Hello everyone,
Welcome to another Sea Power update. The weeks are just flying by at the moment, I swear it was only yesterday that I was writing the last one of these, but then a couple of rather busy weeks have happened since then.
GameStar Magazine have published an exclusive look at the game’s progress (Echtzeit-Schlachten mit Flugzeugträgern, Kampfjets & U-Booten - Sea Power lässt es krachen!)
It is in German but the English subtitles give a decent overview and there is a lot of footage to take a look at that you will not see elsewhere. In game related news the last two weeks have brought us more of the same, there is nothing really momentous to report apart from good steady progress on the game. And that late at night we sometimes sit and watch it going “this is really cool!”, we look forwards to when you get to see what we see.
In the coding team we are focusing on a few things in the next couple of weeks, primarily Campaign and AI. These are the two big job that need to get done before we can begin to go into the final stages pre-launch.
The campaign, as I am sure you have heard, shifted from being a turn based strategy system to something more akin to Cold Water’s real time mode (I have to say I aspire to reach the heady heights of what Falcon 4.0 managed, but that will be a big job, check out this interview with its creator (Interviewing the Falcon 4 Dynamic Campaign Creator, 25+ Years Later - A Retrospective):
We are setting up a system that is going to be globally flexible, which will allow you to create new campaigns as you please across theatres of operations of all sizes. You might have spotted some testing of the background civilian traffic system in the GameStar video, we are attempting to create a world that feels very much alive so that you can build your own stories.
AI is another monster, Ivan has taken the lead on this with Nils, between them they have been creating realistic doctrines and approaches to combat so that both enemy assets, and player assets that you are not directly controlling behave in a believable manner. This is a pretty massive thing for us to try and get right, we want the game to be a challenge, but not in the traditional RPG “Bullet Sponge” way. Enemy units will try and react to their surroundings to get the best of you, and you will definitely have to be careful to make sure that you do not suffer from an unexpected defeat.
Don’t worry though, there is still going to be the option to sail around in a custom mission blasting everything with the 16” Naval Guns on the Iowa though. That is pretty satisfying.
Outside of the core coding work more UI work is in development, obviously to support the campaign, but also to polish up tools that we have previously created. And to finalise systems that were still in development. Danill has been majoring on this, with overall art direction from Nils.
We are staying invested in improving resilience and performance too, Ben has been leading the way on this, fixing bugs, adding catch mechanisms to systems that fail to load due to background file errors, and generally making the overall systems work better. Ben has been leading the way on moving systems to the new Unity Jobs system, which allows us to truly take advantage of the performance of modern multi-cored machines.
Noah has really stepped up to the plate (a baseball reference slid in seamlessly, though I am not sure why Americans call rounders that and why it is quite so popular?) and is learning to modify the ini system to help Mek get some new airports set up, and has started writing the first of the tutorials based on his experience of learning the game.
The art team never sleep (it seems like it sometimes!) either, Mek and Ian have been touching up the environments, they are looking really cool, if I say so myself! Especially the autogen! Nils has been making even more brand new ship models too (there is another custom warship in progress) while leading the direction to try and keep us on task and coherent.
That concludes this week’s update, please have some screenshots!
Examples of the autogen system, showing off the emissive light system used at night. As Nils says “moody!”
Suddenly! A new airbase layout, we have had these almost ready to go for ages but now they are happening.
The new Snøgg class missile boat emerges from the shed to join the fleet.
Sometimes you get something slightly wrong, this aircraft has perfected the new amphibious fast taxi technique.