Hey there AFF Community!
We promised a post that’d give you all a bit of an insight into the future of AFF so here it comes. It’s a rough outline of what we want to do with AFF in the coming months, both in terms of development and proceedings around the out-of-early-access release. If you want to stay even more up-to-date with the development of the game, come visit us on our
Discord channel.
First, let’s get all the formal stuff out the way:
AFF will come out of Early Access in a few months - but no idea about the specific day or even a month. We never give any exact dates on anything because we just pull the trigger on any release whenever we think it’s done. Take a look at the roadmap below to see what’s still left before we can call the game ready for a 1.0 release.
Nothing changes as far as the AFF financial model goes - we’re still funding the development out our own pockets. What’s important about that is the large chunk of the income from Early Access sales will go exclusively towards promotion.
A few weeks before the release (so again, a few months from now) we’ll start advertising the game through all the possible channels. We have a sizeable list of youtubers, gaming sites and other media which we haven’t used so far and will definitely contact when the time comes. We don’t have any plans for sponsored videos, we feel like the game should be able to defend itself on its own merits in video review form, but we do want to invest in advertisement on several sites.
To combat the low online population plaguing the Early Access version even further we’ll do free/discount weekends and similar events around the 1.0 release. Despite keeping the game a bit under the radar so far we did get in contact with a lot of lovely people and intend to gather as many players as possible for the release. Being an indie title we obviously can’t expect to retain a massive online population after the initial around-release influx but we’d be happy to keep at least 2 full servers going. We’ve done massive optimizations to the netcode of the game to make sure the situation from around the Early Access release doesn’t repeat itself and the new players don’t bounce off a badly running server.
We also have plans for adding a “Quick play” option to the game which will connect you to the most suitable server instantly - we feel like a lot of potential players look at the server browser, see the low playercounts and quit, which subsequently contributes to even lower playercount. It would also be in order to highlight our full bot support even more - and that even the servers with low playercounts are fully playable.
Additionally next month we want to set up a devblog-kinda-thing on our website (and probably link to it through Steam news as well). Probably partially in video form and partially in text, depending on the topic. This is less for promotional purposes and more as a means of documenting all the tricky technical stuff we do to make AFF work - how we set up our ship interiors, how all the sub-components of ships work, how our bullets can pierce walls etc. Our lead artist already started streaming a bit of random development sessions and we hope the AFF Community would also like to hear about the more obscure low-level intricacies of how the game works.
And what about post-release? This highly depends on the popularity of the game at that time. There’s a set of features we want to keep adding to the game even after the 1.0 release - again, take a look at the roadmap below.
If AFF achieves a reasonable success there’s a few options we’ve been thinking about. The most straight-forward one would obviously be just supplying the game with further content - maps, ships, weapons etc.
Another would be modding, but this is something we’ll have to gauge after the release - both in terms of people being interested and us being able to actually afford it. Providing and maintaining an SDK is a huge expensive time-sink.
The most far-fetched option would be a more cinematic single-player (or rather coop) campaign. It’s something we dreamed of since forever but creating experiences like that is hugely expensive - animations, voiceover, scripted sequences, it’s all a gigantic money and time investment. Maybe after the post-release dust settles we’ll consider alternative means of funding such a campaign as a separate kickstarter’d game? This is a song of a really distant future anyway, right now we have this game to finish!
Speaking of which, let’s jump to the more technical stuff. We’ve created a simple outline of the features we want to finish before the game leaves Early Access and add after that period:
This is by no means an internal tracker of the features we’re working on at the moment - that’d be an incomprehensible mess of notes and british curses;) It’s just a representation of what we want to do, available publicly for maximum transparency. The cards are marked with coloured labels based on whether we expect them to get added after 1.0 or in the EA phase - it’s really just a guess though, we might shift the priorities. Additional benefit of creating this roadmap is that Trello has a voting functionality built in - which we might use in the future to gauge how much the community is interested in a given feature.
