Hello everyone!
There has been a lot of work done over the past few months that I'm excited to share with you. We've also decided to increase the frequency of updates to every 2 months, from every quarter.
The primary focus of this update was polishing, bug fixing, and actioning feedback. I'm very happy with how this has been going. Massive shout out to the testers! There has also been a fair few QOL and some accessibility support added.
After returning from TwitchCon in June, I had a list of bugs waiting for me. Most of them were handy enough to fix, but some were pretty major and some even potentially game breaking. I'm delighted to have those fixed up & hoping we can catch them more often with the increase in update frequency.
I've added some accessibility support this patch - adding colorblindness support & subtitles where applicable.
Some tooling to assist in the Artwork updates has finally happened, and the new artwork is now available in the campaign, and character creation screens.
I've added some quality of life improvements, including some changes to controls and how they are represented, contextual instructions and visual prompts.
Main Items
Here is a full list of the main items that were worked on during these past few months. There is a much more exhaustive list available on the Rise of Piracy discord for those interested.
- Added accessibility options for Colorblindness and Subtitles
- Alot of bugs fixed - Full list on the Discord.
- Multiple Campaign QOL fixes.
- Campaign Minimap improvements.
- Instant Contextual feedback on every screen & gameplay state.
- RTS Mechanics improvements and QOL fixes.
- Map beginning & Intros were worked on heavily.
- Rebalanced multiple aspects of AI, including targetting & bonuses.
- Rebalanced the mission generators on the Campaign Map.
- Redone NPC logic across the board to make state transitions safer & more predictable.
- Some graphical updates improving water, reflections and clouds.
- Added Directional Radars to some player states.
- Redone the Reinforcement system.
- Added footprints to the soldiers/characters.
- Completely rebuilt the wind system & added more FX.
- Iterated on the Avoidance logic to make it more reliable.
- Fixed major issues regarding character double-reloading and ignoring maximum range.
Upcoming
We will continue to test heavily over the next few months generating work items & working through issues.
I still need to update some of the Tutorials. There has been some improvements to the Faction alliance code, the privateer mechanics must be updated as a result.
More audio improvements are coming. The additions this patch have made working on this aspect a bit easier, but I still need to clean up and improve on audio across the board.
Thank you
State of the game has improved greatly thanks to the testing. Looking forward to more bug reports!
TwitchCon was amazing. I met with so many game developers there, including the leader of my stream-team, PirateSoftware. I'll for sure be trying to get to more events in the future.
Remember, you can follow along with the development live @8PM GMT daily on Twitch - @irishjohngames
Thank you all for your valuable feedback, and support. I appreciate it.
- John