Stellar Impact, new independent game

Hi gamers with jobs community,

We are Tindalos Interactive, a French indie games studio based in Paris.
We just released our first game, Stellar Impact, an online multiplayer game, PC only !

If you are a MOBA, DotA or RTS player, you should keep reading
In Stellar Impact, you command a space battleship in intense tactical combats with your team mates. You will have to make tricky maneuvers,
elaborate efficient strategies and most of all play collectively if you want to be victorious !
It’s also possible to upgrade your spaceship, its crew and the weaponry systems to get stronger and crush your enemies in various game modes.

You will find a first trailer including gameplay footages on our Youtube channel:
- http://www.youtube.com/user/Tindalos...

Screenshots are also avaible in the "media" section of our website:
- http://www.stellar-impact.com/stella...

Want to give it a try ? You are given 10 free trial games when you register
- http://www.stellar-impact.com/stella...

Now, we would like to hear from you ! What do you think of the game, trailer, screens... ?
As an indie games studio, we rely on players like you and on the indie community to spread the world about Stellar Impact.

Join us on Facebook and Twitter:
- https://www.facebook.com/pages/Stell...
- https://twitter.com/#!/Tindalos_Int]...

See you guys on the battlefield !

Aurélien - Tindalos Interactive

Looks like fun, actually.

Of course, that was me, before I realized Kiri was still logged in lol.

I like the look of this.

Anyone tried this? Impressions? Looks like MOBA/DOTA in space. Spaaaace!

Seems like NavyField, which could be a good thing.

Having trouble logging in to their website, however.

Nevin73 wrote:

Seems like NavyField, which could be a good thing.

Having trouble logging in to their website, however.

Btwn RPS and TotalBiscuit their site has been up and down all day. I created an account, but I'll wait for this huge influx to calm down before I bother playing.

Has anyone been able to get this running yet? I still get the "Unable to connect to authentication servers. Please restart the game" error.

Nevin73 wrote:

Has anyone been able to get this running yet? I still get the "Unable to connect to authentication servers. Please restart the game" error.

I haven't tried, but right now is probably the wrong time to try this game. Give it a couple weeks to calm down. They're still getting hammered with requests et al.

So I finally got into this. It is very much like Navy Field in space. That's not a bad thing. You have objectives and objects that you can take over. There seem to be a bunch of skills and weapons to play with. Unlike Navy Field, you can jump into any ship type off the bat, though it is a good idea to config your skills appropriately first. There are loot drops at the end of a battle which give you gear to mount on your ships. As each battle commences, you have skill points to assign to specific skills to hone the build you are going for.

I dig it so far.

I'll admit, I liked it, so I bit on the full version while they have it on sale.

So far...

Pros: Cheap, Good graphics, interesting game dynamics, and challenging matches. I really love the look and feel of this game. I'm hoping that my money will help go towards the cons though.

Cons:
1) Laggy. They really need to invest in some better servers.
2) Not many games in the lobby.
3) Desertion Counter counts how many games you've dropped from, but doesn't really show how many you've stayed for. Mine's at 0, but people at 3 tend to get kicked out of matches before they begin. As a man with a budding family, and very little play-time, it's easy to see how a person could need to drop out of a few games.
4) Worthless tutorial. An offline sandbox map would be much better suited given the very steep learning curve of this game. My first match was a slaughter just in the fact that I wasn't sure of the buttons, didn't even know I needed to hit space to fire. I could only help my team by soaking up a little bit of damage before biting the dust.

Looks interesting. Any more recent impressions?

So this is on a modest sale on Steam this weekend (20% off) and I am thinking of picking it up. What is the single player like? Is it like Demigod, where there is a rudimentary tournament or other gameplay against the AI, or is it multiplayer only?

My understanding is that it's mp only.

Also, if you buy it right now and expect to play, you won't be able to as the Steam release seems to have killed their site.

I just picked this up from Steam with the sale, anyone else playing ?

I picked it up as well, haven't tried it out yet.

