Dear Fans,
Dear Followers,
Old & new,
Welcome to this September 2022 dev diary for Task Force Admiral.
Life’s been sweet to us in September, at least by the standards set by 2023. We didn’t have much to complain about, we were among our loved ones, doing our work. That work, unfortunately for most of it wasn’t very graphic, and as such can only be mostly explained through the unabashed use of walls of text and a few diagrams. Yet, it was an important step in the direction of providing Task Force Admiral with a soul beyond its pretty face.
Operation Barebones, the codename we gave to our basic playable slice, is well on its way. This month was all about artificial intelligence & its strategic implications, along with efforts to provide the game with its strategic layer. With each passing week, Task Force Admiral is morphing into an actual game, and like many of you might think - clearly it was about time!
So as to make sure that the enemy and friendly AI in Task Force Admiral behaves in a believable fashion, we need to reconstruct carefully a scheme of thought. The AI will be asked to adhere to this logic, that tries to emulate the process you would expect from a commander faced with dilemmas, over and over again, and reacts dynamically to them – with some sense, but often with some wrong assumptions of his own. It means developing a specific set of tasks which will identify clear goals, whether these are dictated by the original mission objectives or by the ever-evolving combat situation.
Another department where some sweat was expended in no small measure is our interface for the Naval Search missions. Separate from defensive and offensive missions, this tool will ultimately allow you to program your sector searches, the ubiquitous opening move of any proper carrier battle during which both sides send scouts to locate their opponent before launching a strike.
Yet, although it is a common matter treated by all games about the topic, Naval Search ended up being a remake of the irreconcilable "the chicken or the egg" kind of conundrum: setting up a flightplan based on a given sector you wish to investigate (aka populating it with your aircraft) vs. generating a sector from the aircraft you have available. Sounds kinda simple & harmless enough, but it ends up being a rather game design-defining choice, and a tough one at that!
Each system had a few issues of its own when it came to providing us with the tools needed for the job. The latter is actually what people usually have in games like that - say, in Carriers at War, Task Force & Pacific Air War, for instance. You add aircraft from your pool, sub-sectors are created each time and add to each other, and there you go, that's the good old Microprose way many of you have been used to, easy to use. I'd know that, I could use it when I was 9 and set in another language, so it must have been pretty handy after all!
On the other hand, you also have the rarer breed of the sector taking precedence over aircraft themselves, 2by3's War in the Pacific being one example. But even then, a squadron is limited to one sector search at a time, which means that you need two units when you need to cover two sectors. Mostly, each technique encountered can be either put under one or the other doctrine, with their own limitations. These are limitations we attempted to solve in TFA, hopefully with some luck, observing the best practices and learning from our illustrious forebearers. Here's the preliminary result we came up with.
After some experimenting, we ended up convinced that the mission itself (aka the area to search) shall be the defining item, rather than the result of the air assets you have in hand - and if the latter don't work to cover your needs, then you'll have to revise your needs to take your limitations into account. Similarly, using a mission-based system rather than a plane-based system allows you to create as many search plans as you like, including two-phased ones or sector searches going in opposite directions, yet worked on separately by aircraft from the same squadron.
This done, the next stage will now include the vital doctrine-related & behavioral choices we want to inject in the gameplay, so as to allow you to brief your scout pilots - simply, but with some clarity - regarding what you expect from them. We will hopefully cover that in the next update, if all things go well in October, that is!
While Jean Baptiste our coder was busy trying to assemble the brains of our game, one cog at a time, obviously other had his own workload.
Now that most of the fleet is on its way to finalization, our 3D artist had some spare time to dedicate for a smaller task – and by that we don’t mean a matter not less important in the larger scheme of thing, but purely something that doesn’t involve big ships, but little men.
Our local pixeltruppen, that is our digital sailors, officers & other crewmen, are often requested as a feature in the comments left & right in our social media. Do understand that they are a concern for us all the same, but we are looking for the right most satisfying and balanced way of including them to the game without incurring a disproportional workload that would possibly affect our overall timetable and pipeline. For now, we will probably settle for static crewmen which will certainly add some bits of life to the scenes, despite their unequivocal stillness.
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Adding animated models would require the opening of a different can of worms we can ill afford right now, but obviously our wish is to get there at some time down the line, especially if we were to be successful at release. It is, when all things are said and done, in the category of pure eye-candy, but this is the sort of feature that contributes its own valuable little step towards an improved overall immersion.
In the same fashion, don't expect these soldiers above to jump out of their Daihatsu barge and storm a beach. For now, it is all about adding some more immersion to the mix, and we will certainly develop this further as time goes once the game will be seating on solid foundations. But until then, at least we won't be afflicted with that silly "ghost ship syndrome" most of you dislike so much! Better than nothing, like they say.
As for the 2D front, we’ve been painting new ships one after another, while still researching better rendering techniques for our vehicles. As our skins are all layered with different effect, working on a given layer in order to improve a given effect doesn’t impact workflow as much as it used to back in the day when a single overall skin was to include everything you needed to dress up your model. Rivets in particular are a tough customer. Whether they are visible or flushed, they still require an extra bit of attention to render properly while being optimized so as not to slow gameplay to a crawl when a wave of 50 SBD is about to dive on the Kido Butai. The progress is probably more apparent with pics rather than words, so I’ll let the pixels speak!
And that will be all for this update! As a final word, yet again, don't forget that we have a mailing list here specifically made so as to keep you updated of all our Steam updates and other announcements which might be big enough to deserve a special treatment. Click on the pic below to access the form.
Cheers & see you for our next update!
The Task Force Admiral team.
