New plans and current progress report

- Marenz, Skylar, Chris, Alexey and I are working on the customizations and their integration - creating the assets, creating the shops, managing the customization database, creating the profile preview in the launcher, configuring drop rates and so on.







We've now made up our mind about how we want to handle customizations (skins, hats and maybe more later on). We originally didn't want to do a chest+key model, but the vast majority of our playerbase is in favour of it. So we will be dropping chests and items after matches. And in order to open chests you will be able to buy keys from our item store. Every chest will contain about 4 items, with a certain chance to contain rare or legendary items.





All items will be tradable and marketable. Meaning you can give them for free to everyone or you can sell legendary or rare items for insane prices.





We have about 250 assets right now. To keep things interesting over a longer time we decided to release them step by step, only starting with maybe 10%. We will give out different items in different times of the year. For example zombie or mummy skins will only be available during halloween and santa only during xmas.





- In the meantime James has been doing good progress on the midfield bots. They now know how/when to defend and the next step is adding their offensive abilities. A more complex problem. The defense and keeper logic is rather simple compared to offensive abilities. Defenders and keepers just have to follow the attackers or the ball, but attackers have to come up with stuff on their own, find open spaces etc. But always keep in mind that we're aiming for the bots to entertain new players. Veterans won't be seriously challenged by them.





Anyway, when the midfield bot is done we can create a simple botmatch mode, so every player can always play at any time of day on any continent. And if there are just 2 people in the queue they can play with 8 bots. There will be no time where someone can't play Supraball (both with friends and alone). This was the main goal we try to achieve with bots.





He mentioned getting the bots finished one day before something called Mass Effect gets released, I wonder how this could be related. But considering their complexity I expect a mid april release of the attacker bot.





- Alexey surprised me with volcano assets that he didn't make specifically for us, but we can use them. So I took 1-2 days to create a 5v5 volcano map. The performance is better than on all other maps and this is what it looks like





- As for our overall plan. This is about what we are going to do:

1. Finish customization stuff

2. Finish bots

3. Test this stuff in paid early access and tweak shop balance and mechanics.

4. Go free to play (still early access)

5. Tweaking, testing, bugfixes etc

6. Official release in free2play





We don't feel super well about 3. where we have ingame purchases but are still a paid game, but we need some time to test the shop and fix potential problems before we go free2play, because it needs to work 100% when we go free.

When will 6. be, you ask? Maybe august? I dunno for sure. We're working as hard as we can is all we can say.

- David