Greetings, Candidates! This is the newsletter for October 12, 2021, the first October update. Before we get into the specifics, we have a big announcement! Rank: Warmaster will be having a media release starting on October 15, just three days from now. What does this mean specifically? It means that an early build of the game will be released to select playtesters and media influencers on the 15th, which will finally allow us to get some outside feedback. We're working hard to try and make sure we have a good build for this release, keep an eye out for potential Rank: Warmaster gameplay footage in the coming weeks. That's all we can share with you regarding upcoming releases, so let's cover news from the team.
From the coders
Matt and Art are attacking on two fronts here. There is the continued progress on the implementation of the tutorials, mostly by Matt, and the fixing of a bug that has plagued us for a long time and which has kept all of our gameplay trapped at the North Pole of Mars, being tackled by Art.
For the tutorials, it's hard to get into specifics besides squashing what bugs arise and trying to keep the whole experience smooth. The majority of effort goes into writing code which helps the engine to react more dynamically to player action during the tutorials, as well as making it easy to point out the different areas of our HUD as they are taught. To put it more simply, Rank: Warmaster is a complex game and sometimes even simple objectives have multiple ways of being completed. The engine needs to be able to understand this and progress the dialogue of the tutorials appropriately.
As to the bug Art is working on, it basically comes down to "We're trying to get the game to understand that on a sphere (like a planet) "up" is relative." Until this is fixed, buildings not on the north pole are being built sideways because the game thinks "up" is above the pole. Naturally, this is a problem.
From our content writer
Jorden has been submerged in work on the tutorials. So has Matt. But on a couple of recent days Jorden came up for air and began writing out the larger campaign outline for the narrative of Rank: Warmaster. Not to say that there was never a plan for the story before, we've known for a while where the story was going to go, but actual details for the campaign at different stages of the game are being written. In addition, Jorden has begun writing the first campaign scenarios, the actual in-game situations which will allow the player to progress through Rank: Warmaster's story. More work is expected to be done on that as the tutorials become more and more stable, but unfortunately we are not expecting to have any mid-game scenarios implemented by the Early Access launch.
From the artists
Kathleen and Paul are hard at work putting together concepts for building lights, so that it can be made visually apparent when any given building is active by the patterns of lights on the outside. This also makes the buildings much more visually interesting.
From our QA tester and game content designer
Lastly is Adam, He of the Longest Title. Adam has been devoting his time to testing and re-testing the tutorials. This is meticulous work that will pay off heavily in the long run and we definitely need it as we approach our first release.
That's all for this update! A lot of interesting news and many challenges still in front of the team. Be on the lookout for more exciting news from us in the coming weeks, and we'll see you next time with another newsletter. To keep up to date on our progress as well as to be notified as soon as the game is available, make sure to wishlist us on Steam! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1422270/Rank_Warmaster/