Steam Trading Cards and emoticons

Steam Trading Cards for Perpetuum are now available!

If you are a Steam-dweller you probably know what these are, but here is a quick recap:

Playing Perpetuum on Steam will give you trading cards from time to time (every 30 minutes of gameplay to be exact). A set consists of 5 cards, and you can get half of this (rounded up, so 3) by simply playing.

The other half (and more) can be acquired by in-game purchases (Perpetuum Credits) or via the Steam community market. (I'll quote the Steam Trading Card FAQ here: "For every $9 USD spent (approximate) (...), you will earn one card drop. This card will drop at some point as you play.")

Completing a card set will earn you a badge, a random emoticon and profile background, and other stuff.

Summary:

  • 5 trading cards
  • 5 badge levels (plus 1 foil badge)
  • 5 profile backgrounds (3 common, 1 uncommon, and 1 rare)
  • 10 emoticons (6 common, 3 uncommon, 1 rare)

Happy card hunting!

Today we're introducing new premium packages and upgrade kits for Perpetuum. Our main goal here is to be able to reach a wider audience by permanently reducing the price of the base game, while still providing something extra for those who are willing to support us beyond that.

The upgrade kits contain varying amounts of Extension Points, Perpetuum Credits, Alien Improbability Devices, and also exclusive new sparks, and the Perpetuum original soundtrack.

These kits are organized into the above mentioned premium packages, which include the base game plus one or both of the kits - the picture below should give you a nice breakdown.

Premium packages

You might also notice that the base game will come with 200 credits and 1 AID from now on, in order to provide a less bumpy road for new players.

Of course the individual upgrades are also available outside of the premium packages. So if you are an older player, you can also purchase these in any combination* and enjoy the same goodies like someone getting a whole premium package for the first time as a new player. (Hence the name "Upgrade Kit".)

* Each upgrade kit can be purchased only once for each Perpetuum account.

Upgrade Kit Zero
Upgrade Kit One

Pricing

Soon after the introduction of the premium packages, the base game (aka. "Standard Edition") will undergo a permanent price reduction and will be available for only 9.99 USD/EUR.

Both Upgrade Kits go for the same 9.99 price tag if purchased separately, and if you decide for one of the premium packages, you'll enjoy a few bucks off on the package price compared to the individual prices. The Premium Edition goes for 18.99 (save about 5%) and the Superior Edition for 27.99 (save about 7%).

Note that these packages are currently available on Steam only, but we'll offer them in our own store soon as well.

Head over to our Steam store page to check them out now!

Friends, it is time to prepare for our annual ritual, during which our wallets gain sentience, slink out of our closely guarded pockets and offer themselves as monetary sacrifice to the great lords of Bellevue in hopes of a plentiful digital Summer wherein we may joyfully reap the crops of electronic entertainment while overdosing on caffeinated drinks and dubstep.

Yes, it is our favorite vaporous vacation vendition, the Steam Summer Sale and this time we offer you a whopping 50% off on Perpetuum and all in-game items starting from June 11 to 22, both on Steam and on our website; a great opportunity to buy several copies of the game and thousands of credits to various members of your family, your pets, your dentist, your high school crush, your lawyer, your probation officer and Dave the Guy from Grocery Store on The Corner.

Perpetuum 3.6 release

One of the new field terminals

It's been a long and bumpy road, but we're finally there. Our truly random assignment system aka. Assignment system revamp Stage 2 will hit the live server on Monday the 15th of June, along with a healthy number of general updates and fixes.

Public testing of the patch has been going on for almost 2 weeks already, and those of you who have been following development saw almost daily updates and fixes. I'd like to take the opportunity here to thank everyone who participated in the testing - your feedback and bug reports helped us a lot in speeding up development, and certainly made this a better patch.

Testing will not stop though, since in this first patch we're only releasing the new assignment system for the three Alpha 1 islands: New Virginia, Attalica, and Daoden. As soon as we finish reworking the other islands, you'll be able to see and test them first on the test server.

