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Mailstrom

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Mailstrom

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Join a co-op team of 4 friends in a first person shooter that sends Pan Galactic Postal Service letter carriers into the locked-down streets of the future! Fight mutated alien horrors as you and your fellow essential workers deliver baubles to hard-to-find destinations! Hey, at least it's a job!

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Most popular community and official content for the past week. (?)

Weekly Update: Melee

Apr 26

First things first, get on over to the new Mailstrom Discord and stake your claim on what will no doubt be some of the most coveted social territory on the internet: https://discord.gg/sDvkH5gQNJ

We had a pretty big week of feature-making and bug-hunting, with advances including:

* All-new melee system - now when you pull something out of a parcel that ISN'T a gun, you can swing it at the baddies and do some damage. This comes with a bunch of new items, including hockey sticks, cricket bats, chainsaws, and every once in a while... KATANAS (Steam doesn't like YouTube shorts links, but you can find some footage here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MS_84O_BNoA )

* Item icons in the inventory section - now you can tell what you're holding, even when it's not equipped.

* New Assessment System - groups missions into bundles of three. You've got to pass two of three to advance to the next rank. If you fail the first two, you enter SUDDEN DEATH, where you've got to get a perfect delivery score to advance. Otherwise, you get the dreaded PIP! No, this is not directly informed by actual events in the lives of the developers.

* New mission selector - now the missions offered to your team will range from "appropriate to your current experience level" to "probably way too hard for you," giving you a choice to get into trouble in pursuit of some extra cash!

* New NPC hunting behavior - depending on current difficulty level, some monsters will have the ability to seek out players who are outside of their direct line of sight. This makes the ends of missions a little more spicy.

Next week, we're starting to batten down the hatches to get this game turned into a playable demo! If you're interested in participating in our upcoming closed beta, hit us up on Discord!

Mailstrom

Hate to be the one to say it but it has to be said. These guys have a HISTORY and its not good.

So I hate to be the first to bring it up but anyone planning on getting this game, supporting or jumping on early access needs to be aware that the developers of this game have a history of shady development practices that have definitely been labeled as scams in some circles (in particular their games supporters). Nate Simpson in now infamous for being less than honest with the community as he ran KSP2 into a wood chipper after charging $50 for an alpha quality game under the promise of continued developm...

Saphera12

Apr 26 @ 1:45pm

General Discussions

Weekly Update: Energy System

Apr 16

Happy Wednesday! We've posted another weekly update to youtube, which you can see here:

It was a big week at Advanced Faffery! We did a little bit of everything, from adding a new energy system to replacing the HUD to adding a wide range of new adversaries. Here's a breakdown:

We've got a prototype version of the energy system up and running - currently, an onboard battery is trickle-charged from a portable fusion reactor at a very low speed. Use of weapons, as well as use of sprinting, will draw down your current battery level. You can recharge by either picking up batteries or locating a charging pad (which will be randomly placed throughout the level). We've got lots of ideas on how to expand this system (toggleable lights that die if you're out of energy; a system for donating energy to fellow team members; an energy penalty for carrying too much weight, etc.), but from the attached footage, you can already see how that energy precarity activates the moment-to-moment gameplay.
The new HUD gives a player a much better idea of both what they're carrying and whether they're close to a critically-slow level of encumbrance. While increased weight affects movement speed and jumping height, the impediment curve really takes a dive above 40kg. This not only creates opportunities for players to plan around parcel weights (as in the attached footage, where I had to deliver a 30kg minigun and was therefore mostly unable to carry anything else), but also gives us lots of area for growth in the outer loop. Store items will give the player new ways of managing and increasing parcel weight capacity.
We added a number of new monster variants, and played quite a bit with spawn radii and spawn frequency. The new monsters include a spiky guy (covered in swords and hockey sticks, for some reason) who does more damage, a guy who wears a trashcan for a hat (takes more damage), and a couple of very fast tiny monsters, one of which seems to have found a helmet to wear. We're having a lot of fun designing and fighting these guys.
We overhauled our dispatch assignment board so that players can now vote on the mission they want to do using colored magnets. We also now have an entire new tutorial area in our dispatch bay.
We added damaging goo puddles to the level, creating some interesting navigational challenges - especially when access to a specific address becomes limited. Lots of interesting choices to make within the team about how to get cargo across some of these obstacles!
We connected specific items with specific new parcel types (we'd been randomly assigning parcel types in the past), created a few new custom parcels (for example, the weapon boxes seen in the video), and the currently-carried parcels are now accurately shown on the back of each player.
We worked more on our outer loop, adding new items to the postal store, including special shoes that reduce falling damage, special helmets that increase player durability, and lots of other fun stuff. We've got big plans for this area.
Lots of bugs knocked out - items no longer hover in the air when their carrier dies, the player can now see their own body, held items are now positioned in a visible portion of the view frustum, and the spectator camera is now properly positioned on the helmet.

In the coming week, we'll be working on diversifying mission obstacles so that individual missions are more unique, digging a little more into character animation to improve actions like throwing (and, aspirationally, melee attacks), and outer loop improvements to get players motivated to get back into that dropship and earn some dough!

Thanks as always for your support, and see you next week!

Mailstrom

Weekly Update: Making Gameplay More Improvisational

Apr 7

We're going to try to get into the habit of posting weekly progress reports here. These will come with a YouTube update, and then we'll get into a few more details here. First, the video:

Now that our core loop is stable, we're putting more thought into how to make each mission more unique. Instead of bringing tools or weaponry that you bought at the store, you'll now only be able to purchase wearable gear at the store. You'll need to ransack the randomly-assigned parcels in your dropship at the beginning of each mission to search for items of value. And critically, you'll also still need to deliver those items if you want to hit your quota! This new focus has led us to make a few changes, including:

We've built a parcel template that uses weighted random values to apportion parcel contents to the player. This has unlocked the ability for us to embark on missions without bringing equipment (other than scanners, which are a special case). This really feels like stepping through a door that takes us away from conventional shooters and toward something a lot more surprising and fun
We've added another layer to the system that assigns parcel destinations so that it doesn't ask the players to go an insane distance to the other end of the map. This adjacency system has helped mission flow considerably
We densified the number of obstacles in the level to reduce the amount of running down empty streets with no cover
We overhauled the monster spawning so that monsters now deploy from hand-placed spawn locations, rather than from randomly-selected doorstep delivery targets. Monsters now emerge from much more organic locations - dark corners, back yards, storm drains. It feels good!
We messed around with parcel/item values, and more importantly, parcel/item weights. There are now some items (the minigun, the anvil) that are so heavy that the player has to drop other stuff to move the parcel around. Encumbrance continues to be a key player constraint - one that many future wearable items are meant to minimize or manage
Water is now toxic, and damages the player. The floor is lava.

As seen in the video above, Dan's also got a very early version of an exciting new feature that in its final form will allow players to pay for onsite rush delivery of needed items in the field. Our current thought is to modify the scanner so that it has a PDA-style screen through which players can access a sort of Space Amazon (if anybody has ideas what this thing should be called, let us know). If your needed item is in stock, and you can currently afford it, a dropship from a competing delivery company will drop your new item down to you (along with some encouragement and/or discouragement). In the coming week, we'll be experimenting more with environmental obstacles and hazards that are meant to encourage use of this delivery system.

Thanks for your support, and see you next week!

Mailstrom

Discord or contact?

Game looks interesting and wanted to join the discord but at the time of me making this post the link is invalid. Is there an updated discord link or some other place to get in contact?

ImJustJun

Apr 26 @ 1:15pm

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