I had a glance at the Steam forums. Generally not especially helpful but it does give a good indication of what is going on. Apparently there are a lot of instability issues with lag and account management. But I suspect a lot of them are just from the system getting hammered, which is something to expect these days when releasing on Steam.

Yup, just like when Total Biscuit did a video, I'm avoiding this because their servers can't handle the influx of people. I imagine the influx of Steam people is quite a bit larger than the TB video.

I just booted it up to go through the tutorial, it definitely whet my appetite for the game, I am looking forward to the DOTA game mechanics coupled with large and unwieldy ships that can't turn on a dime. I also like the turret mechanic.

I didn't try for an actual game tonight though, but I'm going to give it a shot tomorrow. My work PC is getting a new OS and I'm taking a half day off for that, so we'll see if the servers calm down enough during the middle of the day for stable play.

Took it for a spin tonight, still buggy. There seems to be an issue with my game not recognizing my codes (Game proper, +DLC) even though it was working last night.

There seems to be some others on the steam forum having this issue as well, so I am sure they will get it fixed.

Great little game though, quite a bit of fun.

So I put several hours into this on Wednesday, and I definitely recommend this. As far as technical and server problems go, one of my games had a tremendous amount of lag, but the game handled it fairly well, it was visually distracting but I didn't feel like it impacted the game too badly (although if I had been using the torpedo skill that you have to aim manually I may not feel that way). All of my other games were perfectly fine.

In addition one of my games froze up on me and I had to restart the entire computer. (And it was my first game I was actually going to win!) I haven't seen other complaints for that though, so it's not a common issue, and they continue to patch technical issues.

Demigod is the only other game of this genre I've put significant time into, and in comparison to that this game is squeaky clean server perfection. I played 2v2 all the way up to 6v6 and it just worked. People joined the lobby, clicked ready, and then we played the game. That may not sound all that special, but anyone who tried for Demigod game nights will appreciate something that just actually works, rather than causing you to lose 45 minutes in the lobby hoping and praying your 3v3 game will finally get started.

As far as the gameplay goes, the actual battles themselves are a combination of Demigod/DOTA and Navy Field, and the process of upgrading and improving your ships in between battles is more in line with World of Tanks.

I'll post some more impressions after spending more time with the game.

What's the average match length? MOBA's usually take too long for me (around 40 mins).

oMonarca wrote:

What's the average match length? MOBA's usually take too long for me (around 40 mins).

The game I had was about 30 mins, I think. Yonder will probably be able to give you a more accurate representation though.

I will say that the devs have been really good at rolling patches, there have been 3-4 this week which have fixed a lot of the "OMG I H8s THIS GAME" issues from the forums.

My games have been 30-45 minutes long, but they have all ended in surrenders once it gets fairly obvious who is leading. I'd imagine that more evenly matched games (like we try to arrange with Goodjers) could break an hour fairly easily.

On the flip side, a game with goodjers all on one side fighting pubs would probably be consistently around half an hour, as our average higher coordination would probably give us a pretty big advantage.

One nice thing about how the rewards work (you get two items after every victory, one item after every loss) is that it provides a strong incentive to move on to the next game, I have not yet had a match where it's obvious you will lose and people on your team just want to prolong the defeat.

Interesting. Still too long for me, though. That, and the fact I can't play with Goodjers.

f*cking timezones

Back to SC2. Thanks for answering!

Yonder, I will look you up this evening, I am planning on putting in some substantial time with this, this weekend.

Well, either I am doing something wrong or your names aren't HantaXP, Nevin73 and PurEvil in the game. I'm Yonder btw.

I think mine may be just "Hanta"

I'll look you up.

I haven't played in quite a while...not even sure if it is still installed. I'll have to check tonight.

So I have several games (even a couple wins!) under my belt now and wanted to go into a bit more depth about the game. First of all I have had no more crashes or technical issues, actually in subsequent games I haven't even had lag. It may seem odd that I mention this first, but any of you who tried to force their way through Demigod with us knows how crucial this is.

