Welcome!
Luke here.
It's 8 Months post demo release. The team and I have not made any official announcements about ATS's development for a long time - and that's plainly because we're three developers who are more focused on making the game than talking about it!
You can always check our live dev updates for ATS on our Discord server:
Skyglow Softworks Discord Server
Also don't forget to try out the free demo if you haven't already.
Also also I want to mention that we are hoping to go into Early Access by around December with the Kontaalen and Vaalkorei campaigns as well as whatever side content we manage to get done. But that's a hope for then, this is progress now!
So let's get things straight. We've entered Version Beta 0.8, which marks the point I believe us to be over the greatest humps in the game's development. To have hiked the second tallest mountains, and now to descend into the valley of 0.9, to reach the summit of 1.0
A ton of work has naturally come along the ways to get us here. So much infact that it's an unreasonable task to attempt to accurately summaries it ( Also I want to get back to work ). So we can focus on a little "executive overview" that leaves out a ridiculous amount of detail and even whole events, but provides the jist of what's been happening.
Over the past 8 or so months since the demo was released, we've added units, reworked PD, reworked Drones, improved models, worked on performance, fixed errors, added features, cleaned up HUD information, added in Alerts ( like buildings blowing up ), added in new dev tools, worked on the Kontaalen Campaign and overhauled parts of the Shallows to improve learning and reduce somewhat the rather strong difficulty curve it had for new players.
To be clear, a huge amount of work.
In the end, the point of 0.8 is that the game works. Not just works, works well. It's fun. It's behaving, it's got maturing promise, and charm, looks good, feels good, sounds good, and runs fast.
So what have us three been doing? Well all the stuff above plus our more individual specialisations.
Aleks has been doing a large amount of modeling and visual work for his Tychon Division. Followed by overhauling our build-grid systems in preparation for a number of feature improvements and systems necessary for the Tychon to operate as envisioned. As well as continued to work on improving the intelligence and functionality of our AI Commanders. And a bunch of other stuff.
Though sadly he's not had the time to work much, due to the demands of life.
Owl has as ever been working on proof reading, adjusting and otherwise cleaning up the text mess I leave behind throughout the game's writing. Cooperating in narrative and story design, as well as working tirelessly to improve the Shallows maps both visually, experientially, and in terms of difficulty. ( He's the one that does all the Trauma mission version )
And of course the ongoing duties of adding in new Vaalkorei Coalition units, improving weapon/unit/effect visuals across the board and for all the factions, and fighting with individual ship AIs and weapon behaviors on all of the factions' units to get them to perform their best.
Finally I've ( Luke ) been working on the Kontaalen Campaign, rewriting parts of the Shallows narrative and redesigning our in-mission-coms-chatter. As well as my usual techie work of overhauling parts of our ship movement systems to make them fly better, replacing large segments of our weapon firing code to fix a large number of issues and limitations, fixing yard ( spawner ) behaviours and doing code nonsense for a whole bunch of things, improving and adding in a number of features for the HUD, Level Editor, and Commander AI Editor. As well as new Kontaalen Armada units. And just generally working on just about everything else because this is my day job.
And... well that's it. Left out a lot of stuff we've all been doing just for the sake of brevity ( and the fact I really can't remember in fine enough detail what the other guys have done, let alone what I've done over the months )
That's that!
Look forwards to continued updates and come hang out on the Discord server.
Luke AP
Skyglow Softworks