The order of release will be Alpha 1 islands (in Monday's patch), then Alpha 2s, Beta 1s, and finally Beta 2s, the latter ones receiving assignments for the first time ever.

The testing forum topic can be found here, the first post of which also serves as preliminary patch notes.

We hope to welcome a bunch of new players during the weekend, and some of us devs will probably pop in to general chat too, so see you there!

So gamma islands are back, you’ve been busy there for 3 weeks already. With the expected small hotfixes out of the way we can say that we’re happy with how things went down, we hope you’re having a good time too.

This brings me to the main announcement of this blog. As outlined in the previous status report, once we’re looking at a stable gamma system, we’re ending our Early Access phase on Steam.

Originally the EA phase was meant to be quite short, basically to make sure that our new servers work as they should and our integration with Steam is flawless. But because of the removal/revamp of gamma islands the game has lost a large chunk of its content, we decided to extend EA until it’s finished. Of course we could still wait until we’re done with the mission system revamp, and with new PvE content, and the new engine, and and and… but that would be a vicious cycle and we’d be stuck in there forever. With the new changes of the Steam UI it has also become even less desirable to stay in Early Access for longer than absolutely necessary, simply from a visibility standpoint.

So with that said, we’re officially launching on Steam this Friday, the 17th of October. And as it is the case with all newly launching games, Perpetuum will be -10% off for a week.

Of course this won’t really change much from a development perspective, we’re continuing on the road we have laid out and keep improving the game.

New mineral system

We’re also planning a small patch for this Thursday (version 3.5.2), with a few bug fixes, and something that we wanted to do for a while now. This is a reworked mineral spawning system, which won’t mean too much difference in gameplay at first, but it makes our lives easier and it’s also more optimal for the server and the database.

To get a bit more technical, mineral fields so far have been generated and stored in raw bitmaps, and “fields” as a concept did not actually exist. Minerals in ground tiles had no connection to each other, and we couldn’t tell whether two tiles belonged to the same mineral field or not. This made it practically impossible to create rules and mechanics that would affect a whole mineral field.

With the new system, fields are node-based and are stored hierarchically in the database, which makes it very easy to let a whole field despawn without any residue after a certain time for example.

The system is very different compared to the current one, which will result in all the mineral fields being reset, so please be aware of this.

From a balancing standpoint we’ll also take this opportunity and make the faction-specific mineral difference even more significant, going from a 1:1.5 ratio of non-faction:faction minerals on an island to a 1:2 ratio.

Intrusion and gamma changes

Two relatively small but very significant changes will happen here, based on forum feedback and our observations, which will be deployed in the patch after the next one (3.5.3).

The change related to gamma islands is that we’ll be lifting the limit of 3 terminals per island. We have anticipated this change and mentioned before gammas were opened that we’re playing it safe but this might happen, but now we’re sure it has to go. The remaining terminal-to-terminal range limit and the red no-build areas should be enough to provide a soft limit for the number of terminals on an island.

The change to intrusions will bring an end to the automatic stability increase of beta outposts, and will require the owner corporation to complete their own SAP events as well. This will be the only way to increase the stability of outposts; if an event happens without any interaction then the stability will remain unchanged. Attacking corporations completing SAP events will of course still reduce stability, like they do now. As a result of this change, intrusion events should be more fast-paced and straightforward as defenders won’t have to stand around for two hours waiting for someone to come, but it will also require more effort to keep an outpost stable.

Robot balancing

We’re preparing a larger balancing patch that affects pretty much every robot in the game. The general aim is to boost light and assault class robots, and to stimulate or rather make room for a larger variance in weapon and module choices for all robots.

