2017 was the year that The Imperial Realm::Miranda, my multi-year game development odyssey, actually shipped out to paying customers. Yay!

I have really enjoyed talking to everyone about the game this last year. Having people interested, who want to talk about the game, and are enthusiastic, is pure oxygen for a lone developer like me. I can't emphasize enough how great that feels or how much it helps.



There were a lot of great accomplishments this year, although with the game out now you already know about many of them. I was particularly thrilled to finally have not one, but two trailers. The two big themed updates Nemesis and Return of The Fallen were also very cool. I even took a few weeks of summer vacation where I sat in the sun, ate ice cream and went to movies with my family. That was really nice.

By most measures, the first eight months of Miranda's Early Access campaign has been really successful. People are having fun playing with the game. I have gotten a lot of great feedback which has really helped me figure out what sort of game Miranda is going to be. I've also received lots of helpful bug reports. The only real problem is that there just aren't enough of you lovely people yet.

This is my favourite blog post of the year, mainly because I was really happy with the way the poster turned out. So much so that I got it printed and framed for my wall. Eventually I am going to get it printed poster size.

Goals for 2018

Make Miranda Prettier - The most common negative feedback I get is that the game looks like something from the '90's. It's ok, that doesn't really hurt my feelings. Just as many people have told me they like the art, or that they don't care about the art. But the reception the game has gotten so far leads me to believe that people are immediately dismissing it based on looks, and so I need to address that. Part of the problem is the technical abilities of the renderer at this point in time, part of that is the art.

The renderer is the easier part of the equation to fix, it actually isn't missing that much, it's more a matter of using what's there with a more modern sensibility. The really tricky part is finding art, or more specifically, finding pieces that work together. Buying assets from artists on places like the Unity Store is an imperfect process. Nothing is usable as-is. Some things end up not working at all. I think the difficult solution is going to be making more Miranda-specific art.

More Gameplay Variety - I thought Miranda could be successful as a PvP game so I focussed first on building out that gameplay. Unfortunately it turns out I wasn't able to attact enough players to make the PvP systems work the way they were intended to. After much thought, I've concluded that the key to having more players playing is giving them more activities to choose from. I've already started down this road by adding PvE and map discovery. In 2018 I will be adding more individual activities, expanding the AI, and adding more unit types to play with.

Marketing - I have not put as much energy into marketing as I need to. For my current five prong strategy: Twitter is alright, the blog is good, press reach is minimal, Facebook is a disaster, and Google+ is totally dead. Miranda's marketing strategy is getting two new prongs this year: The first is advertising, the second is going to be a surprise.



Here's some numbers for 2017:

309,463 lines of C++ code.
226 additions and changes.
197 bugs fixed.
34 blog posts.
2 updates.
1 release.

Happy New Year everyone!

Miranda now has a PvE enemy, The Fallen, returned after being gone for nearly 40 generations.

PvE in The Blue Zone

The Empire and the Independents have forged a temporary truce. Within the Blue Zone, players cannot attack units owned by other players, but they will always need to be on guard against The Fallen. Miranda's new Blue Zone offers a pure PvE RTS experience. Players who have bases within the Blue Zone cannot participate in Nemesis matches.

Discoverables

Miranda's map now features three types of discoverables: Vendors, Points of Interest, and Monoliths. Once discovered, these items will stay on the map for easy reference. Vendors allow players to buy and sell extra inventory. Points of Interest are places players may find interesting. Monoliths are - interesting. In-game sensors have been improved to reveal interesting locations nearby players' bases on the map.

New Mission

"Find a Vendor" for new players to encourage them to locate a vendor.

Perks & Attributes

Due to a technical issue, all player-selected perks have been reset. Perk points have been refunded, so players just need to reselect their perks. There are several new Perks to choose: Fallen Monoliths, Tranquil Glyphs, Fuel-Air Explosives, Orbital Bombardment Satellite and Ore Purification.

Other Notable Changes

• New forces will be given many more Attribute points to allocate than before. In addition to stat bonuses, Attribute points give a boost to the level of specific Perk categories. The minimum level requirement for earning XP in Perk Categories has been eliminated.
• New Achievements: Stalwart Explorer, Bargain Shopper, Mono-Maniac. Sadly, the Build a Building achievement has been retired.
• Unit weapon effects now support weapons with multiple barrels, Quadlasers!
• Loading screens during fast camera movement via the map and keyboard controls have been eliminated or greatly reduced.
• Vendors now have different prices and inventories, make sure to shop around for the best deals. Happily, the original four vendors in the north-west corner have retired after many years of dedicated service to Miranda's shoppers.
• New Audio for loot crates, missiles, teleportation.
• One of the most-asked-for feature requests for Miranda is new in this build: Saving of unit selection (Ctrl) groups.
• With the new challenges present on Miranda, initial force inventories have been increased to reduce the chance of a dead force early in the game.
• The disappearing UI bug has finally been reproduced and vanquished.
• Some players noticed that powerplants, satellite tracking, and silos took effect as soon as they were built, before they were positioned. That problem has been eliminated.
• Players will no longer lose their shroud progress in the event of a server crash.

