In order to make an omelet you need to crack a few eggs. Over the last few months we've made a lot of upgrades to core systems and under the hood features, but since these updates touched a lot of core systems much of the content in the game was broken and needed to be rebuilt. As of today the game is stable enough to share the build, but some features still need tweaking and polish. Here's a summary of the major updates made:
- Core system refactor - Much of the code has been cleaned up and refined to remove bugs, improve performance and to make it easier to modify going forward.
- Visual update - This improved performance allowed for graphical improvements while maintaining performance benchmarks. Unit shading is improved, the maps have been revamped to use Unity's terrain system, and dead units ragdoll.
- Gameplay updates - Unit AI has been differentiated to allow different unit types to have their own logic as needed, projectile attacks now have an arcing trajectory, and melee units will engage enemies attacking them without needing player input. Capture mechanics have been improved including easier to capture spawns as contesting points delay troops spawning in.
- UI - The UI has been revamped and the respawn screen has been reworked to allow more variety of loadouts.
Known issues:
- many of the sound FX are missing
- Unit types and factions temporarily have the same stats. The stat variations will be added back as the light and heavy armor units are added in.
- Some UI navigation issues when in split screen multiplayer
The path forward:
- The immediate future will focus adding missing content including filling out the unit loadouts, adding unique stats, and making another pass at the sound FX, which will then be followed by giving factions their unique unit types including things like Giants, Mages, Crossbowmen, etc.
- The next major update would be to include a wave survival "Siege" mode where you can either by yourself or cooperatively with a friend hold out against increasingly deadly waves of units.
- The last mode to be added before the 1.0 release would involve a conquest campaign with a turn based overworld leading to individual battles.
Be sure to try out the new update and let me know your thoughts on our brand spanking new discord here.