Age of Rust — Dev Update #4
By: Spacepirate Games
Tags: Indie Game, Blockchain, Bitcoin, Counterparty, Indie Game Dev

Over the past few weeks we have been working to wrap up the feature sets for the new Beta release of the game. Right now, we are in our debugging and testing phase to move from Test to Production which we anticipate us to complete over the next week or so. At the same time, some of the sound mixing and voice over work is being completed as well to round out the experience in playing the beta version. As soon as the first section of the game is playable, it will be released. After that, additional sections, content, and features will be rolled out.

Alpha to Beta Storyline, Puzzles, and the Treasure Hunt

We wanted a story that would pull the player into the world, while the alpha version contained threads of a story, most players wanted more story interspersed throughout the gameplay. The storyline in the beta is told through forward linear progression in the game. Major plot points and the narrative are through voiceovers told through various characters in the game. Minor plot points and background information are through other means in the game.

While the puzzle difficulty between Alpha and Beta remains the same, the hints to solve the puzzles are all contained within the game. In alpha, we had some hints and clues outside the game, like on the web or in a social media post, but in beta, everything needed to solve the puzzles is inside the game. It’s not a walk through the park to solve the puzzles, a lot of the feedback from the alpha was that the first few puzzles were too easy to solve. In Beta, we wanted to make sure the puzzles were not only difficult, but still engaging at the same time.

The beta version also continues on the theme of an armchair treasure hunt. The alpha version of the game had 0.2 bitcoins embedded into the game in two unique ways. One of the players solved both puzzles over a 3 month time frame which required a lot of sleuthing to figure it out. The beta version of the game ups the reward quite a bit in terms of a treasure hunt, as it contains 4 bitcoins. The difficulty remains the same in terms of complexity to solve the puzzle to unlock the reward.

Blockchain cards

The Beta version will be the first release of the game to feature our blockchain cards, including a few of the cards from Spells of Genesis. The beta will allow players to link their counterparty-compatible wallet to the game and the game will recognize the cards.

The puzzles in the game are tuned to specific cards in a player’s wallet. There are subtle hints in the game as to which card you might need to have in order to unlock another clue. So if a player is missing a particular card, the puzzle will react differently, giving a non-clue or different information about the game universe.

Rustbits Integration

Phase I of Rustbits integration will be in the beta version and will be acting as Token Controlled Access within the game. The first area of the beta version is open to everyone (roughly the first 30 areas of the game) but after that, players need to hold varying levels of Rustbits in their counterparty wallet in order to move on and continue. We received a lot of feedback and ideas about how to further integrate Rustbits into the game. Cumulative pools to unlock special puzzles, etc is one of the ideas that is still being explored. Join our discord chat to continue the conversation on integration.

Changes to Dialogue

In the alpha version, the dialogue was a little tough to find with some of the characters in the game. Some players considered it a puzzle and in one case, it was a bit of a puzzle. To make the game more intuitive to get dialogue with characters in the game, the dialogue and voice over audio for it has been added into the menu where characters and other players show up in the game. Eventually, multi language options will be available for several languages and the dialogue and voice overs will be available in those languages. Multilanguage support will be rolled out over time through the beta.

Navigational and UI changes

In Alpha, there was quite a bit of extra typing into the console to get up and running in the game as well as moving around in the game. In the beta version, we changed up the UI to include the artwork of the current area as well as a navigational menu for moving around the game. It very much follows the low-tech MUD style retro game style that players enjoyed in the alpha.

Over the course of Beta, we are going to continue the process of streamlining the user interface and unifying the design across the game. One question we saw quite frequently in the alpha version was “how do I start?”, so the changes we are doing in Beta will make it easier to start and play the game.

Artwork upgraded

The alpha version of the game had some experimental artwork, some of the graphics were meant to represent a concept in the story. In the beta version, the artwork is more detailed and while it still represents a narrative in the story, it adds a new depth to the experience. A lot of players really like the almost 16 style of graphics as it lent itself to the theme of having a retro-style adventure. However, to downscale the artwork to make it look retro actually took effort and additional work to get it to that style. In the end, we decided to keep the native artwork in a higher resolution, depth, and lighting to speed up delivery of the artwork in the game.

