Happy weekend everyone and thank you all for your amazing continued support during the early access period of Veil of Crows! In this post, I want to share some exciting news and upcoming plans for the game.

Firstly, I would like to announce that VOC is no longer a solo project! Brandon has come to help optimize and improve the game even further. Like the new camera controls? Thank Brandon for that!

Below I have highlighted some of the things we are planning to roll out over the next few weeks.

Optimisation:

This is an ongoing task, and every day we find things that can be done better, more efficiently, and with less overhead. I have put a lot of work into optimizing the campaign map lately, and it seems to be paying off. There is still a bunch of work to do here, but it is already starting to seem more stable. I look forward to turning this focus onto the battle scene and seeing how we can improve things there

User Interface:

I have been prototyping a new user interface. Angelica, who designed the game logo, has been sending in some amazing art for me to play with, and it is looking great. We are starting with the main menu just to get the right aesthetic for the UI. I plan to begin rolling out the new UI in the next couple of weeks with the main menu. Then I will be moving on to the battle scene as there is a lot of work to be done including new options for player controls.

Controls:

I hear you guys! You don't like them! Well some of them at least (siege equipment). You will be happy to know that today I had a big meeting with the lead game designer at Humble Sage Games, and we have been discussing how to move forward with more intuitive controls. UI buttons will also be added for ease of use. We also discussed a lot of your feature requests, such as ‘stances’ and unit cards etc. All additional UI elements will be able to be turned off if you prefer the bare look, and most current controls will still work, but we will implement better ways of doing things.

Saving and loading:

Currently, they are slow and hard to access (registry), as they are using Unity’s built in system. Our aim is to completely rebuild how the game is saved/ loaded, make load/save times faster, and possibly add a cloud save option. Brandon has been prototyping different ways of doing this with promising results, and we hope to have something nice in the works soon. Our aim is also to keep your current save games safe, so we will look at the best way possible when we decide to do the changeover, and hopefully, it runs nice and smooth.

Fog of war

The current system is 'ok', but it could be better. Many of you have spoken up about being able to see explored areas etc. We hear you, and we are hoping to look into a better system sometime in the near future.

Everything else:

Veil of crows is still in alpha, but we are dedicated to listening to the community. There are many other elements that we hope to improve over the next few weeks and your feedback is crucial to the development process. Once things are running nice and smooth, the rest of the game content will start to roll out. There are two more tiers of units to implement, more cavalry options, more battle maps, more keeps for castle sieges, improved castle maps and many features that I am keeping secret just for now. Veil of Crows is not just my full-time job, it's my passion and I am dedicated to making it one of the best RTS games out there.

As to be expected, the first couple of weeks have been pretty busy with bugs flying at me left, right and center. Now that things are starting to calm down, I can begin looking to the future and moving this project forward. Updates may become less frequent but they will be more focused. My aim is for you to have the latest version of VOC as soon as possible, especially in the case of bug fixes.

Thank you for your ongoing support, and I hope you enjoy our weekend.

Cheers

- Kerry