M.A.S.S. Builder, A Fully Customizable Mecha Action Game

November Updates Patch Notes
over 4 years ago – Sat, Nov 23, 2019 at 01:39:59 AM

We're three months in after the early access release of M.A.S.S. Builder! As you may have read a few weeks ago about our adjustments, we are now almost ready to release the additions and adjustments to the game. First, let us admit that we might have not been able to finish all the things we've promised, there are some last minute changes that made us reworked many of the patch parts (looking at you, level design). We're still aiming for another January update with lots and lots more content to come. The updates should be coming to everyone SOON.

Additions to the game

New Firing Types
  As promised, we are ready to let players try out more firing types that have been shown throughout the weeks. For now there's only the two that was shown before but we're continuing our work on more of them!. If you haven't seen them yet, check them out below along a short description:

• Spread (Bullet Shooters): A short-ranged cone firing pattern, the "spread" fire will allow players to dish out heavy damage through multiple pellets from a single button press. The closer an enemy is, the chance for them to get hit by multiple pellets increases. When used in conjunction with damage properties, the spread fire will be able to add great utility to their damage.

• Ray (Energy Shooters): A mid-ranged narrow stream of energy burst forth! The "ray" shooter fires at an extremely fast rate with piercing rays through, delivering streams of energy to a large group of enemies with ease. With how fast these shooters can fire, players can utilize them with damage properties to deliver a constant stream of conditional ailments!

New Armor Set

We are also adding in the Kaiser armor set. The set is themed around a more rounded and curvy design.

Photography Mode
  Another promised addition, the Photography mode is here to help everyone take screenshots of their creation to show it off. The feature currently allows players to pose their M.A.S.S. in various poses, alongside their crafted weapons, in the various backgrounds that we have. We do plan to update this feature alongside the game when we create more missions and tilesets that can be added to the backgrounds. For now, please have fun and show us what you can create with the feature!

 
Story and missions

• Added 2 new story missions with an epic boss fight at the end of mission 8. So, the ending of Chapter 1 which is just introduction has come, mission 8 will feature an extremely difficult boss fight against one of the first epic boss Quark. Please have fun with it, we do hope we lived up to the hype of having a great boss fight.
• We're also updating new level designs into the game through the newly added missions. With how well they were received during our WIP previews, we've decided to work on them immediately (shifting some of the things backwards) and implemented them into the game in this patch.

Adjustments

Defensive Focus adjustments
  Reworked how defensive focus M.A.S.S. functions: With these adjustments, we hope to help brawlers playstyle that can make players feel better when fighting in close combat without having to worry much about their durability. If damage to a point, they can quickly step out of combat to regenerate most of their shields before rushing back into battle. Please let us know how these changes affect you and how you feel about it.

• Increased shields on Architectures tree, shields recovery, and armor across the board by a significant amount while lowering Durability or shifting it into some other units instead so players can have a better focus on each units. This meant the Effective Durability of a player stays the same, but now half of it can be regenerated quickly out of combat via Shield Recovery tuning. Techs that have conditions relating to Durability should also be more effective and easier to use.

• Reworked techs that focus on defensive prowess of a M.A.S.S. and also change their placements on the development nodes. This should make it more focused and less confusing for our players.
• Adjusted the numbers of Armor status increment and application to compensate for every part that has lowered Durability. This should complement well into the playstyle with our shield changes if players decide to go full defensive units.

Close Combat adjustments
  We've been secretly reading through discussions and noticed that players doesn't have the greatest feeling when using close combat weapons. As a response to that, we have adjusted a lot of things relating to them as well as add some new things to the playstyle. We believe this alongside the shield changes could bring brawling up to a higher level and bring more fun to players in preparation for the January major update.

• Reworked some development nodes for the Power tech tree to give them a better feeling earlier in the game.
• Shortened levels of the POWER techs from 3 to 2 without removing their efficiency and add more POWER techs into the game.
• Move POWER techs around (some up the tree, some down) to dispel the clutter and allow players to reach new strengths quicker in the game. For what's important right now, Tempo Preserver is now a tier 1/2, Pressurized Gears now tier 3/4. Higher tiers are also being adjusted accordingly.
• Added in 3 more movesets for Close Combat attacks. These will trigger upon attack transitions and will make the combat flow much better with methods to pounce onto enemies afar or flying around in the air.

Weight adjustments
  We have seen players speaking of optimal methods to play and didn't like how it sounded as our game prioritizes customization and we want everyone to be able to play with the appearances they like as it is the core concept of our game.

• Rebalanced weight correction on Fuel Burn Rate as well as adjusted Fuel Burn Rate and Recharge on various modules as well as weight scaling on the status. This should allow players to both use boosters more than before as well as easier tuning in the related status.
• Rebalanced weight correction on attack speed. Weight will now have a lower effect on the attack speed of a M.A.S.S. allowing heavier M.A.S.S. to be able to swing much faster and more in-line with our concept of the game to allow separation of aesthetics and gameplay itself.

