary to release on Steam Early Access, we will be spending time enhancing player match making and getting you into teams with your friends.

Even though we're keeping servers on the USA west coast, we are seeing an increase in player counts. That means sometimes you might start a game with only a few people in matchest on what looks to be a busy day for playing. This usually means a new multiplayer server has spun up. If you wait a bit, you'll often find new people joining in short order to play. If you are finding that you are waiting longer than you like, try leaving your current match and then pressing the "Play" button again. A new slot in a game that is fuller may have opened up.

Thanks for your patience as we scale up. We are looking forward to seeing you in Project Genesis!

Best regards,
Project Genesis Dev Team

This update takes pre-alpha Project Genesis into Early Access. Your playtesting and feedback during this time is a critical contribution to development as we fine tune gameplay until our Early Access debuts on May 22nd. Thank you for participating!


Gameplay in both space combat (3rd person) and aboard capital ships or space stations (1st person) has a noticeably different feel. Ship speeds as well as field of view have changed, allowing for more tactical combat in space. Combat areas have also been refocused by introducing more structures, obstacles and cover.

Another pass on FPS combat includes noticeablely increased movement speed. This introduces a host of gameplay consequences including the need for rapid iteration against speed of play.

Please tell us your thoughts on both!


We introduced player progression in our past update, Corvus. In Dorado, we now begin taking action with the back-end algorithms recording player progress. As we continue experimenting with unlocking items, Dorado introduces ships, avatars and weapons that are standard for all players beginning at Level 0. Thereafter, as you progress through levels in accordance to your wins and team contribution (measured by scores in games), more ships, weapons and an additional avatar will begin to unlock.

We can't emphasize enough that this is a work heavily in progress. Thanks for your feedback and patience as we fine tune this ahead of Early Access!


A new weapon is in the game! An upgrade to the shotgun that was first implemented in our Cassiopeia update, the Kingsguard Auto Shotgun has a revamped look to the original shotgun and can quickly fire rounds in a short period of time.

Please try the existing, overall gunplay composition and let us know your thoughts on feel, balance and opportunities.


Turrets aboard capital ships have been significantly improved for aesthetics as well as gameplay. Now you'll experience stronger notification reinforcement to let you know if your turret fire is hitting opponents as well as easier targeting and aiming.

