For this week's update, we're introducing a new Energy Shooter firing type, the "Ray." A mid-ranged narrow stream of energy burst forth! This shooter fires at an extremely fast rate with piercing rays through, delivering streams of energy to a large group of enemies with ease. With how fast these shooters can fire, players can utilize them with damage properties to deliver a constant stream of conditional ailments!

Hello and welcome back to another WIP update this week! Today is a glimpse into the future. As you might have seen from our roadmap, we planned to add new firing types and mechanisms into the game in our November patch and this is just one of them, Spread shots! Aimed to deliver a mid-range stopping power, the spread shot is great against groups of enemies while you can stay at a safe range. Check it out, we hope you like it!

Short work in progress update of the week, a look into our character sprites improvement. As we've mentioned before in our post-release addressing, we'll be updating our NPCs, starting with their main character arts. Here is a sneak peek!

Today, we have a small update to some bugs and an adjustment to what we've patched yesterday. Here is it!

- Adjusted boost controls that helps players escape from enemies after boosting into an enemy. Now you will have a better time in-fighting while locking into an enemy
- Fixed a bug that caused controls options not saving
- Fixed weight display for some items that are calculated wrongly

Hello everyone! We must say we are very grateful for your help in finding bugs and suggesting improvements to M.A.S.S. Builder. We are releasing this quick update for everyone to have a better experience in the game. We hope you will like this new update and we'll keep churning them out in due time!

Game improvements and additions

- Adjusted mission countdown to accurately end of 0 so you can pose easier on mission end
- Added target toggling system into the game, this should be a great improvement to controller users that have not been able to lock onto the targets they wanted to.
- Added in Reset Camera button to help controller players have a better time controlling their M.A.S.S.
- Adjusted lock-on system. Players will now auto lock-on towards the direction they are facing when using close combat weapons. This should help players move towards the direction they want to go while attacking.




- Rebalanced enemies' status numbers and AIs. They should feel less bullet spongey and more aggressive towards players now. In addition, They will behave more aggressively in higher difficulty.
- Adjusted enemies' resistance towards FREEZE property attacks.
- Adjusted boosting into enemies, you will now stay in front of them instead of going pass them so you will have an easier time with close combat weapons.
- Rebalance some Auto-Shooters mechanics, you will not be able to knock back enemies with your auto-shooter anymore.
- Added a notification system that will tell you if you have completed a set of equipment and they're ready to be built in their respective menu.




- Removed techs that has no active effects from equipment list
- Added in materials list display on development menu
- Adjusted UI to compensate widescreen cinema standard (2.35 : 1 ratio)

Bug Fixes

- Fixed FPS Drops whenever you die and the gameover screen pops up
- Fixed enemies climbing up some weird places in missions
- Fixed damage bug that happens when switching to warhead missiles
- Fixed an unintended method to fire Auto-Shooters
- Fixed unable to set Controller Axis in option settings in-between missions
- Fixed Blitz X neck not showing up correctly
- Fixed a bug the causes Quarks to spin in place like a ballerina
- Fixed a bug that causes some techs to not show its abilities in the Tuning menu
- Fixed energy shooters bug that prevents them from shooting enemies
- Fixed typos in various places, thanks to everyone who reported this mess to us
- Fixed ability description not showing up in tuning area for some of the techs
- Fixed Reinforced Frame overtuned damage stats, it now reflects a shield frame correctly and not an overpowered frame

Hello there, it has been almost 24 hours since we launched Early Access and reading through all of your feedbacks was extremely fun and interesting to us here at Vermillion Digital. With that said, we'd like to address some issues you guys have been reporting to us, those that we are sure about our answers. So, here it goes:

1. Achievements systems
As you might have noticed, there are quite a number of achievements but they all do not have any images and some are still looking weird. That was because the achievements have not yet been finalized and thus we have not yet fleshed it out. That means that these achievements might still change, but worry not, the statistics and numbers you have obtained from playing the current version is all logged and we'll appropriately backtrack through them once the system is ready. We also would like to say, as our roadmap mentioned, achievements will also include in-game rewards such as decals for players to show them through our multiplayer modes later in 2020.

2. Development nodes and difficulties
We have locked development into 2 tiers for development reasons as of now. This is to help us obtain a statistics through feedback of how our players feel with the current power level they have against our Quarks settings and thus help us improve the feel and numbers of combat in our game and their power curve. By November when story missions continue and harder enemies join the fray, we'll be sure to unlock them into Tier 3 and we will continue to work with this model with the coming major updates.

3. Progression tracking
We've heard a lot of you mentioned things to help track progression on what drops you've received from playing through the mission or completing blueprints, we'll work something on it as a QoL improvement to help notify you.

4. NPCs
The only thing we can say as of now is: Lots of improvement will be coming. Thank you very much for having great interest in our artworks and NPCs.