Status and Units adjustments
  In addition to others mentioned above, we have also adjusted other status of various units all over the board as following.

• Change some architectures' name to reduce confusion as well as some of the default texts in a continuous plan to polish language in the game. Looking at you, Regrower Frame development line.
• Adjujsted Enhancement and Fuel Save Modules to have negative Fuel Burn Rate value instead to further help with the issue of low-mobility M.A.S.S. units. Now players can further customize a longer lasting M.A.S.S. that can move around the mission area (which will be updated to new level designs later down the line).

Other adjustments

• Reworded some texts in the HELP function of the game. This will be a continual update alongside adding new topics into the HELP function.
• Hangar improvement. You can now have a much more zoomed out camera and we've remade the whole thing to give it a livelier and larger feeling.

• Adjusted some default items given to players so that they can try to develop a node during the development tutorial. Thanks for the suggestion kind soul of the community.
• Reworked mission 1 (tutorial) for a better flow of game mechanics introduction.
• Fixed game icon to show M.A.S.S. Builder Icon instead of Unreal Engine icon correctly. We did not noticed this until the community pointed it out so thanks once again!
• Adjusted a lot of sound effects. We've replaced most of the bullet shooter sounds as well as update on many other parts of the game, adding some depths and variations of sound effects.

WIP Preview: Level Designs Preview
over 4 years ago – Sat, Nov 09, 2019 at 02:08:09 AM

So, for our regular Saturday update this week, we'd like to show you some of the experimental things we've decided to work on for the upcoming patch. We've read quite a lot of feed backs on our level design and decided to improve on it, by adding more open areas, more depths, and more vertical designs. This, however, is just some experiments and we're still working on it so expect the upcoming November patch to give you something that feels different!

Be sure to give us feed backs when these new levels are added into the game so we know what you think about them!

Join early access now: https://bit.ly/2vcipiZ

WIP Preview: Upcoming Boss Quark
over 4 years ago – Sat, Nov 02, 2019 at 03:24:32 AM

Hello everyone, welcome back to another Saturday preview, this time showing off our latest and most epic enemy yet for the upcoming patch. It's extremely large, menacing, and full of attacks (and mechanics) that we think would be fun to play around with. We hope you like and look forward to fighting against it. See you next week!

Join early access: https://bit.ly/2vcipiZ

Upcoming November Updates Preview
over 4 years ago – Sat, Oct 26, 2019 at 02:35:34 AM

We're here at the end of October, how has everyone been? Are you enjoying M.A.S.S. Builder? We sure hope you do. Now here comes exciting news about the upcoming updates in November. First things first, when is it coming? We aren't sure as well to when we can finish everything that we're working on for this version. To be honest, we tried to fit as much as possible in this patch to round up various suggestions that can be done instantly as well as fixing some bugs.

What we can say is that the update will be coming late November. Now before you all start pulling up your pitchforks, let us talk about everything we're doing in the update, and why we're making it so late in November shall we? Starting off with what's promised in the Roadmap.

Story Missions 7 & 8 (End of Chapter 1) and New Hunting Ground

Story missions 7 and 8 will be coming as promised. To add to that, we also revised some mechanics that we've designed in conjunction with feedbacks and data gathered by what people have been saying about each mission in the past (yes, each mission from 1 - 6 was designed in a way to introduce mechanics and for us to see which one people liked or hated). Expect to see some more things to play with!

Also, the new hunting grounds will feature a tileset much requested by you all, which is something new so it'll take a bit more time.

Spherical and curved armor designs

As you might have seen it in last week's update, the Kaiser armor set presents to you its spherical and curvy armor designs. In the upcoming November patch, another 2 variants of the Kaiser set will be available so a total of 3 variants (same as old armor sets) will be available for you to play around.

We know this might not be as spherical or curvy as one expected or maybe one is not enough so we'll be sure to make more of it in the future.

More ranged weapons mechanics and firing types

You might have seen some previews we've been releasing of the new firing types and some that we are still keeping in secret. We won't be showing them here to you but we'll give out their short description. First, let's talk about the ones we've shown.
 

Bullet shooters will receive Spread (as shown before in our WIP preview) firing. Spread fires will have lower damage but can deal a lot of hits onto a single enemy, combining them into a much more powerful with great stopping power weapon.

Energy shooters will receive the Ray (has a very good feeling of usage in our opinion). Rays expend bullets at a really fast rate, but they're extremely strong against large group of enemies, pierce through to a certain range. Even with their lower damage, they are able to apply PROPERTY STATUS at an excellent efficiency.

Now with these two weapons we've shown out of the way. Let's talk about something more exciting that we haven't showed yet. We've been seeing a lot of requests for slower weapons that will bring in true heavy impact. What we came up for both shooters are massive Area of Effect weaponries with low bullet count, low firing rate, and highly effective in area control. We think you know what we're talking about.

