Hello everyone !
new Discord link at the bottom
You probably noticed I was less active in the past few days. I have / am taking a break, been playing humankind and cities skyline on and off (I LOVE cities skyline), and planning my trip to Hungary in a few weeks with my girlfriend. Also got the flu AND after that got my second COVID shot. Anyway, that’s my life, but how are you guys ?
I have created this announcement to let you all know about a few things that I wanted to talk to you about concerning the future of this game and my own, as the title suggests :)
Now, let’s move to what you came for :p
As most of you know by now, I have been working very hard for a year and a half making Hex of Steel the best wargame I could with my limited skills with Unity, coding, and WWII in general. For the newest of you, I am not a professional programmer or historian, I am 22 and I am a student :D
And this was my very first try making something. I am reaching a point where I feel like I am satisfied with what I created, and this is what I have always wanted. Make something I feel proud of, and satisfied with, but also that I have fun with, and I do have great fun with HoS.
Does this mean that there will be no more updates for HoS ? No !
Here is a list of features / changes I am still wanting to see implemented before calling it a day (a year maybe ? Haha, what a joker you are Valentin).
- I am not done with the pacific campaigns. I will finish the Burma campaign for the Brits and Japs. Wanted to add 1 or 2 more US scenarios I believe too.
- Zone of Control for units. Probably as an option that you can toggle ON or OFF.
- Pre path representation, showing you what path the unit will take to move to a certain tile by simply hovering the mouse over a tile. Also as an option.
- Multi turn moves. So from one end of the map to another and the unit will move by itself every turn, QoL feature for moving units from one end to the map to the front line without manually moving the unit every turn.
- Implementing rivers in the random scenario generator. Not sure if I will be able to due to the difficulty it represents, but as always, I’ll give it a good try !
And of course, I will always be fixing bugs ! That is something that I will always do, even if I am not working on the game anymore, even if I am 70. We all hate bugs, right ?
Now, onto the next part of this announcement ! My new game ! :D
When I work, I do it because I am passionate and motivated about the thing I’m working on. WWII motivates me and stimulates my creativity, but there is a different period in history that truly makes me excited : the Napoleonic wars/era. I’m French so, don’t think I need to give any more explanation as to why I love this period/era :p
So ! Well, I started working on it already ! It doesn’t have a name, that’s not really something I am focused on or interested in at the moment, plus, if you guys have suggestions, I will surely take them into account and might simply end up choosing it :)
I am also not aware at all about any other game out there on the subject, so, doing what I like because I like it :)
Anyway, what is this game gonna be like ?
I love and always have loved the turn by turn system (well, truth is I love RTS but I don’t have the level nor the assets to make such a game possible) and the genre of wargaming. I also love hexes very much, but only the flat top ones :p
So, we can now start portraying that next game : turn by turn based, hex map, wargame, napoleonic era. What else ??
I would like to list a few features and things I want to have in that new game :
- A fully translated game. I have worked on my skills to translate a game and I am now capable to do so, so this next game will be translated in other languages and will not be exclusively in English.
- Ever faster map generation. I am now using the tile maps system from unity and not using a single game object per tile. This helps to generate bigger maps instantly. In HoS you would need to wait for around 10 seconds to generate a 300 x 300 or so, now it is instant ! (Final map will definitely not be that big).
- I will TRY to make it possible to have online multiplayer and not just PBEM. This is some new skills I would like to develop.
- A beautiful hand-drawn Europe map (and maybe others for different campaigns ?). Not single hex with single types and graphics. The hex grid will be laid down on top of it.
- Stacking ! I am thinking having a commander at the head of the thing and then under his command are placed different units you will be able to purchase individually.
- Experience system for the units and the commanders.
- Better looking UI.
- Naval and ground combat.
- Sieges.
- Historically accurate numbers : since it’s not an RTS, we don’t care about rendering 500 000 soldiers, here it’s just a number.
- Supplies.
- PBEM at least for multiplayer, supporting more than 1 v 1.
- High quality soundtracks.
- Better looking borders.
- Research.
- More than 1 resource : it will probably have manpower, money, and food.
- Who knows, maybe I will make an American Civil War DLC ? Anyone interested ? :D
- Aaahhh and more :) I will be working as hard as I did on Hex of Steel, until I am satisfied or die trying :p
I will be basing my unit list on the game Napoleon Total War from the Total War series to start with. Not sure how accurate it is but I gotta start somewhere right ? If any of you is a history buff, please contact me :)
Here is the list : https://wiki.totalwar.com/w/Units_in_Napoleon:_Total_War.html
Alright ! Well, that’s it for me :)
I might try to kickstart that one to help financing it cause student life you know :p
Wouldn’t be much anyway since I’ll be doing most of everything and I’ll be paying other people to make the assets basically, my brother I think will draw the map he has made some pretty good progress recently making world maps for dungeon and dragons, they look just ahhh so good :)
Ah, almost forgot, I created a new discord server where I will be sharing screenshots and infos concerning that new game, so, if you are interested in just following the advancements, feel free to join here : Official discord server
Will be more than happy to see you there and chat with you :)
Have an AWESOME day everybody !