Greetings, Candidates! This is the newsletter for November 9, 2021, the first November update. We're breaking the format this time since we're still very deep in the trenches of polish and testing. Rather than go by person, we're going to cover the major topics of recent activities: the flight tutorial, polish and features, and the new trailer.
The Tutorial
While still being heavily tested, Tutorial 1 is currently coded in from start to finish. What this means is that all of the things that were written by Jorden have been, in some fashion, implemented by Matt. All that needs to be done is to crush all the bugs that come up as they are found until we have something worthy of public attention. Tutorial 2 has unfortunately been put on hold for the time while we attempt to properly implement more gameplay features.
Polish and Features
On the polish end, there has been a lot of adjustments to the piloting AI so that it better responds to commands from the Nav Screen as well as more dynamically reacting to situations in the world (such as suddenly coming under attack). Paul has also been doing a lot of great work on updating many of the screens in the game which were first designed... honestly, in some cases, the best measure of time is "they were designed a whole pandemic ago". More on that in Paul's last blog and the one before it.
We're also implementing some more features which have been planned and needed for a long time, namely nodes and Travel Mode. Nodes are areas where Ore can be mined out of the ground (which is currently just "everywhere"). Their implementation gives players something to actually fight over and we're very happy to finally be getting them into the game. Travel Mode is an answer to the extremely vast distances of an actual scale planet. Using Travel Mode allows ships to go much faster than normal so that they can cross the distances between nodes (currently planned to be tens of thousands of nodes) in a reasonable time frame.
New Trailer
Yes! We're working on a new release trailer! What's the progress? It's already been written, recorded, and voiced (yes, there are voices in this one). As we speak, Chris is editing the footage together and we will hopefully have something to show soon. There's a little more information on this in Jorden's blog from yesterday, so go check that out if you want to hear more.
That's all for this update, we'll see you all next time! 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/