Known Issues

Movement Desyncs - occasionally unit positions are going out of sync between client and server. Symptoms of the problem include: in-combat teleports, discoveries for items which are still invisible.

The problem that resulted in duplicate inventory accounts has been fixed. Any players with duplicate inventory accounts can get rid of the bonus accounts by selling components until only one account remains.

Emperor Cauto I was hailed as a saviour when he single-handedly ended years of pitched warfare with The Fallen. Now, forty generations later, the price of his treachery is finally coming due.



The Return of The Fallen is the second major update to The Imperial Realm::Miranda, an open-world real-time strategy game now in Early Access on PC.

The Fallen are a new AI faction which adds to the two existing player factions: the Empire and the Independents. The Fallen provide new PvE challenges throughout Miranda's 400 square kilometer seamless map.



The Blue Zone is a new map area where players can engage in PvE battles, safe from attacks by other players.

With the Return of The Fallen, Miranda's mysterious Monoliths have suddenly come to life, providing fast travel across Miranda for players who can discover their secret. Miranda's huge map also now features vendors, monoliths and points of interest to discover.

This update also adds Quadlasers, a new Mission, new Perks, new Achievements, new audio, larger initial component stocks, 40 bug fixes and 47 other changes.

The Return of The Fallen update will be available to play on December 22. Buy your copy of The Imperial Realm::Miranda today at itch.io or sign up for our mailing list.

Secret Lair Games is offering our Lowest Price Ever on our one of a kind open-world RTS The Imperial Realm::Miranda with an additional 17% off our already huge 40% off Early Access discount prices.

Shop now at itch.io!

Sale runs until Midnight November 24, Pacific time.

You might think I'm going to rip on Mass Effect Andromeda, because that's the cool thing to do, but there are some lessons on open world RPG design that I have been able to draw from my time in Andromeda that I can apply to make Miranda a better game. Truth be told, after 60 hours and playing through about 40% of the game, I can see the Mass Effect game they were trying to make and there are things I quite like about it. I play some games just to try to figure out how they are designed, but I wouldn't still be playing Andromeda if there wasn't some of the old Mass Effect magic in there.



The first hour of Andromeda is spectacular. Bioware always really nails the first hour in their games. It is spectacularly beautiful, engaging, with lots of story, lots of action, and it moves at a good pace. Too many games don't make this effort and their first hour is like any other hour of gameplay. Designers would be smart to look really hard at what they put in, and more importantly, what they leave out of the first hour of gameplay to make sure players' first experience is amazing.

Next Thursday is the 8 year anniversary of my start on The Imperial Realm::Miranda. That's a really long time to work on a project, particularly a game, but I can see the end now so that's something to look forward to. I don't have anything exciting planned to mark the day, I expect I'll still be working on the next update.

The most frustrating thing about working on a super-secret new feature is that you can't talk about it! Or even ask questions about it. Sure you can talk to people you know won't spill, but sometimes you just want input from the people who play the game.

Super-secret feature #3 of 4 wrapped up last week. I'm pretty happy with it. I simplified the design so nobody should have any problem figuring it out, which I think is the right direction to take. The effects are also looking nice, but there's always more you can do on that.

Things got off to a bit of a slow start on super-secret feature #4 this week. The core of it is an adaptation of a program I wrote a while ago, but when I tried to get it going, it was crashing with a bug that I've seen extremely rarely in-game. Like, once every four months over the last three years. The lucky thing is that because I could finally reproduce it, I was able to fix it at last. Next the program's clock was going out of sync with the rest of the game which was causing problems. That had never happened before. Turns out the update loop was only running about every 45 seconds rather than 30 times a second like it is supposed to. Fixed that. Then I encountered a thread deadlock, first time ever, so that was a surprise - those cause program hangs, but are easy to fix. I also fixed a server bug that's been plaguing me for months. At the end of the day, I have a base to build the new feature on.

So then it was Wednesday and I finally got to working on the design for what I'm doing. I like to design up-front - I find I make fewer false starts that way. Once I was satisfied with the overall plan of attack, I started on some of the new art I need. I'd forgotten that there was a wierd problem with this particular art that I hadn't been able to figure out when I originally bought it, but I'm taking another crack at it, moving ahead and hoping a solution presents itself. Art is always a challenge, like today I had to teach myself Blender again. It has been long enough since I used it that I've forgotten all the shortcut keys, luckily I made decent enough notes the last time I had to re-teach myself Blender.