- Preset Color Palettes
- Stats Tracking Upgrade
- Implemented Discord rich presence
- Fixed issue where TurretEmplacements would increase their rotation when being used by the amount defined on the World Rotation of their placement in the level
- Fixed the levels of the EMP audio
- Fixed issue with ship projectiles not replicating
- Updated frag explosion sound
- Increased missile repeater fire rate from 0.75 to 0.5
- Increased lockon sound volume from 1.5 to 2.5
- Changed the frag fuse to activate on collision and it explodes 1 sec after, should make it more consistent as long as you bounce the grenade near your target
- Fixed lockon widget sould clean up if the target leaves the match
- Implemented max distance traveled on turret projectiles, they'll explode after traveling a certain distance, dictated by the turret
- Fixed issue with the ship's targeting systems not targeting other ships properly
- Fixed ship weapon charged fx now cleans up on EndPlay
- Fixed issue where player can equip locked utility for character
- Player & Unit progression adjustment; target unlock 4 hours
- Fixed issue where player can equip locked items (ships, ship weapons, avatar, avatar weapons)
- Material/mesh updates - give higher fidelity to low quality game settings, lightmaps
- Made major improvements to the KillCam. The KillCam will now play a floating away sequence which serves 2 purposes. One is to make the KillCam appear more dynamic, the second is an edge case where the KillCam has no Actor to target, in this case instead of remaining in a static position, it will now float away to a set distance and aim the Viewport towards the Players death location. The KillCam will also not fly through existing geometry and performs collision checks to find its maximum distance it can float away before potentially clipping geometry.
- Fixed a crash with the TargetingSystemsComponent and a missing nullptr check
- Fixed an issue where the ReadyUp Timer was not properly replicating state to Clients that joined later in the PreMatch period and would have to wait the full ReadyUp Time instead of the partial current value reported by the Server.
- Fixed an issue where the Player could manipulate the Spectator pawn that is created when they first join the Server in such a way to move it under the Map. This had no gameplay consequences but was a visual inconsistency.
- Fixed a Client Side crash when exiting to the MainMenu where bindings to delegates for getting the Login status were not being correctly removed when the MainMenu Widget was destroyed.
- Added sound attenuation to ship charge sound
- Fixed an issue that displayed the missile incoming even if it wasn't a lockon weapon
- Turrets now use the targetting systems, which display the ship diamond widget and also allow for lockon functionality
- Lowered kg shotgun sound a bit more, added sfx soundclass so it can be adjusted in options
- Can now zoom in with the turrets
- Production lightmaps
- Set eye adaptation to 2 for all quality levels
- Updated main menu map to look better using low quality settings
- Adjusted hangar materials to look better at low quality settings
- Changes to further address issues with Ping not displaying for other Players.
- Updated the HangarManager Blueprint to use the CLIENT_UpdateHangar Cloud Code function when pushing changes to the Hangar Slots by the Player.
- Fixed an issue where Projectiles that have huge velocity would spawn their impact effects behind geometry due to their speed. They now correctly apply their impact effects at the point of impact.
- Fixed an issue on the AssaultPodInterior Actor that would cause remote Clients to see the Breached Wall static mesh when the Pod is Idle or Traveling instead of the Intact Wall static mesh that it should be using during those states.
- Further adjustments to the Bombsite in order to address the issue where the Bombsite continues to "tick" after the match ends.
- Adjusted (centered) ships in hangar
- Tweaked material roughness params in hangar
- Fixed lighmap UVs on hangar meshes
- Cooling tower vert painting, collision bug fix
- Fixed level extent collision boundary (Carbonaceous)
- Play/Join button typo fix
- Dom cap ship/outpost interior polish
- Created new function for showing the widget
- Level ups show on the left side of the screen in a scrollbox now (if any) - unlocks on the right (if any)
- Showing avatar and ship level on hover event in the details panel (only if the item is unlocked)
- Added ship support cradles back in to hangar
- E Key is now the default key for breaching
- Fixed issue with seeing the breach Indicator though the capital ship shield if close enough
- Fixed green breach indicator height
- Fixed breach use text to update with bindings
- Set thruster geo to use lighting channel 2
- Implemented lockon notification & missile location
- Changed charged weapons sound FX
- Setup a system in the HUD where we can define which was the last set focusable Widget, the ChatBox is currently the only Widget to use this feature to determine what Widget it needs to allow focus for when it loses input.
- Fixed Turret firing hitch that affects all Players.
- Hiding the Escape Menu if the Respawn Menu appears after a Death.
- Put in provisions to disconnect Clients from VoiceChat early on before they roll to the next map. Made adjustments to the RespawnMenu as well as the PlayerController input code to allow VoiceChat to work while in all MatchStates. This should solve voice channels remaining open after exiting to menu.
- Increasing footsteps volume to find a baseline
- Updated respawn menu
- New bay items to show off the pairing and bay number
- UI 4k support
- New design for flight deck menu
- Flight deck using similar bay item as in respawn menu
- Added 4k menu support
- Fixed camera issue on initial loading the flight deck
- Upres'd mounted turret barrel
- Expanded E/D capture volume in Dominion
- Fixed s301 badge/weapon conflict
- Added thumbnail for auto shotgun to the BP
- Gamemode helper text should be hidden on end match
- Made modifications to the VitalSystemsComponent when taking damage in order to resolve the case where we might want the World to cause damage to the Player. Added a Radial Damage causer to the Bombsites when they explode. This uses a new BP_DT_World Damage type that is specifically for events that arent caused by Players but need to apply damage.
- Changed the HangarBay Slot Widget on the Respawn Menu to always show its contents when it is Selected.
- Fixed a hardpoint from floating on the S301
- Added badge mesh to base ship BP, updated ships to use correct badge mesh
- Pulled the ChatBox and VoiceChat Talkers list out of the Killfeed Widget and moved them to their own dedicated Widget called W_Chat. This allows us to separate the ordering of these elements so that they always appear on top of all other Widgets, this should also allow users to discuss things during the End Match.
- Exposed the ServerIdle check functions to Blueprint. The GameState will now check if the Server has exceeded its maximum lifetime at the end of a Match even if there are Players in it (where previously it wouldnt). It will now gracefully push Players back to the Hangar before shutting down the Server for recycling. This will happen after a minimum of 3 hours (this can be changed in the GameLift Settings page). The Players will get a clear message and be asked to rejoin a match until we get time to implement a more seamless transition mechanic to solve this.
- Raise up the EndMatch win condition text to stop it from overlapping the GameMode description text.
- Added in provisions to help mitigate the issue where you can "Return to Ship" while also simultaneously breach a ship.
- Fixed a crash with ShipWeapons attempting to access a nullptr when initiating effects.
- Turret aiming speed is the same as the fps aiming speed
- Changed team colors, blue is always friendly team while red is enemy team
- Prevented scoring on dominion if intermission/post match. May need another pass if some points slip in.
- Reduced frag grenade bounciness
- Added game mode helper text on the scoreboard
- Fixed a bug with a Utility function that wasnt looking for the correct Prefix on AvatarWeapons.
- Implemented a rudimentary Versioning system on the GameState that checks the BuildVersion.txt file on the Server versus what the Client thinks it has. If the Player doesnt have the same version contents, it will automatically kick them back to the MainMenu with a message.
- Adjusted some Timer Handles that could potentially be left dangling and causing crashes.
- Removed ability to access turret from below in outposts, filled gaps in floor at cap ship bridge/outposts
- Fixed UVs on cap ship
- Enabled cap ship interior cull volumes
- Fixed UV stretching on cooling towers
- Generating new physics asset bodies on KGLM, KGS, CP5 to solve for dropped weapons rolling around.
- Changed kg shotgun firing fx (sound and particle)
- Changed capital turret firing sound
- Capital turret monitor changes when destroyed
- Implemented TP mesh on FP mode, can now see your lower body
- Refactored footsteps to use the TP ones instead of the FP anim notifies, this allows for more accurate and responsive footsteps, as well as not having to re-do the footstep notifications on all new weapons, other player footsteps are louder than yours, crouching reduces footstep volume
- Reduced incendiary damage radius
- Removed old breach help widget