For bullet shooters, we're working on something that fires a large bullet that pierce into the first target on impact. They'll explode after a few seconds, creating a humongous explosion, damaging all enemies caught in the vicinity. For energy shooters, it'll be a pulsing vortex that constantly damage enemies around CHARGEABLE flux of energy. These will be shown throughout the Saturdays of November itself so be prepared!

Old armor pieces rework

It's still coming, we pulled some of our gears back for it though and have decided this should be constant upgrades to the old sets instead of a one time rework of everything so that we may receive feedbacks on those old sets and how they under perform in the aesthetics department compared to other pieces.
 

Photography mode

We have been hard at work at completing this feature and suffice to say, we have completed a very workable feature for everyone to use. We would like to cut this a little bit short due to the amount we will continue to work on them. We are proud to say we're releasing a feature at 90% functionality and completion on its core values added to the game.

To clarify, the photography mode is planned to be upgraded with each patch (more poses, more backgrounds, things that are locked behind tilesets and contents) thus it will be a feature that grow alongside other features of the game. We also heard some of you wanted poses that are quite out of the norm. What we can say is that we will try to increase them gradually after the "serious" and "popular" ones are completed.

Now, aside from the promised stuff, we know you are wondering why we are setting back the patch into late November itself. Here it comes.

Localization

Surprise surprise! With requests and players from all around the world telling us to have localization for the game, we have decided in conjunction with Sekai Project to step up with localization schedules. We are not fully translating the game as there are various places we think might change (like the story) but we're committed to translating all the UI and HELP menu to help everyone have a more enjoyable experience. This will be a continual experience and we do have some things planned with how localization is done.

The first batches would be (Japanese, Spanish, and Chinese). Why these languages? It's the ones we can perform localization ASAP with our publisher's help and in time for the November patch and we do plan for other languages as well. This is a time-consuming feature but we think it's worth to shift back the patch a little bit for it.

Defensive Focus adjustments

Another unplanned adjustments we've made to the game as a whole is how all the defensive functions work. We've changed a large amount of numbers pertaining to them such as Durability, Shields, and Shields Recovery and adjusted some formula and calculations. We're doing this to improve upon a playstyle looked upon by many of our players as unworthy and too weak (we see you, people who min-max by focusing on power/accuracy/damage only).

We're also going further on distinction, putting more difference between an offense focused piece of equipment and a defense focused one. This meant people going for offensive stats will have a much lower tankiness when compared to a defense focused one and vice versa.

With these adjustments, we hope to help brawlers playstyle that can make players feel better when fighting in close combat without having to worry much about their durability. If damage to a point, they can quickly step out of combat to regenerate most of their shields before rushing back into battle. Please let us know how these changes affect you and how you feel about it, and if it's enough or not.
 

Close Combat adjustments

On the same note, we've been secretly reading through discussions and noticed that players don't have the greatest feeling when using close combat weapons. As a response to that, we have adjusted a lot of things relating to them as well as add some new things to the playstyle. We believe this alongside the shield changes could bring brawling up to a higher level and bring more fun to players in preparation for the January major update. We know it might still not be enough to break through the efficiency of shooters (especially the new ones) but we hope to bring them up alongside before January happens.

  Also, some new set of attacks are making way ahead from the planned January update into this November update itself to help out. Players will now be able to approach Quarks, both in the air and on ground, on an easier scale with their close combat attacks. It's just a glimpse of what we're doing and we're sure to continuously upgrade it further.

Weight adjustments

We have seen players speaking of optimal methods to play and didn't like how it sounded as our game prioritizes customization and we want everyone to be able to play with the appearances they like as it is the core concept of our game. This is why we have decided to adjust weight to have less impact on gameplay itself, rather than having them effecting everything and players needing to min-max with aesthetics in mind. No, we want everyone to really create something they like and think look good. We wanted players to have those M.A.S.S. be as effective as others through "Tuning."

We're still reiterating on the numbers of the floor and the ceiling of weight effects though and we're looking to stabilize them to an amount that only has a small amount of difference. We hope to come to a conclusion ASAP.

Others

There are various other things coming into this patch (bug fixes and settings relating to FPS and optimizations) as well so look forward to the upcoming patch notes in a few weeks! There's an exciting news about decals and the ease of putting them on and more. If you'd like to learn more, feel free to come into the discord and ask it from our developer themselves. Maybe you'll get some leaks and hints.

WIP Preview: Kaiser Armor Set
over 4 years ago – Sat, Oct 19, 2019 at 03:38:01 AM

Hello everyone! Let's change some pace this week. We've been showing lots and lots of new weapons in development, but how about the new planned armor set? That's right, today is a sneak peek of the first variant of the new armor set, the Kaiser set. The Kaiser set boasts some spherical and curvy designs that will be able to mix and match ones of the old sets, and we promise you more variants when the November patch hits!

Join early access: https://bit.ly/2vcipiZ