Hey engineers!
It’s been 5 days since release! Now this is great and all, but that also means we finally got the unprecedented amount of feedback. There are a lot of great things about Sandship, we see how many people love it. But there are also a lot of areas we NEED to improve with Sandship. We heard your feedback (it’s hard not to hear when it comes in thousands) and it is a lot of feedback we heard during beta as well – but we can’t fix it all in one day huh.
So we have to do it one after another. We wanted to take this opportunity to be fully transparent with our community and share our roadmap with you – what we are planning to change/fix/add in the upcoming days and weeks. At Rockbite, we really want to be completely transparent about everything – so time for my favorite list – “Everything that is wrong with Sandship”.
Bugs and Stability
It’s really impossible to see some of the bugs unless you have more than 1000 people playing the game. So, when we thought it seemed stable and released – it crashed 100,000 times in an hour. It was a crazy panic at Rockbite, albeit all of us from our homes because of the pandemic. During the first day of release, the game was crashing at least once at some point for 60% of all players. We were releasing updates, one after another with countless fixes, and I can say that 5 days later we have brought that number down to 5%. Now, the game crashes only for 5% of people. Now it’s still a lot, and we must still bring this number down to 1% or less. And this is so important that we can’t actually fix anything else that we need to fix until this is done. We know there are gameplay issues, but unless the game is stable, we can’t do it. So this comes first. It’s not just server stability issues and client stability issues, it’s also things like supporting old clients for people who don’t update often and so on. This will probably take another 5 days to get done. We are on it. We are super thankful for your understanding and patience, and we just want you to know it’ll get better very soon (we’re also saying this to ourselves).
In terms of puzzle issues – the newest update should fix it for everyone (Apple users we’re just waiting on approval). For users facing issues with Underwell Pit at level 4 and underground belt issues – the fixes are almost done – we’re just testing in the office and hope to release those to you ASAP!.
Balance and Gameplay
Next order of priority is the game balance and things we got wrong that must be fixed ASAP – and we are planning to change in the very near future.
Resource caps
Currently warehouse is super limiting… it has a global cap that feels low. And the reason is because producing one material can “eat up” production of another. If you produce iron ore at a faster rate than you do a slower production resource, it quickly limits the space you have in your warehouse. This ruins the experience of “mass production”. And this is not how a factory game should feel like. Here is a list of changes that we are going to introduce to combat that:
- Make resource cap per material instead of global
- Resource caps will not require research but can be individually upgraded for credits
- When one material reaches its cap – it will not stop the whole production line. Instead it will just continue with excess going to nowhere. This will ensure that everything else operates normally.
- New “Advanced Warehouse”. Players will be able to maximize the warehouse to a more advanced view, where it’s much easier to take things back and forth between in transit and permanent warehouse. There will be new functionality to “lock materials” so the claim button will only claim unlocked ones. And this will be the place to upgrade your per material storage limits.
Building Costs
Currently microfactory is all that you need and it costs nothing to add. This is just wrong game design. Here are the changes coming to that:
- Microfactory will increase in credit price with each NEW microfactory you own
- Other factories will increase slightly in their maximum inside size (especially the long factory)
Building Craftables
This has been in the making for quite some time, and will be added to the game soon. Players will be able to finally use everstone to craft unique items that can be applied to each building to “mutate” it’s capabilities. Things like production multipliers or things affecting specific industries. This is good since it will finally give more use to everstone, and add more control on improving your specific buildings and adding specialisations to them.
Puzzle reward system
Credit rewards for puzzles were never intended to last forever and was something temporary. It’s time for it to change. Here are the multitude of changes that are coming to puzzles.
- We will introduce a new currency called Yik points, which will be rewarded for solving a puzzle.
- Puzzle reward will vary based on how complex the puzzle is
- Complexity of puzzles will be determined daily on statistical data based on how many people tried the puzzle versus how many people were able to solve.
- If a puzzle is extremely simple – it will not give any reward, and eventually fall out from the gallery
- Making complex puzzles will generate daily Yik points that the creator will be able to claim. There will be no benefit in making simple puzzles. The more popular and complex the puzzle is – the more the reward.
- There will be a way to flag puzzles as yik-grab if that somehow happens (If creators are spamming them in hope of points)
- There will be a new tab called “creators” where we can see top puzzle creators.
- We will add a new Shop tab where players can purchase special in-game trophies for Yik points exclusively.
- In-game trophies are like devices with custom views and connections to in game lore. These are cool looking things that players can put inside their factories
- Players will be able to visit each other’s Sandships to take a look at setups and see these trophies.
New content
Next up in priorities is new content, which we have A LOT lined up. Before the next big expansion we will have some new, short content injections such as increasing the cap to level 15. This will allow for some additional devices and industries that might be really cool for puzzle creation. Expect some “smart devices” that will play into the theme of recycling and logistics.
There is a lot more we need to do, but this is our plan for “immediate stuff to be done”.
If we missed anything, please let us know by e-mailing us! And for the users who were able to play, but suddenly are stuck on a 100% loading screen – please e-mail us at sandship@rockbitegames.com so our team can try to fix your data!