📢 Attention Thunder Run, Days of Valor, Mars Frontier, War Star Empire, Battlefront Mars, and Firestrike Commanders:

Welcome to the 14th installment of the Battlehouse Dev Blog, a place where fans of all Battlehouse games can enjoy regular behind the scenes peaks into the minds of Battlehouse Developers.

We’re officially now in a new PvP Season, and while we didn’t make much progress on the Developers Roadmap this past season aside from delivering craftable Security Nodes, we have been working on a new large back-end project that we’re excited to finally talk a little bit about now in this Dev Blog entry.

The purpose of this new project which we’re internally calling “Project New Horizons” is to publish across multiple platforms to gain a lot more players, with a goal of gaining enough revenue to substantially increase our dev team size and release boatloads of new content. The first visible step of this project is the Kongregate re-launch that allows Facebook and Kongregate players to go head to head. Next steps include a downloadable client that will be published on several other platforms, like the Windows Store and Steam.

The downside to this project is it lowered the priority of a lot of front-end content. The Developer Roadmap still represents the front-end projects in the works, they’ve just slowed down a bit. After the Kongregate re-launch, expect at least one project on the roadmap to see some development cycles.

We’ve also been working on some projects that do their thing in the background.  The PvP end of season tournaments had some timer entries that were wrong due to typos. To prevent this, we automated the process that times the announcements and leaderboards. The next season tournament should go without a hitch in July.

Our VPN detection software and reputation filter has been integrated with the game engine. This has been quietly in the works for a while. A consistent complaint about PvP is that certain bad elements will have an army of alt accounts on anti-alt maps and hide behind VPNs so that our alt-detection system won’t notice them. Starting after the next end-of-season PvP tournament (July 2-July 9), all anti-alt maps will become anti-VPN maps.  Any player connected on a VPN will not be able to join an anti-alt map. If a player switches to a VPN while already on an anti-alt map, the player will be moved to a pro-alt map.

Now, we know that some of you have to use a VPN for one reason or another. Like our anti-alt policy, we will grant some exceptions to some players. We’ve started rolling out notices on the servers well in advance of the policy change, so if you start seeing messages warning you that you’re on a VPN, submit a ticket to our customer support team now by clicking the “Contact Support” link at the bottom of your game. If you meet the criteria, your account will be flagged as ignored by the automated processes that police the maps.

We are hoping that this will make the PvP tournament a more competitive and exciting event for players going forward.

That’s all for now. Keep up the good fight, Commanders!

Stay up to date every day on what’s being developed on the dev-tracker channel here.

Looking for an update on where the Dev Team currently stands regarding various community suggestions? Check out our “Voice of the Commander” trackers here:

Like what you see in this Dev Blog, or have suggestions on things you’d like to see addressed in our “Voice of the Commander” trackers? Let us know over on our Thunder Run Discord Server!

Battlehouse Dev Blog, Issue #14: Developer Updates