Listing all the changes specifically would be too much for this blog, but here are the main points:

  • Light and assault bots get additional head and/or leg slots.
  • They also get a slight CPU and reactor boost...
  • ...and a 25% mass increase, so equipped modules don’t affect their speed that much.
  • The current faction-specific weapon damage bonus of all combat robots will be changed to a combination of a larger general weapon damage bonus plus a smaller faction-specific weapon damage bonus. This means that your robot will be less “crippled” when using weapons other than its faction-specific ones.
  • Weapon-specific bonuses of assaults and mechs will be size-independent, so assaults will receive bonuses for medium weapons, and mechs for light weapons too.
  • All robots will receive an extra bonus that is either connected to their intended role or their faction.
  • We’d like to emphasize the scout role of light combats, so they receive a detection bonus.
  • Combat assaults receive an optimal range bonus in order to take on longer-ranged mechs more easily.
  • Light EWs get a small bonus to their faction-specific weapon cycle times to increase their combat capabilities a bit.
  • Combat mechs should be as agile as possible on the battlefield, so they receive a bonus to demobilizer resistance.
  • EW mechs’ main role is to disrupt from the distance, this means an EW module optimal range bonus for them.
  • Combat heavy mechs, being the slow fortresses they are, receive a small survivability boost with the help of armor resistance bonuses.
  • Industrial light robots get an accumulator capacity bonus giving them more working stability or even survivability, depending on their loadout.
  • Industrial mechs will be pushed more towards a combat support role with remote support module and sensor strength bonuses, while still retaining their primary mining and harvesting bonuses.
  • We’re also making indy heavy mechs a bit more sturdy with a bonus to their armor amount.
  • It’s not all that bright of course, so don’t be surprised if there will be also nerfs to some robots’ specific bonuses.

Mk2 robots have special bonuses and those will stay as they are, but basically Mk2s (and other special variants like prototypes) will get the same treatment as their normal counterparts.

These can still change as we will still go through all of these modifications again in the coming week. It will also hit the public test server first since we’re of course curious about your feedback too, so we don’t have an exact schedule for this other than “soon”.

Closing

Although this report is mainly about the impending and shortly upcoming changes, don’t forget that the larger updates outlined in the September and May status reports are still in effect. So the next blog post should tell you more about the incoming second stage of our mission system revamp. Or maybe another one inbetween about the teleport and highway network revamp?

These posts should be more frequent, I know. Gamma island mechanics are currently the most complex parts of the game and development dragged out more than expected. But we wanted to get it right this time before we move on to more pressing issues, like the situation on the PvE front.

The good news is that the wait is finally over soon: the reworked gamma islands patch will hit the live server next Wednesday, the 17th of September.

Now, since this will be a big patch that includes a lot of changes and fixes outside of gamma mechanics too, we’ll take a bit of precaution. When we deploy the patch on the 17th, gamma islands will be there, but the teleports leading to them will be initially disabled. We’ll use the next two days to gather any issues that might come up during general gameplay, and if all goes well, we’ll deploy the fixes and open up gammas on Friday the 19th. (Update: we'd still like to take a few days to make sure everything is right and check out a few remaining bugs, so gammas will open next week.)

There are still a few kinks to iron out until then, but these are mainly just small bugs and balancing issues. Testing on the PTS will still go on too (you're welcome to join!), and here we would like to thank everyone who helped us with feedback, ideas, or bug reports!

What you need to know about the new gammas

The new gamma mechanics include a few big changes and a lot of small ones. For simplicity’s sake I’ll only talk about the important ones here, and those who are interested in the details can do so in the “Gamma revamp testing” forum topic, which is fairly comprehensive.

New islands, new layout

Initially we’ll start off with 6 gamma islands - 3 old, and 3 brand new ones. For the new islands we tried to make things interesting instead of following the “big chunk of land”-style, so we have some split landmasses and archipelago-style zones too. Additional islands will be introduced when we see that the demand arises, and we’ll also try to keep them varied and interesting. And although the teleport network for these 6 islands seems fairly symmetrical for now, this won’t be the case as we expand with additional ones, so don’t build strategies around this.

