Happy New Year!

Happy New Year from all of us at TeaMug Studios! A lot has happened in the development of Earths Edge:

• Steam page & socials went live
• Refined core gameplay
• Improved audiovisual fidelity
• Implemented Steam stats & achievements
• Refactored our build pipeline

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Steam page & socials went live

As of writing this blog, we've reached a total of 3099 wishlists on steam, which feels quite impressive given that we've only been sharing development progress for Earths Edge for just about 4 months.

Thank you for all your support, discussions and feedback! We really appreciate it!

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Refined core gameplay

EM-BRs feel more weighty and Scorchers feel lighter. Interactions, movement and general combat responsiveness have been improved to make gameplay more intuitive and fun. UI Feedback has also massively improved compared to a couple of months ago, and work has just begun on implementing proper progression (Camos, weapon attachments, EM-BR Modules, etc.).

During internal playtesting we've really enjoyed what we have built so far, even without the progression system in place! Things will only improve from here on, and we're happy to share some playtesting builds with you sooner rather than later!

As with every blog post, we want to share some new information: Scorchers have been given a new passive ability to help distinguish between classes a bit more, in addition to the class specific weapon bonuses:

Assault:

• Health regneration starts sooner
• (new) Tactical Sprinting lets the Assault reach POIs even quicker

Heavy:

• Thicker armor reduces all damage taken by 15%
• (new) Reduced recoil for all primary weapons

Scout:

• Improved cycling and reload speed for sniper rifles
• (new) Improved targeting systems let the scout see target outlines through walls

Engineer:

• The Engineer can carry one more grenade of each type
• (new) While embarked on its EM-BR or attached to the hull of a friendly unit, it passively repairs the hull of the EM-BR Unit

Note: The abilities for each class are subject to change, and/or may be scrapped entirely based on future playtesting. We are trying to make the class selection more meaningful, so some abilites will be changed

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Improved audiovisual fidelity

Placeholder animations and sound effects were replaced, drastically improving overall quality (duh).

Check out last months blog post for examples of soundcues!

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Implemented Steam stats & achievements

To better track player engagement, meta weapons and primary cause of deaths steam stats were implemented to help balancing the game through real anonymous data.

To showcase a couple of fun stats and numbers (because data is always fun) during playtesting:

• Total Kills: 20282
  • Of which were e.g.:
    • "critical" kills (e.g. headshot): 6010
    • SMG kills: 873
    • Incendiary grenade kills: 585
    • EM-BR Revolver kills: 425
• Player deaths: 350
• Total EM-BR Drops: 200
• Shots Fired: 66290
• Shots Hit: 42706
• Respawns with LMG: 105
• Stim ability used: 104
• Distance traveled with Stim: 19.1km

Steam achievements also help track general progression and retention, as well as give the players something more to work towards (e.g. getting all achievements).

Here is a small excerpt of already added achievements, with more to come!

For the nerds:

Currently, the stats are "manually" grabbed via the steam web api on script execution, which serves the data in a json format which is then parsed via script and inserted into a spreadsheet. In the future, we want to automate this process via prometheus monitoring and visualize the data via grafana dashboards. I like data :)

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Refactored our build pipeline

We’ve reduced build time from roughly 2 hours to 40 minutes per build job by adopting a stateless disk snapshot strategy for our build environment.

The disk snapshot contains all necessary components (git, Visual Studio, engine, etc.) and cached build files so the machine cant start compiling a build right away once created.

We are currently building on Azure and want to run the compile job on other hardware so we can still use our local machine since the packaging is quite resource intensive.

Thank you again for your continued support!