Now into more of the gameplay. There are currently eight classes of ships, five that come with the base game (corvette, frigate, destroyer, cruiser, and dreadnought), and three DLC ships that have been released since then (Artillery, Support, and Carrier). Apparently there are three more DLC ships in the works... I think a survey ship, a science ship, and something else.

The most basic stats of the ships are Structure, Armor, Shields, Speed, Radar range, and the number and type (light, medium, heavy) of their Front, Side, and Rear turrets. Armor is actually a percent value, typically from 30% to 50%, and represents what portion of your structure is armor. Armor only takes 1/3 the damage from all attacks other than torpedoes.

As far as the first five ships go, there is a fairly predictable balancing that actually seems to work fairly well, though I would probably want to put several hours in with semi-organized people before I could truly say that, hint-hint. The Corvette is extremely fast and maneuverable, the frigate has the greatest radar range, etc, etc. A team of all Dreadnoughts would be at a severe disadvantage, they may have lots of attack power and armor, but their radar range would be terrible, an opponent Frigate would allow the enemies to fire at your fleet from much farther away, and then there is the obvious problem with a team full of slow dreadnoughts properly responding to the enemy quickly changing their paths.

Another interesting mechanic is that while the Structure values and Armor percentages increase for the heavier ships, leading to far sturdier vessels over all, the smaller ships actually have stronger shields. Shields regenerate far quicker than structure is repaired, allowing the smaller ships to dart in, take damage, dart out, and be ready for more action soon thereafter. A larger ship brought down to half or lower combat readiness would be out of the picture for quite a bit longer.

While we are on the topic of damage, there is one more important affect that occurs to heavily damaged ships. The lowest half of your structure bar is split into five segments, every time you get damaged past one of these segments you get a random critical failure. These range from the relatively innocous "your shields will no longer recharge" to the crippling "half movement speed". These status affects remain until your structure is repaired past that segment. This mechanic actually brought me to one of my favorite moments of the game. I had scooted past a sun (damages all shields, heavy gravitational pull) to attack the towers on the enemy's flank. They arrived to repel me, and as I dove back into the sun's pull to escape, they got a final hit on me which damaged my engines.

Luckily I had damged them in turn, too much for them to follow me into this dangerous zone, but they may not need to follow me after all. No longer able to mosey past the sun, I was now in the fight of my life. By the time I reoriented I wasn't on the outskirts of the sun's effects,but deep in the gravitational field. I gave up on any attempt of moving within the field and attempted to head straight out from the sun. Unfortunately I only had enough power to maintain my--nope I was definitely getting pulled back into the sun. I had only one chance, the natural hull regeneration was far too slow to save me, but one of my skills was Emergency Hull Repair. Using it would heal me significantly, pushing me out of the critical damage territory and giving me full power to my engines.

The problem was that I had used this skill during the fight, and it was still 14 seconds away from being usable. As I watched the cooldown timer tick down I slipped closer and closer to the sun. When the skill finally became available I was only seconds from death, I triggered it and my fall halted, then reversed. Slowly at first, but as I pulled away from the mass my progress accelerated, and I was finally able to break free and limp back to base for further repairs.

The other traits that differentiate the ship classes are the skill categories. Each ship class has it's own unique skill, unlocked only during long games. The other four skills come from (mostly) the same pool of more than 20 skills. Those skills are set up into various categories, like Movement, Attack, Defense, and Command, and each class can only have a limited number of skills from each of those categories. For example three of the corvette's four skills can be movement related, so it can cloak, or boost, or teleport short distances, all in the same battle. A Cruiser, however, can only choose one of its skills from the movement category.

This can lead to very different ships within the class. For example you could create a Ganking corvette with cloak, teleport, torpedoes, and Shockburst. He could hide out on the edge of the battle waiting for one of the foes to be weakened, then teleport in, unload on him, then cloak for his own escape afterwards. Another corvette could be designed to sneak around behind enemy lines, capturing facilities and laying out listening posts.