5. Void Crystals and stage mechanics
We heard your pain, improvements will come.

That should be all that we could be addressing at the moment, we thank you very much for all your feedback and suggestions to improve the game. Please keep them coming so we can improve this game together.

Best Regards, Vermillion Digital

A THANKS TO YOU ALL!

It is a good day for everyone of us here at Vermillion Digital. We know you've heard this a lot of times but we are extremely grateful to all of you backers that have allowed us to come this far, developed the game from the state it was in, and now into launching an Early Access on Steam.

We first started out as a small group of developers who wanted to create something that we'd like and standing here right now seeing our game going onto an online marketplace where people all around the world can grab it, have fun with it, and tell us about stuffs they think of our game, it makes us feel happier than anything else.

So, all of you, backers, we thank you from the bottom of our heart, you have helped us reach this point. For whatever opinions you have, we will gladly listen to them and improve our game upon it!

If you didn't get a key please email support@sekaiproject.com

Also, we've uploaded a new patch for the DEMO version

what? Well we decided to upload a new DEMO for everyone who can't decide yet whether they're going to jump on with us and play the game to try it out. This DEMO will contain as much customization as the Early Access version so you can have a good feel of how our game works out for you.

However, what we must say is that the DEMO version will not receive another update in a very long time thus the Early Access version will soon (by November) have much more content available than what the DEMO can offer!

We're happy to announce that M.A.S.S. Builder is launching on Steam Early Access September 13th 2019!

As a reminder, there was a roadmap posted on a earlier announcement and we'll be reposting it below.

Hello everyone! Welcome to the release of our development roadmap - August 2019, where you can see what we're planning to work on and release each month. There might be minor changes, small update releases, or some deviation through each passing month but this is the roadmap that we'll try to stick to in our development until the end of Q2 2020. You can read further about each decision and plans we’ve made during these months after our campaign ended. Now, let's take a look at the development roadmap itself.

Project timeline!

So, the most important question... or the second most to some, is: "When is the full release of the game?" To answer that, we can say that we expect the project to still be in Early access by the end of 2020 itself. This is due to the sheer amount of contents that we decided to work on and the stretch goals that we've reached but we'll continue working on all of it diligently we promise.

What we are looking to working onward to that point is completing the first part of the game for everybody. What we mean by that is we need to have every type of contents for everyone to look forward to. That is why we put Multiplayer which will take months to complete right in the middle of the single player story, but only after half of the missions are done (there is planned 26 story missions).

For the other important Question, read on!

Early Access Release!

Alright, we'll tell you right here right now. We're sorry that we need to push Early Access release back... to second week of September, frankly 13 September, 2019. 2 weeks later than we expected due to some stuffs on the Steam side that required us to send in a build 2 weeks in advance for Early Access approval (we didn't knew about it so if Steam allows the game to be released earlier then cheers!)

So what was adjusted during these months of development? Here is a list to read through.

NEW FEATURE AND CONTENTS

• Tech Abilities: We have released the new development tree with a revamped Tech nodes. They now house special skills that would activate when slotted into your M.A.S.S. Architectures as well as unlock some mechanics of the game itself. We believe this will provide more depth into customization and would help players realize their fantasies better. Please tell us what you think about this new feature so we can improve on it!
  
  
• Glows - If you've been following our updates, you might have already seen it. As largely requested, a glow feature has been added into paint customization. You can now make each part of an armor or a weapon shine lights or resemble a beam weapon itself. Hope you'll like it!
  
• New enemies, bosses, and difficulties - We've been bombarded with feedbacks on our enemies' types, AI, and looks, so we improved them all alongside providing new enemies. They are now more vicious and cunning, looks better (remember the glow feature? yeah Quarks also have access to them), and much more challenging with the difficulty levels (it works now!) as well.
  
• New Missions - We're releasing a continuation of the story missions in the game's chapter 1. You can now play through the first six missions of the game where things are starting out, learning about the world and Quarks, forging alliances and fighting in various areas. The total number of missions right now is 6 from a total of 26 planned.
  
• Hunting Grounds - These are optional mission offers by NPCs of the world. They have no effects or links to the story and will provide you with a place where you can test out the power of your M.A.S.S. The main mission of these hunting grounds will be to destroy all the Quarks in the area without much thought. Go on, RAMPAGE!
  
• Added an option to invert X-Axis for camera controls
  
• Added an option to toggle Motion Blur on/off (Default is "ON")
  
• Added an option to toggle Volumetric Fog on/off (Default is "OFF")
  
• The Vanguard Armor - A new starter armor set has been added into the game as a default armor set for all players.
  
• New weapon parts - We have added around 60+ weapon parts for players to utilize and play with. They're distributed between all weapon types.