Servers back online! This is the first deployment of our newest build: Dorado

To connect to the early Dorado build:
1. Right Click on Project Genesis in your Steam Library
2. Click on the BETAS tab
3. Select: NONE - Opt out of all beta programs

Full release notes to come. But here's a short preview:
- Player Progression
- Upgraded Ship Combat
- Upgraded FPS Combat
- Upgraded Ship & FPS Movement
- Kingsguard Auto Shotgun
- Preset Color Pallettes
- Upgraded Stats Tracking
- Discord Rich Presence
- Official Soundtrack

This also means that the Daily Dev playtests resume! Join us every day at 5pm Pacific Time / 12am GMT. Feel free to jump into our Discord to chat with us live during these sessions.

SERVER/GAME DOWNTIME NEXT WEEK



Hey folks, we want to give everyone a quick update as we get ready for early access in a couple of weeks. We've run into a big limitation in trying to perform an upgrade on our back end system, while trying to get it to straddle our legacy system and the new and improved system.

The tldr; is that we're going to retire the Project Genesis: Corvus build early, and we'll have some "dead air" as we work hard to get an interim build (with lots of new features...and probably lots of bugs) up and running for you.

THE UPGRADE
As most of you know, we've been working hard to get our progression system in and leveling up our stats system so that we can start rolling out playbalancing (and activate our Ace Pilot program).

We thought we could have the old system live happily along side our new system, but that was just not possible. So we're going to bite the bullet and perform the transition from Corvus to an interim build ASAP before we launch in early access.

THE IMPACT
There are several areas that you'll likely be affected if you're attempting to get into Project Genesis:
1. Corvus will be retired which means there won't be a production build to play for a number of days next week
2. The interim build won't go through the same level of testing we and the Test Pilots like to perform before releasing a production build to everyone - so expect lots of bugs! The good news is, this latest build should also fix a ton of bugs reported on Corvus
3. This might affect our Early Access date if things go less than harmoniously (it's gamedev so we've come to expect the unexpected)

WHAT'S NEXT
We're going to jam over the weekend to try to make the downtime as minimal as possible. We'll get as much testing in as we can before pushing the interim build live.

After we get everyone back on their feet, we'll have a new improved experience for everyone.:fingers_crossed:

Thanks for your patience!