New gamma islands - red overlay means no build/no terraform areas

Reworked terraforming

Sky-high “terrain walls” were one of the big problems of old gammas. Although it was nice to see people getting creative, apart from the aesthetic issues it also allowed for near-impenetrable fortresses, which caused a lot of headaches for us and for you as well. No-bounds terraforming was a big issue, so we’re changing this now.

New terraforming panel

Terraforming has now a limit of how steep you can make the terrain. This limit is set between the slope capability of assault and mech class robots, which means that you can’t ever terraform anything where a light or assault bot wouldn’t be able to pass. Unfortunately we have to say goodbye to beacon-terraforming, however much you guys liked it, because we simply couldn’t make it work together with the slope limit (for now at least). So instead we made module terraforming more user friendly, by making terrain tile locking instant, and merging all the different types of terraforming charges into one charge, where you select the type of terraforming method from the new terraforming panel.

Network bandwidth limit

The second big issue that came up was that we didn’t impose any limits on the number of structures you can build. This not only caused balancing problems (numbers always win), but server and client performance issues too. To remedy this, all buildings connected to the network have a certain bandwidth usage and main terminals received a bandwidth cap.

Energy management changes

Like some of you, we have also made the observation that gamma colonies are too self-sufficient. Since reactors generated energy out of thin air, you could practically leave your base alone and it worked for an indefinite time, unless someone destroyed it.

Energy field

A big change here is that reactors won’t be generating energy on their own anymore. We’re introducing a new underground resource, which is not so much a mineral, but actually an energy field (that’s what we’re on Nia for, after all). These fields cannot be exploited by regular means; you need to place energy wells on them (a new building type), which will send the raw energy over your network into the reactors, which in turn will convert it to energy usable by all the buildings.

Like normal minerals, energy fields also deplete and respawn at random places all the time, so colony managers will need to check on them every few days and look for new energy sources to keep the colony powered.

Gamma highways

This has been requested for quite a long time now, and now they are here: buildable highway nodes, which will create a strip of speed boosting effect between them.

Walls and gates

Also a fairly big change is that now you’ll be able to lock and directly shoot deployable walls and all kinds of plants too.

Forcefield gate

We have also created a simple forcefield gate that you can place between wall tiles, and can be opened and closed with a simple click (if you have access, of course). Since this is not part of the gamma colony system, but a simple deployable field device, you'll also be able to use these on Beta islands.

The end of Steam Early Access

Our Early Access phase on Steam has been created with the aim to warn new players about possible server and connectivity issues while we were in the process of moving our servers. Meanwhile, the development of gamma took longer than expected, and since such a large system in the game can bring unexpected performance issues, we have chosen to wait with the closure of EA. But with that done, it will have served its intended purpose by a large margin, so it must come to an end.

So after gamma is released and seems stable, we will come out of Early Access and officially launch on Steam.

Of course this doesn’t really change anything - we will still continue development and regularly bring in new features and much needed changes.

What comes next

As laid out in a previous blog, first we’ll be doing a rework of the current highway and teleport networks, to speed up travelling in the game. The gamma patch actually includes a related change already, giving a flat speed increase to all robots.

Meanwhile we’re preparing a larger balance package for robots, with the aim of boosting smaller classes a bit, and changing some bonuses all around to make certain roles more distinct and logical.

Then we’ll move on to the long overdue second stage of the assignment revamp, bringing real variance to the PvE experience in the form of random assignments. NPC spawns have also become a bit of a mess due to all the balancing and mechanics changes over the years, so we are planning a big overhaul for them as well.

Later on we’ll still continue with improving the neglected PvE part of Perpetuum. The introduction of energy fields slowly starts to give sense for the actual backstory, and we have a few solid ideas already to make the collection of raw energy not just a gamma-only feature, but an interesting incentive that all players can participate in, from new to old.

That’s all for now, and I’ll try to make these reports a monthly thing, promised.