Starbase Dev Tracker

On the 21st day of December we’re giving out 3 Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince game codes for Steam!

Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince is a four-player co-op puzzle-platformer game released in 2019. The three heroes of the best-selling adventure series are back, sent on a quest to retrieve the troubled young Prince Selius. If you’d like to learn more about the game, check out the post here! ...

Day 20 brings more UX Design talk! This time the subject being Starbase, and told by one of the UX designers.

User Experience design (or UX design) is an interesting facet of game design, which has fairly recently been split off as its own thing. Essentially the focus is on the player and their experience. So, for example, Starbase has tons of different kinds of designers. Some focus on building ships, some focus on the economy, some focus on planets and, you know, space, just to name a few things that need to be designed.

UX Design in the production phase of a game often means getting in...

Day 19
Today we have a special gift for you from the Frozenbyte writing team lead – a Nine Parchments story!

Yuletide
a Nine Parchments story
by Maija Koivula

It is the darkest and coldest time of the year in the Kingdom. The students of the Astral Academy prepare to spend Yuletide holidays in various ways. Gifts are given, taken, stolen, and machinated. Some dubious punch is had, as well as tea and delicious plum tarts. A legendary monster makes an appearance. No fireballs are thrown.

The First Part.

~*~

I. Afternoon. ...

Day 18 – and one more week to go! If you haven’t started your holiday season preparations, now is the time to do so!

Today we would like to share some old storyboards from Trine 4. Storyboards are often used in projects to pre-visualize animations or videos. Here are a few storyboards used in Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince and ...

Day 17 of the calendar brings you a Starbase fan fic, written by one of the Community Managers. If you’d like to read more, you can find the previous post here!

Hope you enjoy!

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Day 16

Some time ago, several Frozenbyte employees participated in some speedpainting activity. The subject for the art was Trine, and the participants could either do a challenge mode (10 minutes’ time) or the regular mode (30 minutes). Here are the masterpieces they created – hope you enjoy!

Starbase Alpha invites are back! Now that the game has a proper starter-experience and a ton of new features, we are resuming additional invite waves. Here’s a new video showing some current gameplay from the alpha:

If you’d like to participate in the Starbase Closed Alpha, and you’ve done one of the two signup surveys – await your invitation! If you’ve not done the survey, head over to ...

On the 15th day of December we’re giving out 3 Nine Parchments game codes for Steam!

Nine Parchments is a co-op action-RPG game released in 2017. The story of the game revolves around a group of drop-out wizard apprentices, who’ve decided to skip their training for a quick path to the Nine Parchments. If you’d like to learn more about the game, check out the post here!

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Week 50 (December 7th – 11th)

Hello everyone! Here are the progress notes of week 50!

Please note that the “Progress Notes” are different from the Starbase Alpha “Patch Notes”. Progress Notes are snippets from the development team and what has been worked on during the previous week, and many of the features might not be present in the current or upcoming builds of the Closed Alpha. Some features, especially in the design portion, can be subject to change as the development continues.

Design

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Day 14
Let’s be real – one of the best things about the holiday season is the food. Today, we’d like to introduce some traditional Finnish Christmas food for you!

One of the most common food during the holidays is baked ham. The ham is slowly baked in the oven and is usually the main dish of the dinner. If you don’t eat meat, you can replace pork with seitan, for ...

Happy 13th of December!
Today we would like to talk to you about User Experience Design. One of the Frozenbyte’s UX Designers is here to tell a bit about their role and share a few snippets of the player experience in Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince.

User Experience Design (or UX Design) is an interesting facet of game design, which has fairly recently been split off as its own thing. Essentially the focus is on the player and their experience. So, for example, when making Trine 4 level designer focused on the pacing of the level, the difficulty of the puzzles, player skills, etc. Fight designer would focus on making sure fights are balanced, increase in difficulty, have enough room, etc. UX designer would focus on the fact that players should be imm...

Day 12 

Something that we greatly enjoy here at Frozenbyte is community-made content inspired by our games. Seeing fan art, fan fiction and videos along with all the other material made by you players always brings a smile to our face! Thank you all for your creations and thank you for sharing them with us – it means a lot!

Some time ago, we started collecting ...

In three weeks the year will have changed and we have reached the first day of 2021. One could say the year 2020 hasn’t treated us well: the global pandemic has been on our minds quite regularly and forced us into dealing with rather exceptional situations.

Despite the unfortunate events of the world, we have kept the company running remotely and released several games! Today’s post will cover our released titles of the year 2020.

Starbase Alpha

Starbase is an upcoming space MMO, with a hybrid of voxel and vertex-based technologies, fully destructible environment and an infinitely expanding universe. The gameplay in Starbase is focused on building and designing spaceships and stations, exploration, resource gathering, crafting, trading, and combat.

Starbase Alpha started officially on the 11th of May this year and has continued since. There are currently thousands of participants an...

On the 10th of December, we plan to share some concept art from Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince!

The game was released last year, and you can learn more about it here.

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On the 9th day of December we’re giving out 3 Has-Been-Heroes game codes for Steam!
Has-Been-Heroes is a game of strategy and action with a roguelike twist, released in 2017. If you’d like to learn more about the game, check out the post here!

Update: All codes have been redeemed.

Day 8 

Nyah! Like, y’know… nyah!

Behind the 8th door is a comic from one of the community managers, starring Nine Parchments’ Rudolfus and Cornelius, who would absolutely be the resident memelord.

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Week 49 (November 30th – December 4th)

Hello everyone! Here are the progress notes of week 49!

Please note that the “Progress Notes” are different from the Starbase Alpha “Patch Notes”. Prog...

Day 7 

Today we are celebrating Frozenbyte’s 19th birthday; the company was officially registered on the 7th of December 2001. Happy Birthday to us!

On the 6th of December, we would like to commemorate our precious (and legendary) van, also known as Hypevan, that we sadly had to let go only recently.

Happy 5th of December!
Today we thought it would be nice to introduce our Discord servers to you. It has come to our understanding that some of the servers aren’t very known with our gaming communities, so we thought we would list them all here and talk a bit about them.

Frozenbyte
The official Frozenbyte Discord server is our general server for all of our games, and a good place to contact devs and ask about the company in general. The server consists of some announcement channels and game specific channels for Has-Been-Heroes, Shadwen and Shadowgrounds. There’s also a channel for all the information about the company, the servers we own and a separate channel dedicated to the information about applying for us.