Steam Community :: Group :: Shoot Many Robots: Arena Kings

ABOUT Shoot Many Robots: Arena Kings

Demiurge Studios is taking the best bits of Shoot Many Robots and turning it into a fast-paced, competitive experience with the tactical depth of boxing and the showmanship of pro wrestling. Join this group to get the scoop on our weekly updates and be notified of play sessions with the developers.

Arena Kings forums[demiurgestudios.com]
Shoot Many Robots[shootmanyrobots.com]
Arena Kings beta signup[arenakingsbeta.shootmanyrobots.com]

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RECENT ANNOUNCEMENTS

Shoot Many Robots: Arena Kings -- Update 10 ("Time Enough for Bullets")

31 July, 2012 - aporianaut | 1 Comments

Here in Massachusetts, the days are getting shorter and our thoughts turn to mortality. What will be our regrets on our waning hours? Who can say, but it ain’t gonna be this weeks update, featuring a new physics engine and some tweaks to help you find less laggy games.

CHANGES

*Improved matchmaking to make it more likely that you’ll get into less laggy matches. We search for hosts close to you for 90 seconds, then, if you haven’t found a game yet, give you the option of searching wider or continuing to search nearby.
* Fixed a bug where the end-of-match results would sometimes not appear.
* Challenge progress is saved more reliably if a match ends prematurely.
* Cleaned up sound during end-of-match sequence.
* Swapped out our old physics engine for a snazzy new one, called Bullet.
* Secret bonus for those of you who read these change notes: we left in a physics debugging tool that I think looks pretty cool. If you start the game with the “-enable_ship_cheats” command line argument, F4 will show you some of what’s happening behind the scenes.

18 July, 2012 - aporianaut | 1 Comments

Do you like pooping? Well then, our ninth update is for you. It includes a new achievement, speedier matches, and a bit of help for new players.

(It really has nothing to do with pooping. I just like talking about pooping. Poop poop poop. (If this is too lowbrow for you, you can skip ahead to the Elizabeth Cady Stanton joke.))

Let us know your thoughts on the forums (http://demiurgestudios.com/community/), and if you run into any problems, let us know at support.arenakings@demiurgestudios.com.

WHAT'S NEW

Arena Kings is updated weekly based on the feedback we get from you. You can check out the full list of updates on our forums, but here's some of the major stuff:

* Noob Aid: To make things a bit fairer, new players get a health bonus which phases out over the course of the first four levels.
* A new Steam achievement for finishing a match during the beta
* Faster Matches: Sped up games by reducing 3-player and 4-player victory conditions.
* A bunch of bug fixes and improvements, particularly related to scoreboards and the challenges introduced last update.

COMING SOON

Five words: Freeze Ray. (I am now encased in a block of ice and can't say the other three words until I am unthawed generations from now in my country's darkest hour.)

YOUR FEEDBACK

Okay, I'm not going to pretend to be frozen anymore. Here's some of what you've been saying:

"Pretty hard to play with lag."

Addressing lag is one of the two most important things we're working on, along with giving people that don't use Facebook the ability to sign up for an Arena Kings account. In the previous release, we added a warning when we can tell that you're about to join a high-ping game, but we're not getting reliable results from that check. We're working on improving that, as well as a bunch of other changes to networking.

We expect that in the long run, we may need to change the game so that it's hosted by dedicated servers. Lots of folks have asked for that. That's a very large engineering task, though, and in the near term we think it's better for the game to spend those hours adding features and fixing bugs.

While we're working on improving things, the number of people playing the game at any one time has a big impact on whether you can find a nearby, low-ping host, so keep on inviting your friends to play.

"Had to leave because the game was way too long."

We've reduced the 3- and 4-player score limits to help with this. Let us know what you think of the new game lengths!

"What's the 19th Achievement?"

It's the one that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony made, but were never allowed to unlock. Not really. It's a little thank-you achievement for you (valiant beta testers all) enabled in this latest release.

"<3 <3 <3"

Y'all also said lots of nice things about the game (shucks, thanks!), but those aren't as interesting to talk about.