Okay, so going through the stuff on the roadmap:
We fixed the most game-breaking netcode issues but there’s a few things in the AFF networking that still could use a boost. In addition to optimizing the sheer amount of data sent between server and the clients we want to move certain actions to the client’s side. Before this sparks any controversy - this doesn’t mean client-side hit detection or client-authoritative gameplay code. We merely want to decouple things that don’t need server verification from the legacy netcode we inherited from UT - this means the weaponfire effects and stuff like that should be more responsive. To accompany this we want to improve on the impact effects and the whole visual sequence that happens when you get hit or incapacitated - vfx, animations, kill-cams etc. This all ties into some upgrades we already started introducing into our animation system so both the combat- and movement-related animations should feel way less glitchy after we’re done.
One area where the game still stumbles on a technical level is the CPU load - we need to optimize the AI calculations, possibly by deferring them to a different thread, since currently you get much better performance running server-client than you get with a standalone local instance. There’s also a nasty problem with the windows on the ship where you look out into space - culling and rendering mechanisms of those viewports are suboptimal for our use case. Those two issues will have to be resolved before the game can leave EA.- fortunately we’ve already identified what’s wrong and fixes are in progress.
Now, the most near-future stuff:
We’ve replaced practically all of combat audio in the game - gunfire, explosions, impacts - and added more ambient sounds around the maps. Our lovely sound artist is getting a few last samples done as we speak so expect that massive audio update in the next patch in a week or two. This revamp also necessitated a couple improvements to the audio backend which is now better optimized and should no longer randomly cut sounds off when there’s too much happening around you.
The new UI is of course the biggest content change going on right now. The menu screens are far into development while the HUD (the most complicated part) is maybe less than 50% done. It’s all still weeks away from being done but you can already see how much more legible the new UI is going to be:
One of the things the new UI will let us do much more easily is a meta-game mode that’ll tie in a sequence of maps on a server (or in solo play), similar to a Galactic Conquest mode from a certain old shooter ;) This is something we always wanted to do and there’s been a pretty vocal support for that in the Community. So far we’ve only done some preliminary design on that, menu mockups, gameplay considerations and such, the actual mode will require much more work since all the maps will have to work both ways - with both factions taking turns in defending or attacking a map. But it will definitely be introduced into the game at some point, very likely tying into the completely new feature of commander powers - eventually giving the commanding player on the team an ability to call down orbital strikes, artillery, support drops etc.
There’s also a handful of gameplay features we want to implement to make the game more true to the AFF lore, to accompany the new version of our in-depth universe wiki which is in the making. Most importantly drones, which are plentiful in the AFF universe and so far haven’t been represented in the game. They will work like the countermeasures on vehicles and spaceships do right now, as cooldown-based abilities that can be triggered for all sorts of fun effects - building an instant cover in front of you, cloaking your character, providing momentary point defense etc.
Since the game is still in Early Access, we’re considering some significant changes to the existing systems too. Some improvements to player’s movement capabilities are in order and a rethinking of how spotting/tagging enemies works in the game right now. These are rather low-priority tasks right now so stay tuned for more information about those later, but it’s fairly likely they will see the light of day in the EA phase.
Progress on the new maps has been a bit on the slow side, admittedly. We teased a few of them but they’re not ready for public release yet. This is largely due to the code team being focused on all the fixes and those new maps still require some amount of code support. For example the AI has to be adjusted to board multiple stations and then escape after blowing them up and the planetary landing we’re doing on one of the maps does need some special handling to work back and forth. We’ll dedicate one of the next updates to the maps, their environments and gameplay features.
Hope this wall of text paints a comprehensive enough picture of AFF’s future. Nothing’s ever set in stone but this is generally the direction we will pursue and we hope our lovely Community sticks with us throughout the process :)
PS. Again, to stay as up-to-date as possible, come visit us on our Discord channel, it's the best place to meet both the dev team and a whole bunch of great people you can play AFF with!
And as usual...
Onwards and upwards!