Stormgate Dev Tracker

Helpful steps the community could take include being an active contributor to our discussions here and on Discord, playing the game, submitting constructive feedback, inviting your friends to join you for our 1.0 release, and leaving a positive Steam review.

As for more direct contributions to the game, that gets complicated. I’ve personally received many offers from modders to help with our editor, for example, but we’re still a ways away from being ready to put those tools into players’ hands for testing.

Thanks so much for your support!

We plan to continue communicating our development progress, like with our most recent patch notes, the art reveal videos, and dev blog. That said, we are going to put a lot of effort into making our 1.0 launch moment as successful as possible.

Thanks for asking! First, it’s important to recognize the tremendous support we’ve received from RTS content creators. They’ve been amazing.

As for broadening into other “Blizzard game communities,” I feel like we’ve been taking steps in this direction already. MrLlama from the Diablo community (I remember him as MrLlamaSC) did a great interview with Ryan Schutter on our aspirations for the editor. Hearthstone’s Trump (also TrumpSC!) streamed our game during one of our beta reveals. And then of course, Asmongold and Esfand from the WoW community came together for their awesome reveal of our 3P co-op mode, which put our game in front of a big new audience outside of the RTS community. They were all amazing to work with and we’d love to do more.

We’ve had former League of Legends pros and top players from CS also express their support for what we’re building as you’ll find that pro players from many PC genres first fell in love with competitive gaming through RTS.

I had that trophy made as a reference to this amazing SNL skit: https://youtu.be/3e0tszep890?si=QJrI-1UXjS61nFCu

I had answered this in a different thread, but I'll repeat the relevant part of the answer here:

"In the short term, we'll be looking to improve the pacing of the game by increase the economy with a focus towards early-game. Some things we've tried are starting players with "Rich" Luminite Mines that mine at a higher efficiency than regular mines. Though we liked this approach, it was slightly unintuitive for some playtesters, and we're leaning toward a more natural approach by strategically changing mining rates, starting conditions, and Celestial economy overall.

In the long term, we're looking at some major reworks regarding how the resources work. For example, while the scale of the game was lower (when 1-3 bases were more common), we felt Therium and mechanics around Therium were more interesting, but partially due to increased scale, I think it's since more evolved into Vespene Gas with extra complexity."

This feedback resonates a lot with us, so much so that "Make Things Happen" is one of my two pillars in terms of future development. Some things we plan to do in service of this pillar include:

* Increasing the economic pacing of the game.

* Adjusting abilities to have more visible instant, and impactful effects.

* Reworking creeps to be more rare, more meaningful, more pointed, and more instantly gratifying effects.

* Reworking specific units to improve the potential for cool plays.

* Replacing Top-Bar abilities that shut down harassment.

* Reducing the strength of late-game turtling.

In the short term, we'll be looking to improve the pacing of the game by increase the economy with a focus towards early-game. Some things we've tried are starting players with "Rich" Luminite Mines that mine at a higher efficiency than regular mines. Though we liked this approach, it was slightly unintuitive for some playtesters, and we're leaning toward a more natural approach by strategically changing mining rates, starting conditions, and Celestial economy overall.

In the long term, we're looking at some major reworks regarding how the resources work. For example, while the scale of the game was lower (when 1-3 bases were more common), we felt Therium and mechanics around Therium were more interesting, but partially due to increased scale, I think it's since more evolved into Vespene Gas with extra complexity.

How Food works in the AoE franchise is one of my favorite parts of those games. Not only are there multiple ways to harvest food, it's possible to almost ...

Tim M commented on this here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stormgate/comments/1hhyi8p/comment/m30n85o/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Pace is one the big areas we're focused on right now and it's the target of focus for an upcoming patch. Economy-wise, we feel that mid-game and late-game pace is near what we'd like it, but could use a slight bump. On the flip side, I feel that early-game economic pacing is currently the weakest part of the 1v1 game, and we're currently experimenting with combinations of changes that shore this up.

Something we're experimenting with in Team Mayhem is a blanket 20% movement speed for all units, and players have generally been enjoying that. That being said, Team Mayhem utilizes a much bigger map than traditional 1v1 maps. I think it's likely we'll either take the approach of slightly increasing movement speeds or decreasing map sizes, but not both.

Another aspect to pacing is the rate at which exciting events happen. Beyond economy or movement speeds, we feel that game-changing occurances don't happen enough currently. Things that fall into this category include har...

My personal favorite memory was Simu Liu's visit to our studio. I was fully expecting to meet a Hollywood movie star who was just looking for a business opportunity, but I couldn't be more wrong. Simu is a genuine, earnest, and passionate fan of RTS who really wanted to just show his support for a team looking to revive his favorite game genre.

All of our voice actors, including some of the biggest names around, have been tremendously supportive of our game and in working with us in spite of our limited resources. You'll find that many of them have a past connection to RTS and we are lucky to have had their support.

Beyond being an RTS fan, Simu was super warm and kind, too. He brought a giant stack of books for our team, did individual meet-and-greets and took photos with the entire studio, and played an EPIC showmatch against his longtime StarCraft 2v2s partner on one of our earliest prototypes. His skills are legitimate, too--I'm pretty sure he's a masters-l...

I can share my perspective in being part of the playtests and observing the playtester Discord. The Team Mayhem playtesters have provided us with a lot of helpful feedback and I’d say that testing has been proceeding smoothly and we are seeing meaningful progress. The testers are also producing some solid memes, like this tribute to Albino’s nerf-worthy Kastiel.

https://preview.redd.it/pjn1jyu4y18e1.png?width=1058&format=png&auto=webp&s=a2b68065d2c3dd18be008c090aea62a34864afc5

A bunch of the Frost Giant devs hopped in and played with our testers on patch day and we had a good time--even if it did feel like many of us were figuring things out considering how much has changed since we starte...

Hey, appreciate the heads up that you feel like we're forgetting Team Mayhem, but this isn't the case. Tim addressed this specifically in the blog.

"Our top development priorities are now crystal clear: the Campaign and Versus (1v1) play (our “moment-to-moment RTS gameplay”), followed immediately by our Team Mayhem mode."

Team Mayhem is still important to us and it's actively being playtested. This is an "order of operations" situation where our foundational modes are being worked on first, but Team Mayhem is next in line.

Hey, folks. This is not the official question thread--please remember to submit your questions in the thread that'll go live on Thursday!