Greetings, Warmasters and Candidates! This is the newsletter for June 7th, 2022, the first June newsletter. As usual, most of the updates are around the tutorials, however, tutorial 2 is about ready.
While not polished by any means, it at least can be completed (if the proper path is taken). There has also been a graphical update on the buildings. There are the typical bloom refinement and bugs fixes of course.
Quality of Life
The tutorials has been the main focus. While Rank: Warmaster isn't hard to play or understand, especially if you've played the genres before, the controls may need a small refresher for how we defaulted the controls, and the progression of the game itself. Also doing the tutorials show a lot of places polish and improves, and even bug fixes are needed, which is a lot of why they are taking as long as they are. It's not so much putting in the dialog, but making sure what they are referring to is working correctly. What came out in playtesting was how long it took to extract the resources to build a building wasn't needed or even planned to be that way. So now that is far quicker and therefore less annoying. Many other flow issues switching between screens has been cleaned up, such as the building screen. There is a far longer list, if interested, please check the patch notes.
Artistic Update
The building bloom tweaks have started. There are still a few things to iron out, of course, but the buildings do have a more sci-fi flare to them now. Also the effects for moving resources have been standardized to take advantage of the new bloom effects, so extracting is red, placing is purple, mining/salvaging is green, and repairing is blue, with building still being white. As a bug fix, we noticed that the building effects had stopped working in the Navigation screen, which of course is now fixed.
There will be further tweaks to the buildings, and the first round of updates to the ships should be coming soon.
Short-term RoadMap
Tutorial 2 needs a lot of polish and finishing touches. The Quick Designer has a few paths through it in tutorial 2, and while the short path is usable, the longer and more in-depth still needs to be fleshed out. The Salvaging AI is currently being worked on and should be expected in the next release. What this will mean is you can make a cargo ship with salvage beams and order it to clean up the battlefield and it will do so on it's own, and drop off the cargo back at base or a local cargo ship or repair ship. Automated repair ship AI will come afterward. As previously mentioned, the tutorials allow a lot of gameplay and shows what needs to be fixed or updated. Sort of triage for a video game.
That's all for this update, stay tuned for more news next time! If you'd like to give Rank: Warmaster a try for yourself, pick up a copy on Steam and begin your conquest of Mars!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1422270/Rank_Warmaster/