Across the development of Structs, we've played the games in lots of different forms. We started playing Structs via a card-style prototype that demoed player-versus-player battles. We even held a tournament with our Discord members, wherein our CEO had to make the competitor's moves for them on the gameboard, live on Twitch.
Later, we created a partially-animated visual prototype that allowed testers to experience limited slice of pre-determined gameplay actions in an early approximation of the Structs gameplay experience.
Later still, as the Structs backend began to take shape, we played the game programmtically by issuing commands directly to the network in the world's most inscrutable text-based adventure game.
In recent weeks, though, we took a huge step: we're now testing the Structs gameplay interface. This means a work-in-progress version of Structs is being played, for the first time, in the shape we envisioned back when all we had were drawings on a whiteboard. This will make the game accessible to a greater range of testers, and allows us to experience a much broader picture of how Structs might be played.
This version of Structs is still very incomplete, but we're creating accounts, joining guilds, building Structs, mining Alpha, and launching raids every single day. Structs is coming to life: testers are raiding each other for a ballooning sum of Alpha Ore—93 raw ore as of this writing—in hopes of locking it down long enough to refine a few pieces into precious Alpha Matter. Multiple overnight raids have taken place, seeing the stockpile spirited away from would-be owners while they slept. Our CEO has been seeing the "Defeat" screen with disturbing regularity.
Every week more pieces of the puzzle go online and we knock down more bugs, giving us a more complete view of the Structs player experience.
Our current beta release, Nebulon, running on Testnet 109, is focused on making Structs feel right. Tighter battle mechanics, more predictable energy, a completely refactored game-state engine, and a wave of UI improvements that bring the human experience up to speed with everything happening on-chain. It's not the flashiest release we've ever shipped, but it might be the most important one.
What's new in this release?
Battle Mechanics
Combat saw some corrections and tweaks in this release:
- We resolved an issue where offline Structs were launching zombie counter-attacks.
- We also fixed attack counterability as a struct-level override, so defensive configurations behave the way you'd expect them to. This addresses an issue where Mobile Artillery could be countered despite its defensive ability stating otherwise.
- Randomness checks have been corrected, resolving a number of related bugs in both offensive and defensive calculations.
- Jamming satellite effects no longer linger after the satellite is destroyed; no more mysteriously failed Smart Weapon attacks.
There are more tweaks ahead for funsies and fairness, but the fixes in this release were a signficant step in bringing the combat engine in-line with the original specifications.
Under the Hood
We rebuilt a lot of plumbing in this release. The biggest piece is the General Context Manager—a major refactor of how we track game state across every entity type. It touches everything. Alongside it, the entire caching framework has been rewritten: dozens of handler functions, cleaner indexer behavior, better GRASS event flow. None of this shows up on a feature list, but for testers who have ever had the game do something weird and unexplainable, there's a good chance one of these fixes addresses it.
The UI Levels Up
The chain has been ahead of the UI for a while now in terms of functionality. CLI wizards have had the luxury of on-chain battles and energy production while the UI was still in the infancy stages. The UI has more than caught up though, making it the best Structs experience by far (even if it is still aggressively beta). Attack actions have a clearer flow. Defensive configurations are easier to set up and understand. Raid results now show proper victory and defeat banners—no more guessing what happened. Planet exploration is smoother, including Command Ship loading during the exploration sequence. The charge bar is more reliable, and Struct controls behave consistently.
What's Next?
In short, we've proven the game works. In Testnet 109 we are now ready to stop fixing fundamentals and and start scaling. Special thanks to everyone else who reported bugs, reproduced edge cases, and helped track down the weird ones. Half this changelog exists because players cared enough to dig in.
Join the Fight
Structs is built and tested by our community. Jump into the testnet, break things, report bugs, and help shape the future of 5X strategy gaming by joining us on Discord.
In the distant future the species of the galaxy are embroiled in a race for Alpha Matter, the rare and dangerous substance that fuels galactic civilization. Players take command of Structs, a race of sentient machines, and must forge alliances, conquer enemies and expand their influence to control Alpha Matter and the fate of the galaxy. Structs is a decentralized universe, a strategic game operated and governed by our community of players—ensuring Structs remains online as long as there are players to play it.