IMPROVEMENT

• All features (and customizations) now support Joy Stick Controller.
  
• We have added video clips into the Help Menu so that players can have an easier time to see how each feature can be utilized and how things work. They're work in progress though and will continued to be update with each change to the systems.

CHANGES

• For more realism and in consideration of future modes of play, we have now limited the amount of weapons that can be brought into battles. You can unlock more slots for each of them through the Architect nodes. Please give us feedback on how do you think of this restriction.
  
• The calculations of magazines and ammo have been changed to create a pool where each type of shooters will pull from. The more shooters you bring into battle, the less stock you will have for them.
  
  
• We have also restricted some features behind Architect nodes and players will need to unlock them first before seeing their effects. These include showing items in the minimap, items magnet, damage property setting, enemy weakness info, and etc.
  
• The option to Invert Camera Axis will also affect Customization.
  
• Lower Booster speed by a bit for easier controls in aiming and movement.
• We also add motion blur into using the booster and turning.
  
• Altered camera range and angle so players have a better time in looking and targeting large enemies.
  
• Increased Custom Color Palettes to 12 slots.
  
• Frame, armor, and weapons' weight will have more effect on a M.A.S.S. speed.

BUG FIX

• Bug fix on how sometimes, players cannot move after shooting their bullet launchers and activating an object.
  
• Most visual bugs on the UI are fixed.

Upcoming updates

Upcoming Contents

• Armors - We are planning to release at least 1 armor set per major update. However, we need to first revisit old ones to give players more distinctive choices or designs to make when using what is available.
  
• Weapons - In the first few updates, we are planning to make an overhaul for ranged weapon designs with additional firing types coming into play such as constant beam or spread shots. We are also looking towards reworking old CC weapons so they can perform differently from each other in terms of speed and range.
  
• Missions - We look forward to release at least 2 new story missions alongside a hunting grounds release every major update. These take time to create with us looking to focus and make each story mission contain some distinctive mechanics that will challenge players more and more with progress.
  
• Suggested and Requested Contents - For those that have not known, many of us have been lurking in the M.A.S.S. Builder Discord hosted by Sekai Games. Believe me when I say we're always reading and listening to your thoughts on how you'd like development to progress, what kind of things you'd like to see in the game, how the game could be better with some changes. We have always been considering them as a part of our usual meeting and as you might've seen, a lot of them have been present in the game. You know who you guys are that suggested those things. We always like to read your discussions so I can say nothing more except "Please continue with your feedbacks, it's what we wanted."
  
• Exclusive DLC Decals and Weapons - To be honest, we wanted to release them by the time of Early Access but with all the reworks and requested types, we are still unsure when we could work on these things. Decals might be earlier than expected and unplanned in some of the early 2020 major updates but for weapons, we'll need to ship them later, like when all the dual-wielding stuffs gets done (since we know you wanted exclusive dual-wielding weapons) and that required a new control system to work with.
  
• Armors and Weapons Design Reworks - This might come as a surprise for many of you but we've decided we wanted to rework some of the older armor parts to make them more distinct for a better customization option as well as to help you guys out before the Accessory feature comes out. For comparison purposes, please look at the image below for the "Before" and "After" here.
  

Upcoming Systems and Features
Photography mode - This is a mode that will allow players to set poses and take a nice image of their M.A.S.S. just for artistic or any purposes. It's a feature we wanted to finish before releasing our Early Access build but frankly, we wanted to finish polishing some other places first so we need to hold it back for now.

Multiplayer modes and PvP - As we've discussed in our campaign, we will be working first on our PvP mode. Tell you the truth, we have been preparing for it and constantly trying to find the best possible time solution for the mode since it will take us an extremely large amount of time to finish the mode. It's like we're re-writing the whole game itself as our design direction for the game in its core PVE mode is to make players feel they are strong against a strong enemy with an AI that works on a dynamic pattern. In PvP, there are a large amount of systems that we cannot use (looking at you, lock-on targeting) as well as a lot of numbers that needed to be tweaked so that there is a semblance of balance in the game.

It will take us at least 4 months to finish the system, and while that is happening, almost all of our human resources will not be able to work on some other parts. That is why we decided to complete at least half of the PvE we are planning on (13 story missions, end of chapter 2 from a total of 26 missions and 5 chapters) before working on the PvP system in March. We will be constantly push out more armor and weapon parts during those time though so a major update of parts in May will still happen.

Accessories and other Frames - This is a higher tier of customization where players can add various things onto a part, like spikes, vents, nubs, etc. They are in the priority work list be we've decided to suspend development of the system for now until we're able to have more hands to work on the thing as well as we have enough armor sets, which should be after Multiplayer is done. We will release another roadmap for the latter half of the year that will address the accessories system as well as some other frames.