Two more things still to do before the next update but a lot has happened already since the last build. I spent a couple days tracking down all the bugs I found making the Nemesis Mode Demo Video. I don't know if anyone else noticed them, but they're there. I added the missing audio for missiles and loot crates, and added a new mission to encourage beginning players to locate a vendor. To get the new mission to work, I have made vendors discoverable. Once you find a vendor once, it will continue to show on your map.



There are also discoverable points of interest now on the map, although their locations are visible from the start. There are only three POI's now, but more will come. To make these new discoverables a little easier to discover, the ones nearby your base are highlighted on the map.

Sadly, this is also an end of an era. The original four vendors have closed up shop and retired.



I'll update you on the remaining two new features as they come along, but the details about them are going to be a surprise. I'm curious to see how long it takes someone to figure out the one.

I did a little video to demo some of the new features in the Nemesis Update to The Imperial Realm::Miranda.

The Nemesis Update is now live for all players. Anyone who has purchased any Early Access Edition from the secretlairgames.itch.io store will be able to log in this weekend (GMT) and try out the new features.

Nemesis Mode

I've written about Nemesis Mode before. With a single click, Nemesis Mode pits teams of players against one another in PvP battles. The final version of Nemesis Mode is very much as originally described except that it now supports up to 16 players. Annihilation, the first Nemesis mode, tasks players with destroying the other team's buildings and rewards them with loot and bonus XP. Additional Nemesis modes including Assassination, Slaughter, Claustrophobia and Greed will follow in future updates. To activate Nemesis mode, click the icon in the top right corner of Miranda's HUD. Settings for Nemesis Mode such as chat preferences and game length can be found on the Settings screen off of the main menu (Esc.) Once you are in a Nemesis match, you can click the Nemesis Mode icon to see the other players, and your statistics, or to leave the session.

Mission List

Miranda's Mission List makes it easier to keep track of the player's current objectives. Player-selected missions display on the HUD. At the moment the only objectives that show on the list are ones from Nemesis Mode. Press J on the HUD to display the Mission List or click the icon in the top right menu.

Foundation Extensions

Miranda's rough terrain sometimes makes finding a flat enough spot for buildings difficult. The Foundation Extension is a consumable which can be used when laying out your base to temporarily increase the foundation height of a single building by 25m. Foundation Extensions are stackable which makes it possible to place buildings nearly anywhere. Buildings with taller foundations will be available as standard components for higher level players.



New forces will be given 10 Foundation Extensions. Unfortunately, existing forces will have to buy Foundation Extensions from Vendors and they are a little pricey.

Map

The Map plays an important part in planning your battles. The Nemesis Update greatly increases the performance of the map screen and adds icons for important map features. When playing a Nemesis Annihilation match, the objective locations are now circled on the map. The map will also now show where combat is underway anywhere in the world.

HUD

Many HUD features have been reworked and are now more compact and hide-able, allowing for a clearer view of the battlefield.

Weapon Sound Effects

Sound effects heard in the Early Access trailer have been added to a few of Miranda's weapons.

Resource Shortage

The number of resource fields on the map has been greatly reduced so resources may be more difficult to come by. Unfortunately, resources on rough terrain can be difficult to harvest (there is a pathfinding problem on rough terrain which is on my to do list to fix.) The next update will bring some additional resources to the map.

Bonus Inventory & Design Slots

I made an error when I set up the entitlements for Inventory and Design slots for players. Each player only received the correct number of Inventory and Design slots for a single force (obtained by selecting Redeem Code from the Main Menu.) I have now corrected this and each force should get the correct number of Inventory and Design slots specified for the Edition they purchased when they create a Force. I have decided not to remove the bonus Inventory and Design slots from the Redeem Code menu, so players can redeem that to give one force some bonus Design & Inventory slots. Once the current batch of Secret Lair Codes are all sold, new codes won't include that little bonus.

Vendor Improvements

Vendors now show accurate prices for what they will pay when buying from players. Unfortunately the 3% premium vendors were paying over the standard price has come to an end, and vendor purchase discounts now range from 25% to 85%. Buy Design now shows the correct number of units buildable. Vendors will also no longer accept unsellable components.

Bug Fixes

The game has been running very stable since the May bugfix update. Since then 23 bugs have been fixed, there were also 25 additions and 25 changes and removals. Some of the more important bug fixes in the Nemesis Update are:

• Unit veterancy should now be much easier to obtain.
• Player's Luck now affects their loot find rate.
• XP should now accrue at a much faster rate. An algebra error was resulting in about 7-10x slower XP gain.

This update took a lot longer than I would have liked, I hope everyone enjoys the new features!