Blastlands: Team Combat

[andreas.strangequest]

Finally after a lot of hard work I am super proud to present our game we’ve been working on.
Now available on Google Play all over the world!!!

Big thanks to our fantastic team at Strange Quest and also a huge thank to the Defold team at King for both a fantastic engine and great support.

The game is a fast-paced action online multiplayer game.
Both client and server is built with Defold and is fully server authoritative (the headless server is the one loading in the level, controlling the physics and playing the full game).
The client is just listening to the states from the server and sending the player input.

We are using Gamesparks as backend and Gamelift to scale our servers up and down around the world.

As we now are in open beta, go to the play store:

play.google.com

Blastlands: Team Combat

Welcome to Blastlands: Team Combat, a new, super-fast action multiplayer team game from Strange Quest. Unlock a unique team of characters and dominate the battlefield! Jump straight into the Domination game mode and capture all points before the enemy team or join a crazy Free-For-All battle and destroy as many opponents as you can while collecting scraps to evolve your unit. The more scraps, the more powerful you will become! Battle your way through each season unlocking unique troops, speci...

Free

or opt in directly using the following url:
https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.strangequest.blastlands

Play and give us feedback! We would love to hear what you think about it.

Once again, thanks for being awesome!

[Pkeod]

Looks really cool! Is the soft launch on iOS or Android?

[andreas.strangequest]

Right now android only. Were you able to see it? Are you located in any of those countries?

[Johan_Beck-Noren]

Looks great! Can’t wait for the Sweden release

[britzl]

Congrats on the release! Really looking forward to an Android release in Sweden!

[Pawel]

Wow would like to see it in action!

[andreas.strangequest]

We’ll fix that very soon

[Axel]

Woo, great stuff! Makes me wanna move to Canada. Looks incredibly nice, and—like everyone else—can’t wait for the full release

[andreas.strangequest]

No worries Axel:
We now already launched the game in open beta world wide!

As we now are in open beta, go to the play store:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.strangequest.blastlands
or opt in directly using the following url:
https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.strangequest.blastlands

Play and give us feedback! We would love to hear what you think about it.

[Pkeod]

@ajirenius runs well on galaxy s8 I tested on, my gameplay instincts are that there needs to be much more to progress on (quests like kill x in one life, destroy x mines, kill x vehicles with mines… a few quests like that at a time would be a good carrot, just make the quantity increase the more quest someone does in a day?), I got crash on resuming a few times but I saw was already reported, got a few errors "Well, that didn’t work {{ error = “timeout” }, bot players should be clearly marked, making a nemesis system would be cool if someone kills you more than a few times, maybe disable screen fading?, the vehicles feel a tad squishy while also harder to control (and they don’t seem to do enough damage to normal human units), showing your reload timer visually would be helpful, vehicles should be able to do walking damage over non-vehicle units, I saw the pig once is there a rare golden pig too?, should units drop scrap based on their level / how much scrap they collected?, it doesn’t make sense to take damage from walls as a vehicle especially with how laggy it can be.

[sergey.lerg]

Hooray! Congratulations!

[andreas.strangequest]

@Pkeod Thank you for all your feedback! It’s much appreciated.
Will try to answer a few things here on the spot:

my gameplay instincts are that there needs to be much more to progress on (quests like kill x in one life, destroy x mines, kill x vehicles with mines… a few quests like that at a time would be a good carrot, just make the quantity increase the more quest someone does in a day?)

Yes, this is a very barebone mvp of the game which will hopefully have a lot more sense of progress in the near future.

making a nemesis system would be cool if someone kills you more than a few times
+
vehicles should be able to do walking damage over non-vehicle units

All are actually in there. Maybe should mark it even better and show it more clearly.

should units drop scrap based on their level

They do. Scraps are being giving out depending on their level but also evenly given out to all units that damaged the unit you killed (so if you did just the last shot, you doesn’t get all the scraps)

I saw the pig once is there a rare golden pig too?

Oh that sounds like a very good idea

it doesn’t make sense to take damage from walls as a vehicle especially with how laggy it can be.

Do you experience a lot of lag. How? Is it latency (long response time) or stuttering (package loss etc)? Is it momentary or overall the same all the time? And last, from what location/network are you playing in that case? It’s really valuable for us to know and understand.

Is it ok that I copy/paste your questions/feedback to our Blastlands forum so we have it gathered in one place?

Once again thanks for feedback

[andreas.strangequest]

@sergey.lerg Thanks a lot and thank you for being agile and serviceminded in our struggle to push it out

[tacklemcclean]

[tacklemcclean]

Some feedback on the gameplay:

Fun and frustrating at the same time! Why frustrating? Can’t stand still + wall damage = stressful combo. But maybe it’d be a bit slow without it.

The Heavy track seems so much easier than the Speed.
I’ve managed several times to get to the last tank, but only one time did I get past the motorcycle in the speed track. With no direct damage (except collision) and fast speed it’s really tricky to kill ppl.
Haven’t tried level 4 and 5 in speed track.

[andreas.strangequest]

@tacklemcclean
Thank you for your feedback! Much appreciated

Yes, the “always move” is one key feature we wanted to try to force people to always be in action (makes even more sense in team/clan matches) and making it harder to camp.
Wall damage was also such a feature where you cannot jam your tank into a corner shooting out towards everything that tries to come near. Still we are revisiting all these ones (especially wall damage) to work better.
We are aware of the mc problem and are looking into it.

[Oleg_The_Evangelist]

@andreas.strangequest once again, gratz with the milestone release! Also when you have a moment, can you perhaps draft a short pros/cons for using Defold for a 3D synch multiplayer mobile game? This would help us and the community a lot.

[umut]

Awesome work. defold seem very capable at 3d. I would like to test on ios

[andreas.strangequest]

@Oleg_The_Evangelist Absolutely. Was thinking about writing a bigger post about how I thought about the design/architecture of the game but also I should include a lot how it was to work with Defold.

[andreas.strangequest]

@umut iOS coming later when we gone through our test phase. Defold makes it very easy to develop both platforms in parallel.