Hello everybody! Tiny Combat Arena released into Early Access about a month ago. The first month post-release development was focused on addressing the biggest playability issues that the game faced, and to stabilize the build. This culminated in the 0.8.6 patch, which has gone over well.
What comes next is "the rest of the game." The following list are a sample of the features that I feel the game absolutely must have before I feel the game can be considered 1.0, and move out of Early Access. This work focuses on Arena and features to support Arena, and is the space with which I am most interested in hearing feedback throughout development. While the implementation details of all of these points might change, these are the high level features that I feel are essential to the Arena experience.
While I haven't specifically outlined much in the way of content, be aware that content will necessarily have to be built out to support these features.
Important Disclaimer!
This is not everything I feel the game needs. It covers things that I not only feel the game absolutely needs to be complete, but are also things that at this point in development I'm confident in talking about them. Plans change all the time during development due to new ideas or unexpected issues. Based on post-launch feedback, I've already made some adjustments.
Expanded Arena Map UI
The current Arena UI is barebones. It's my intention that the Arena UI, seen between sorties, can be used to get an accurate strategic picture of what's happening so that you can plan your next sortie accordingly. There is a lot of missing information, and I think the game benefits from its mechanics being as transparent as possible.
Campaigns
The "Arena Demo" mission is a single Arena mission. In the final game, these missions will be strung together to make an "Arena Campaign", with each mission focusing on some specific area of the map.
The final game will have two campaigns. The first will take place on the "Sand Island" map, and is meant to be very short and introductory. A second campaign will take place on a larger map, with its own string of missions. Details on that second campaign, as well as its associated map, will come later.
Finished Sand Island Map
The Sand Island map started as a simple test environment with one small island an airfield. However, it has since been repurposed into a sort of "tutorial" map. Only one of the islands in the chain is fully filled out. The rest are in various states of development. Some have "forests" and buildings, while others are completely barren.
Air Defense and Defensive Structures/Units
At the moment, Strategic Targets in Arena are always undefended. Bases must have the ability to defend themselves against incoming vehicles, and some Strategic Targets might be focused on air defense entirely. The game has a lot of interesting radar and combat mechanics that I feel are being underutilized without stronger opposition and map locations to take advantage of them.
Improved Offensive and Defensive Missile Combat
The fundamentals for all the missile related combat are in the game, but are missing details. For example, chaff and radar guided missiles are underdeveloped. However the biggest of these is how missiles relate to the AI. The game cannot be complete until the AI start firing missiles at the player and each other.
Custom Loadouts
One of my favorite features in combat flight sims is tweaking the loadouts. At present, the player can select from a series of presets, but custom loadouts is a feature the game absolutely must have. Being able to specifically customize your loadout to your mission and play style should be cornerstone of the game.
With More to Come
As mentioned before, this is not a comprehensive list, but it is a list of the items that I feel are both most important and least likely to change throughout development. There's still a lot of work to be done and I'm excited to be back to working on new stuff for the game after a month of bugfixes and planning.
As always, thank you everybody for the support! Please remember that you can also follow the game's development using the Trello board, which I use myself. Or, you can follow me on Twitter or my YouTube where I often post updates on what I'm working on.