Dear Tankers,
Welcome to our 54th Development Status. You can see what we were working on in two weeks!
Playtests
As we wrote in our last development status. We decided to resign from Steam Next Fest with a demo build and decided to organize for example playtests for the community on a near occasion. We plan to do this event somewhere in July - so it is coming very soon 🙂
Once closer we will inform you how we will organize such an event.
Battle of Steppes Gameplay preview
We would like to showcase the third mission in the German Kursk Campaign called the Battle of the Steppes. This mission itself is an attack scenario, where the player squads have to break through Soviet defense lines to find and destroy artillery battery locations and finally capture and hold an entrenched farm.
The battle happens on a steppe, of flat terrains with little cover or almost no vegetation protection. The player squad has to use all of the advantages they can to win the battle.
The mission begins with an attack on entrenched Soviet infantry, AT-guns, and tanks with the support of our artillery and allied forces.
The second objective is to search and destroy the Soviet M-10 artillery. The artillery battery can be found in one of three positions, the other two positions might be decoys.
The third objective is to capture and hold an entrenched farm. This objective is not yet finished and we will showcase it in the next dev log. Stay tuned.
Sound effects and overall sound settings are still work in progress. We are implementing FMOD in the project. FMOD is a sound effects engine and authoring tool for video games and applications developed by Firelight Technologies.
Right now the biggest issue here is the incorrect treatment of how many sound effects are playing at once, causing some other sound effects to be cut or missing, for example, coaxial MG sounds.
Expect the next dev vlog showcasing FMOD capabilities.
Diagnostic data
We have begun to configure analytics to gather information about players’ behavior to improve gameplay and game design based on that data. We’ve begun to gather data about:
Mission objectives:
- How much time it took players to conquer an objective
- How many times which objective has been conquered
- How much time do players have spent on each mission
Player’s Death:
- On what level player died
- Using which tank
- During which objective
- At which minute of the game
- Position of his death
- What enemy unit has killed a player
Player State (How much time player spends...):
- In tank
- As character
- On map (UI)
- In Main Menu
Basic Game info:
- Player’s controls settings
- Player’s time spend in the game
- At which moment player has left the game
- Crash and bug reports
Performance:
- FPS amount
- Player’s video quality settings
- Player’s hardware (RAM, Graphic Card)
Based on that data we can balance:
- The difficulty for each objective on battle levels
- The strength and effectiveness of AI units
- Length of each mission
- AI behavior
- Vehicles and resources available for player
Just as an example for you to get the idea, we’ve performed tests and we’ve analyzed how many times what kind of units have killed players:
We’ve compared how many units there are on that mission and we’ve come to the conclusion that Soviet AT infantry is too effective against players. We’ve made some changes in that unit configuration and have tested the same mission again. At that time the Soviet infantry was less effective which in consequence improved the gameplay.
Another example:
How many times players have died on each objective
In that specific mission, there are 4 main objectives. As the difficulty of the level is increasing with time, players should die more often with each next objective. As you can notice on the chart, players have died fewer times when trying to conquer the last objective than in the second and third. So we have to balance those objectives to increment the difficulty linearly with time.
In conclusion, gathering data allows us to spot issues that can’t be noticed by simple observation and can help us balance the game effectively.
VFX update
For a couple of weeks, we have started to address some of our VFX’es, that we will be using in Tank Squad. There is a lot to cover, every impact, ricochet, penetration, explosion, smoke, etc. will be done accordingly, and will not look generic (as some other games that touch WWII tend to do). The main objective was to create a believable experience, and visual information is a part of this immersive journey. As our terrains, and models were made, the same attention to detail will, and already is taken into consideration making special effects. Below you can take a look at some work in progress impacts on different surfaces.
Thank you and have a good one!
DeGenerals
