Submitted by Florian on
Soldiers!
Another new year has come! And I can hear you thinking: "where is my game!" ;). Well, there is no official release yet unfortunately! But we have been very very busy setting up private alpha testing to get the first feedback on our current prototype. So we are progressing steadily and do have a working playable game already. But we still need to add more content to provide for the necessary variety in game play. I'll get back to that later as we will be needing you! But allow me to first do a quick review of this rather moving year.
We certainly knew many ups and downs in 2014. It all started a bit with this technical update I wrote late December last year. In it I announced we had chosen to start using the Unity3D game engine and pondered a bit about the large technical challenges facing us. It was at this time that development started not only on the technical foundations of the actual game, but also of the team needed to build it all! We needed art, animations, a new website, sounds, special effects, UI, etc... Budget was of course limited and we felt the consequences of that throughout the year!
In December 2013 we had put much thought already in what we wanted to build in the long term, but technically we were not very advanced yet. We basically had some sort of prototype build to test the Unity3D engine and experiment a bit with path finding and multiplayer:
But we made progress. Although it didn't look like it, the build shown in the following screenshot was already way more advanced than the initial prototype:
In parallel work was also done on the graphics, which we slowly and surely started to integrate (although it didn't look like much yet):
At about this stage Erik had to leave the team due to personal circumstances. This was a difficult time, because he made much of what we did possible! So we had to change gears a bit and get creative again on how to make sure we could make this awesome game happen! But we persevered and kept momentum going both with graphics and game play. Here is some nice art mockup we created early last summer:
This fall was mostly spend on actual game mechanics and UI, as we were fairly pleased with how the map and graphics looked. Things are coming together very nicely now I believe. Here is a screenshot from out current build!
We are getting close!!! We really got a lot of the core game play in there (different weapons, grenading, cover, line of sight, basic statistics, etc...). There is still many things to add though. We haven't got the chain of command in there yet, no weapon and grenade trading/looting yet, only a very rudimentary lobby, no victory points system yet and no extensive battle plan feature! We will need all those features and more maps to really improve the variety in game play. And we'll be asking each and all of your for help on making that possible....
So keep checking back! There will be much to tell the coming month or so!
Florian out