Posted on Behalf of SOF Studios President, Tom
Hello H-Hour Community!
We hope you all had a great weekend and didn’t get pranked too badly with some of the April fool’s day gags that were going around.
Again this past week I saw more of the H-Hour community joining our custom mapper ranks and showing us their creative vision for community maps. We now have 20+ maps in various stages of development and 18 busy mappers working away on content. Like all of you, I am getting excited for the day we are finally ready to open the workshop to the public for map downloads so we can all jump on these new maps and start giving constructive feedback to these hard working community members. That day is coming soon!
H-Hour WorkshopApp News:
The programmer had a very constructive week with the app now including preliminary checks before allowing content submission. A follow up "Sanitizer" function runs prior to upload, scrubbing the packaged directory of unacceptable files/directories. Other coding changes added include allowing the App to distinguish between whether an item is new or is an update to an existing item as well as adding the ability to populate information for author items during upload. This removes the need for extra steps on the part of the authors.
The checks and sanitizing programming mentioned fixes the main concern we had with allowing map content to go public. These features force authors to adhere to the required file structure, removing any files/folders outside of approved locations. Our preliminary development testing over the weekend showed the author can complete the upload BUT because of the parsing in effect if things are not structured correctly, the content allowed will result in a broken workshop item without any impact on the game files of members like we previously saw. We now need to expand that preliminary test and cycle it through all the map content currently in our Steam Workshop Hub.
What’s next? As mentioned, we need to work with all authors this next week to get them to remove their existing content and resubmit it using the new App. This will give us both the secure files and content descriptions needed to release our Workshop to the public. If all goes well, we are hopeful to open the public side of the workshop next week. Map creation itself will remain in beta as there is still additional work to be done on the App plus all guides/tutorials will require updating to reflect the changes.
Funding and Current State Updates:
I am continuing to seek leads, follow up on some of the suggested funding sources the community has brought forward, submit investment briefs, gather answers from the team on follow up questions from investors and have meetings with those that express interest in hearing more. It is a time consuming process as we work on their schedules and not our own. Despite the slow pace, this due diligence on both parties’ sides is required as they need to know our game is the right fit for their investment and we need to find the right investor who shares our vision and can help us bring in the specialized resources we want to complete the remaining complex development work on H-Hour.
The H-Hour community and our volunteers have been rock solid throughout this slow period, keeping the servers and social media active, organizing and participating in special Steam events and helping us validate outstanding bugs in anticipation of the next full phase of development. I cannot express how important your role in this has been. We need to keep our numbers up and show the world there is an interested and thriving community who want a TPV tactical shooter like H-Hour.
So thank you to all of you out there who have been helping with activities, promoting the game and playing on the servers. Keep doing what you are doing and together we will succeed.
More next Monday!