Posted on Behalf of SOF Studios President, Tom
Hello H-Hour Community!
I hope each and every one of you enjoyed your Labor Day weekend!
The development team really stepped it up over the last few weeks and the result was a large and content rich patch being delivered last Thursday for everyone. The patch had a little bit for everyone including many core game features the community was requesting along with a step forward in our graphical presentation for the game. Core features added included things such as automatic idle kick for those players who go to grab a beer and forget to return leaving their team mates shorthanded and the slot full so others cannot join. The beginnings of Team actions were delivered with the new vote to kick and mute additions to the in game menu system. Friendly fire as an option for servers was rolled out and voice feedback features were added so those talking can be identified easily. There were many other features along with some bug fixes included and the details can be found in our Patch Notes.
Workshop map creators are continuing the push to get their maps converted to 4.11.2 and some are even delivering new content for everyone to enjoy. There are 20 maps currently in various stages of completion. Our Workshop server is now hosting 9 approved maps, another 6 maps are being tested by our volunteer Workshop Monitors prior to release and the rest are being prepped for release to the testers. It is looking like we will need additional Workshop servers setup later this week to package these up for everyone to play.
Just a fantastic effort from the map creators! We should all take a few moments to thank them for their efforts by posting feedback on their Steam Workshop page to help them improve their content or acknowledge a job well done. Creating a map is a time consuming task and the maps I have seen come out of workshop clearly show the passion and dedication of the H-Hour map creators.
Here is an image to show all the content up in Workshop, hidden or otherwise, just waiting to get into your hands. It is getting pretty full!
[img=https://sofstudios.com/Art2015/2016pics/workshop/workshop6sep.jpg]
What’s Ahead?
- Most of the dev team took a much deserved break this weekend. All work and no play or family time is not a good recipe for keeping spirits and energy high. When they return, they will continue to address Trello board workloads. If all goes as planned the input framework is next on their list to tackle. This is a key piece of work that needs to be completed so they can move on to adding additional controller support down the road. At the same time, the team is drilling into the bugs and other deliverables to match what can be done in the coming weeks given available resources and community interest in specific items. As an example, official map tweaks have a lower priority at this point as the H-Hour community is busy trying out the latest releases from Workshop so those bugs will be set aside for a later time.
- There were some additional information and content exchanges completed with the animation studio over the weekend. The additional content requested by them was needed to determine the work effort required so they can properly document their proposal for our characters and animations.
- On the investor front, as I mentioned in the last Quick Look, given the complexity of securing funding we are following up multiple leads concurrently. This means that though discussions are still underway with certain groups, as some witnessed on Twitter this past week I am still in the hunt for new opportunities. I will continue to follow up, provide information, meet and pursue every opportunity I can to secure what we need to finish the game and look to the PS4 port opportunities.
For this week’s forum topic, as some asked about plans for development I decided I would talk a little about our Road Map on Trello. This is a great place to go to get a high level picture of the activities and deliverables for our game’s initial release.
We have setup Trello with cards for all approved design items along with many requested features that came from the community for the game (wish list items with black labels). There is additional information inside each card, so make sure if one interests you, you double-click on it and read what other information is attached.
As patches are released, these cards are updated and closed if complete. Blue and green labels show things on the dev team’s work list for the near future. Yellow items will follow those and the orange ones are planned for down the road. Colors and position on workload happens based on a few factors: dependency (this must be done before that can start), community votes on cards, and resource availability. Anything with a black label is “out of scope” for the initial release. We must do this to ensure we can complete the PC build and begin the process needed to move to PS4. Please know, however, that this does not mean some of those wish list items will never be built. Everything will be considered but only for post release content while we are working on maintenance and future DLC.
I want to once again send my heartfelt thanks out to all the volunteers for their tremendous effort these past few weeks, to the map creators who are bringing out great content for everyone and to the H-Hour community who continues to show their support for this game on the forums, social media, by streaming or just playing on the servers. All of you have been instrumental in helping to bring a more positive vibe into the H-Hour world. Keep doing what you are doing. It all helps!
See you all on September 19th…..