Hey Everyone,
Here’s what we’ve been working on recently:
Animations 2.0
The next foundational change we are going to be making to Days of War is a reworking of our movement and 3rd person locomotion animations. What that means in simpler terms is we have redone everything about how our characters look when standing still, aiming, running, and all the transitions in between. We've also added some new dimensions, like hit flinching.
Our existing animations are by no means bad, but they were not suited for our game speed/style and we saw plenty of room for improvement.
New Base Poses
Redoing the animation systems from scratch is no small task, and this project is months in the making. Because this is such a significant rewrite we will be doing a closed test on an experimental version of the game before we push it live to the whole community. When this is ready we will give instructions for those who would like to test it out.
New Running Posture
If you would like to see the new animations in action please check out the following short clips.
https://youtu.be/JCn57qulD9s
https://youtu.be/Y9kjKC-_QaI
Sound
Some other features planned for this month are voice commands for common phrases and tactical commands. This will be especially useful while we wait for our updated VOIP system, and should add another layer of WW2 ambiance to the game.
On the SFX side we are adding some new long distance firing sounds that should make a shot from very far away more distinguishable.
In the past few updates we have made sweeping changes to our sound effects which have led to some players experiencing partial sounds in game. We are testing some new methods of loading sound files to be more reliable and will report on the results.
Map Editor
We have continued to roll out the map editor in a staged process. Currently the editor is by invitation only and under NDA. If you've been dabbling in UE4 we welcome you to show us what you've made if you would like to be considered for this early alpha version of our editor.
We have gained permission from Epic to distribute the editor, and are working toward full compliance with their requirements.
In the meantime we are looking at methods of releasing and distributing the first community maps before the editor is publicly available.
Server Browser
Another ongoing priority issue is improving the reliability of our server browser. A small portion of players have been unable to see any servers and individual servers aren’t showing 100% of the time. This has been an issue since we released and a particularly hard one to debug because of the many underlying causes. We’ve recently made some changes to the way servers are displayed and will be testing it with players who have these issues soon.
Texture Streaming
Our update to UE4.15 introduced some periodic freezes to some players, effectively a game breaking issue on some maps. We've made changes to the texture pool settings and begun experimenting with some of the more advanced in-engine features to reduce the texture load.
Ongoing Workstreams
There are other longer term projects that are still being pushed forward like our VOIP system that won't appear in the next update but are still certainly on our priority list.
And Lastly...
We wanted to give an update on the state of the game and the longer term plan to bring back players and get new players in.
We sold about 25,000 copies of the game so far which has given us lots of new budget to reinvest into Days of War and secured the resources necessary to complete the game.
25,000 players is still a relatively small player base for a multiplayer only game, and we need to bring in more players to ensure we have plenty of populated servers.
However, before we bring in more people, we need to address our known issues. On day 1 of Early Access, our reviews were hovering around 70% positive. This means there is plenty of room for us to improve the game. Our top 3 complaints were price, amount of content, and performance – and all three are very fixable.
Until we fix those biggest issues, the game is simply not ready for a new crop of players. We considered doing a promotion with our 1.0.4.6 update but decided that would be a short term gain at the expense of longer term sustainability for the game.
We will not be doing any kind of advertising/sale/free weekend/etc. to bring more players in until we are confident we have a large enough base of official maps. This means things will be quieter for a stretch, but that is the reality of our journey through Early Access.
Everything we do over the next few months is with this long term view in mind. We know that asking for your patience during this period is a big ask, so once again we thank you for your immense support!
Driven Arts