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Ability demos

First up is a new mini ability Demo panel! This should be especially helpful to new players who are still figuring out how various abilities work:

If you press for longer than a tap on any ability, the panel with the ability description will expand to show a little video of how the ability works. It will show as long as you keep pressing.

There are a lot of abilities in Barnard’s Star, and many of them have multiple purposes that may not be obvious. For example, Bounty Hunter’s Hook ability can be used to:

• Pull a friendly or enemy unit closer
• Pull an enemy into a pit for an insta-kill
• Pull Bounty Hunter himself to a wall, potentially crossing a pit

The ability demo videos are intended to help new (and returning!) players visualize what abilities actually do, without having to actually use them. (Some of them, such as the one for Hook, are a little long to demonstrate several interactions :P) New player retention has always been a problem for Barnard’s Star so hopefully this will help a bit.

This is part of a larger effort to massively grow BStar’s player base by moving towards a F2P model! More on that at the end of this post.

New Abilities & Balance Changes

This patch includes some nerfs meant to address the notorious “water team”, as well as a couple of new abilities & adjustments to make other team compositions more viable.

Water Team Changes

• Amphibian
  • Health: 6 -> 5
  • Revolver range: 2 -> 3
  • Ever since its health was buffed to 6, Amphibian has been the only 6-unit health that doesn’t sacrifice an ability slot for extra tankiness (comparing to Enforcer, Antivirus, and Grump – not counting Beast because of all of its self-damage). It seems like it’s gotten the point where its extra health is oppressive to play against, since leaving an enemy Amphibian alive for 1 extra turn can often be the difference between a victory, and your whole team getting stun-locked.
  • In exchange for the health nerf, its primary attack range is being bumped up by 1. Hopefully this will help it to be more useful in its new position as a non-frontliner.
• Mad Scientist
  • Electrolysis Grenade: no longer spreads water
  • While undoubtedly a cool ability, the fact that Electrolysis Grenade spread water and then shocked it makes for a lot of different AOE shapes that are difficult to play against. A team with both Amphibian and Mad Scientist could effectively make a long L-shaped AOE stun. This odd shape doesn’t have as much counterplay as I’d like – no matter how you position your team, they can still probably stun 2 of your units. And in high-level ranked games, that’s a death sentence.
  • Removing the water but preserving the rest of the ability should allow for most of the play patterns to remain the same, while bringing the power level of the Amphib/MS combo back into line in high level games.

New Abilities & Buffs

• Daemon new ability: Torch
  • Projects a short stream of fire in one direction. Daemon lights 2 tiles on fire in a line.

• Minion: Oil Rain output has been shifted by 1 square.

• Lurker: Taste of Blood ability (same as Sniper’s existing passive)
  • Striking the killing blow on an enemy heals Lurker by 2.

Minor improvements

Game Info screen

• Pause menu now has a ‘Game Info’ button which shows the player list in order (In the future I hope to expand this with mutations and other useful info)

Map Editor improvements

• Map Editor: can’t bring a map back into “Draft” mode after publishing it (this was the default before, I think leading people to accidentally un-publish a map that was previously published)
• Map Editor: new “Games Played” stat, visible in map choosing menu & map preview
• Map Editor: previously created maps from other devices will now be downloaded for editing

Other bugfixes

• Fix for Punk using Overload but not getting stunned because of having Can't be Stunned status
• Fix for double spawning animation when watching the beginning of TV games
• Fix for mega camera weirdness when Sniper got the killing blow on an enemy base
• Fix for “Bots get Extra Units” mutation to work correctly with other mutations such as Mirror Match, Pre-Choose Units, and Clone Wars
• Fix for “Are you sure you want to self destruct?” popup incorrectly appearing during someone else’s turn
• Fix for Lurker to be able to attack someone 2 spaces away when there is an Omnibus-placed teleporter in between
• Fix for making 3v2 games instead of 2v2v1
• Fix for incorrect base healthbar during spawn animation
• Fix for players being able to take action during spawn animation, and then have moves/actions be reset immediately – during online games this would result in the turn not being able to be validated on the server, so turn submission would not work properly
• Fix for random number generation to get out of sync between client & server, resulting in the game to be in a different state on the server

Roadmap & eventual F2P

The next big goal for Barnard’s Star is to make the game free-to-play. This is an effort to bring BStar to a much larger audience, as well as to provide our current small (but highly dedicated!) player base with more multiplayer opponents. Barnard’s Star has always been a multiplayer-focused game, so it’s crucial for the long-term health of the game to ensure that there are always enough players active. As it is, if a few ~4-5 person friend groups decided to stop playing BStar, the player base would be effectively decimated!

Before that happens, though, the new player pipeline needs some love. The Ability Demos feature in this update is a part of that. The other large part is to expand and improve the tutorial, so that’s my next project. It still won’t be a full-fledged, scripted ‘campaign,’ more like a “prelude” or a cross between a story primer & tutorial. Long term, the bigger single-player attraction will hopefully be a roguelike mode. I’ve got a LOT of ideas about this, so it’ll take a long time to really materialize, but I’m not letting myself work on it until after F2P is done.

Anyways, after the tutorial is in a better spot, I’ll make the game free-to-play! I’ll be adding a few non-invasive in-app purchases to help keep the servers online: probably just the option to quickly unlock characters without having to go through the effort of the actual unlocks. Anyone who purchased the game full-price will get a ‘Founder’ badge on their profile and a special cosmetic, like an icon. I’ve also toyed with the idea of offering other cosmetics as IAPs, such as custom colors, hats, or emotes. More details to come in the über-next update!

A big thanks to everyone who has brought the game this far! I’m very proud of the current player base, and love the little community we’ve built in-game and on the Discord. Hopefully more friends will be coming soon!

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