Achievements Systems - We had already a planned achievement systems and we already keep track of all your plays and everything. However, we don't want achievements to be just a decoration to your steam profile but something that you can show off to others. This will be done through an in-game rewards system that will give you things like special locked decals or parts that can only be unlocked by completing an achievement (such as destroying over 1,000 Quarks). Be prepared!

Quarks Evolution System - Where did this come from? What is it? Frankly, it's a new system we thought of when reading along your feedbacks about our enemies and something we thought appropriate. Quarks will be able to transform into a stronger version of themselves on a minimal chance where they will have improved AI, stronger attacks, and new special moves. You want challenge? We'll give you challenge. The higher the difficulty of the mission, the higher the chance you'll face them.

Voice Actings - These will be added into the game after at least chapter 2 is stabilized and every dialogue line is finalized. Please wait for it with bated breath. We'll try to get the best voice and voice lines for each and every NPC available.

Backer Created Contents

We've just received the whole collected documents of all our backer's request (Decals, NPCs, etc.) at the end of this backerkit so we're just starting our work on them. With that said, most decals will not take a long time to work on so we'll get them in the game ASAP, which is by our first major update in November. For those that we need to fix them with you backers, we will need to delay them into the second major update we've planned in January instead. For those that have any problems in sending in theirs or did not receive any notifications, you can contact us directly, provide us with a proof of your backer tier with decals, and we'll guide you through the process of making it.

For NPCs, we will look through each of them and see where could we fit you in, write a short story for them, and have a talk if you'd like it there personally. They'll be constantly added into the game with releases on the Major Updates. We'll try to get a place for them into the game as soon as we can finalize everything with you.

For old backers from the Indiegogo campaign that have not yet received a mail regarding your creation ideas, please mail us directly at our e-mail info@v-dgt.com so we can sort things out for you ASAP. For those that backed us for the digital keys, don't worry, we still got a list of you and we'll send out the keys as soon as we can generate them for you.

Hey! It is finally the day! We're glad we could do this for everyone, another update on the demo of M.A.S.S. Builder! There's a lot of things that have been adjusted and added to the game!

With this new demo, we would like everyone who played and tested it out to give us your full feedback. If you have played the last demo, you can also help us by telling how you feel about this demo's combat against the last demo. You can post them here in the steam discussions or in our discord servers where we have someone sitting in to always answer you at https://discord.gg/gtejKES

NEW FEATURE

• Frame Management System: You can now build up to 32 M.A.S.S. Frames, import Data from other M.A.S.S. Frames, and manage your slots
  
• We have added some quality of life improvements to armor customization, including Batch Customize, Randomize Armors, Unequip, Fill Style, Overall Decal Colors, and much more!
  
• You can now use your ranged weapons in the Free Camera Mode now!
  
• An added Auto Lock Mode that helps when you are attacking. The game will automatically lock onto your targets from a no-lock state. Also added an option to turn this feature off.
  
• Archive Menu: This menu shows your inventory, stories, achivements, and much more. (Some contents are still not on display for this DEMO)
  
• Help Menu: This menu shows how each feature and function works and serves as a tutorial for each and every one of them. (Not yet 100% completed)

NEW CONTENTS

• Mission 2 is now completed with its boss!
  
• There are 2 new armor sets available for more customization!

IMPROVEMENT

• Changed in game mouse cursor
  
• Reworked most movement animations. (Run, Jump, Boost, etc...)
  
• Added dynamic movements
  
• Separated Eye Flare color change from Frame Style for more clarity
  
• You can now change the color style for the Frame's Hands separately (Sub Element 4)
  
• Better Camera view and angle for M.A.S.S. on Mission Result screen
  
• Smoothen Bullet Launchers motions when attached to M.A.S.S. Frame
  
• Tuning Section: Adjusted Parameter Gauge Current / Max for clarity
  
• Showed enemies as IMMUNE when they are in their immunity state
  
• Showed Property Icons of Armor Parts and Weapons

CHANGE

• Rebalanced combat values for a more distinct gameplay
  
• Adjusted starting ammo counts for shooter weapons
  
• Adjusted damage for all types of weapons, especially close combat weapons
  
• Made enemies dropped Battle Points instead of instantly acquiring them upon their defeat
  
• Adjusted UI Design in some sections

BUG FIX

• Fixed Bullet Launchers appearance when not equipping shoulder armor parts
  
• Fixed a bug when players pressed ESC to Skip Base Launch Cutscene
  
• Fixed a bug when players used Controllers to start New Game and the UI freezes
  
• Fixed Parameter Fuel Burn Rate to better reflect it's benefits (turns green when lowering instead of red)
  
• Fixed on how the game pauses when players press ESC
  
• Fixed the positions of Energy Launcher's Hovers
  
• Fixed the angle and direction of Blade Types when attached to a Dual Wielding Grip Type