Hey folks!
After a little rest, I got so much useful feedback from the festival and have been working to integrate suggestions and solve bugs, which I'm very happy with! Here's a list of some of the features added:
Game Manual: This took a good while to put together, but on the pause menu the player can browse through pages of information about the game and explore some of the more subtler mechanics. Paired with the pages is a 4 frame animation that captures the essence of the topic being discussed. My favourite thing added to the manual was the last page which highlights the next step to potentially find ham radio communities in your local area or nationally and as part of the animation, I included the crests of different national ham radio organisations in a way that was consistent. Have a browse through and let me know if I've missed any information and I'll include it.
More information: Watching a lot of playthroughs people seemed to struggle to pick upgrades as they didn't have sufficient information to make an informed decision. I've now added descriptions that elaborate when options are selected as well as longer descriptions on the card deck screen. I've also better labelled menus to have less ambiguity and added much more supporting text to give context.
New Launch System: So I alluded to this in a previous post, MORSE now has dynamic controls for firing ammunition. I've had more time with this mechanic and I honestly feel like it's the missing piece of the project clicking into place. When playing the demo, I've now been able to get over 95% accuracy utilising the ammo select to not waste shells which feels incredibly good. As part of this, the accuracy scale is much more filled up for me on the regular which has led me to do some re-balancing of the ammo feed. I'm considering some kind of bonus unlocked perk if you max out the accuracy scale, but need to do more experiments around it to see if it's unnecessary bloat. Related to accuracy, on the end screen stats I've now added your highest chained combo, my highest chained combo is 45 hits on enemies without missing!
Ships that blow up: I recently watched a documentary about the battle of Jutland, the biggest naval battle of the First World War as inspiration for the project and there was an interesting discussion about a major cause of lost ships on the British side. When German shells hit British ships, the stocks of cordite, a propellant commonly used for launching shells ignited inside the hull which burned the ships from the inside out. The documentary is worth a watch if you've got an hour spare! With this in mind, I've added a chance that munitions can explode, certain ships with more armaments' are more vulnerable to detonating, such as the dreadnoughts. What's nice is the resulting blast can both damage nearby ships and give you an extra bit of illumination as it explodes. View game pageAs a subtle mechanic, I'm considering making the percentage chance of a ship exploding more likely if you land a direct hit on its centre.
Narrative Implemented: On the subject of Jutland, I've figured out a very subtle narrative grounding for the game. There was never a serious effort by the German Empire to attempt a naval invasion of the British Isles, but there was attempts such as the Battle of Jutland to break what was known at the time as the Blockade of Europe. This blockade was a unified effort by the Allied powers to stop supplies from reaching Germany. MORSE will focus around a fictional night time breach of the blockade in early 1916, which narratively fits with the use of sea mines and naval warfare.
General polish: I've added in a lot of subtle visual additions to add a bit more spectacle to the game. Generally I want to keep the game as minimalist as possible but things like dithering out the "Fog of war" to the right of the map or adding a smoke plume when ship cannons fire really adds an extra bit of detail to the project.
Whilst most of the changes/updates are for the demo, here are a couple of additions for the full game:
Iambic Function: I alluded to it in a previous post, but the previous version of the Iabmic keys were focused on tapping left and right to alternate, but Iambic keys involve a large amount of holding or squeezing the paddles. I worked with the subreddit "Amateur Radio" to figure out how to make it feel right and now I'm very happy with the controls.
Battlecruisers: These are midsized ships with medium speed and significant firepower that explode violently when destroyed. I'm considering changing the minesweeper slightly to be closer range with higher shooting speed, whilst battlecruisers would have ranged artillery.
This will likely be the last update to the demo for a while now (unless some major bugs come up!) so I can focus on delivering the final game. Priorities include:
Implementing save functionality: This is a well overdue job that is unfortunately a real pig to get working and to not break, the game has A LOT of variables to keep track of, reset and log.
Getting controls working properly: Whilst MORSE does work on the Steamdeck, it requires players to manually choose an community input from the default settings is automatically assigned. The main barrier to getting this figured out is the tool that I'm building the game in, Stencyl. It doesn't have a clean easy method for integrating the Steam Input API and key binding is technically complicated to setup. This is particularly important as I've had A LOT of ham radio enthusiasts reach out requesting key rebinding to work with their telegraphs and they software they use to convert input.
Enemy ship types: There's at least one other ship type that want to add to the game before launch: The submarine or U-Boat is a staple of the era which would be great to implement. They do function differently to other ships in the game so it's requiring a lot of unique design such as its state below and above the waterline.
Get Semi-Auto feeling better: The Iambic Key is now working but Semi-Auto is still based on a previous configuration that doesn't feel very good and is quite buggy. Most likely it'll involve adapting a new version from the Iambic key for consistency.
Steam Achievements: I've got the variables set up for achievements in game but haven't actually integrated them into Steam. Got some pretty ambitious achievements to for players to go at which I'm curious to how people get on with!
I've been pouring a lot of effort over the last month into MORSE and with that I've let a lot of my other career obligations slide so I'll likely be quieter on here the next few weeks whilst I catch back up! This will also likely be the last update to the demo before launch (unless some major mechanic like the ammo switch emerges). All in all though, the game is getting pretty close to release, I'll be announcing the release date in the next month so stay tuned for that!
Thanks and stay tuned!
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