Music and narration

The alpha version of the game didn’t have much in terms of audio support. There was a bit of rough narration in one of the puzzles, but it didn’t really add to the story or set the mood of the game. In the Beta version, atmospheric music sets the tone of the game and voice over narration adds to the game experience.

The music for the game varies from a haunting melody to a creepy dark atmosphere. We also added some background sound effects to add a bit of dimension to the game such as sand blowing in the wind to water dripping in caves.

Developers Added and Full Time Committment

In October, we brought on VCG which added some fantastic developers to the team. Since then, we’ve continued to add more and more updates to the Beta and to move as quickly as possible to add major functionality to the game. Last week, we added yet another developer to the team to improve the UX for the game going forward. After Beta is released, we will be adding another position to the crew to help with some of the creative work for the game.

From a personal perspective, I left my full time position which revolved around infrastructure cybersecurity for a multi-billion dollar aerospace company to focus just on SpacePirate Games and more specifically, getting Age of Rust fully deployed. Having a meaningful focus on the company and the game will help speed up the delivery process for Age of Rust.

Pushed into the airlock

When you’re building a game, not only do you have 1001 ideas, but everyone around you has 1001 ideas as well. As a designer and wordbuilder, you want to try to capture the best of those ideas and make the game an experience. The problem that comes up is that not everything fits into the game framework for what the vision of what the game is. As a result of shaping the experience, a few concepts have been removed from the game to give it more balance.

Bitcoin as an in-game currency has been removed from the capabilities of the game. One of the early concepts was building in a cryptocurrency system to buy and sell game items for bitcoin. While that concept was interesting to explore, it didn’t give anything back to the overall game experience. We did have players deposit and withdrawal testnet bitcoin as well as mainnet bitcoin at some points, it distracted from the game rather than add to it. This should not be taken as a referendum against bitcoin at all, we still fundamentally believe in and support bitcoin.

In-game hints are gone as well, while it was interesting to explore a buy-a-hint system in the game, it just didn’t lend well to the overall gameplay. So the ability to purchase hints in the game for specific puzzles has been removed. How players will work together to solve puzzles is an interesting social interaction that people enjoyed in the alpha, so we may continue to see that through beta.

Combat vs Adventure in Beta

In Alpha, we found that players found combat to be more of a novelty than anything else, 90% of players shut off combat. Players asked for more “explore and adventure” and less combat in the gameplay even though combat style-RPG was built into the Beta while Alpha was being played. This caused some anxiety during design and build for Beta since the framework for the game still included combat and the blockchain cards have combat enhancing attributes.

To balance that out, the series 1 blockchain cards for Age of Rust have other properties in the game such as being allowed into a certain area or you need a specific card to unlock a particular puzzle. As an example, the Revenge card is combat based, but can also be used to unlock puzzle hints. This way, if the nature of combat in the game changes from Beta to Final, players won’t lose any capability of the cards.

The balance between RPG and Adventure game is something that we are looking closely at in the game play mechanics. It’s still possible that the combat RPG elements will branch off into a seperate game that will use all the same tokens and cards that Age of Rust uses. While nothing has been decided yet on the combat RPG elements (combat, experience grinding, leveling up), we may see combat gameplay change in beta. We have a lot of requests to remove combat RPG elements and build another game that just has RPG gameplay and not an adventure game.

Beta and Beyond

The very next order of business is to release the Beta and get that into production quickly. After that, we will continue to build upon the beta by adding additional content in the game to move from 200 areas in beta to the 1000 areas that composed the final vision of the full game. Content and changes will be dropped into Beta going forward, there won’t be any more stages where there are long gaps and waits between versions. Updates will be broadcast through twitter and discord and other announcement formats. We look forward to releasing the Beta as soon as possible. :)