This one is the first version available to our kickstarter backers as a whole, instead of just the earlier testing groups.
The game is still very much in testing and development, however š
That said, there’s one new key piece: an in-game tutorial, and the engine which makes more of those possible. One of the hardest things to do in maintaining AIWC was changing the tutorial, to the point that we hardly expanded it at all as the game grew, and only updated it for the most fundamental of changes.
Tutorial creation is much easier for us this time around, and highly moddable. There’s currently no way of selecting between different tutorials, but that will come soon, and in the meantime if you’re interested in writing your own you can look at “Scenario_Tutorial_01” in the code and the various thing’s it’s connected to. You could then change the Tutorial button to call yours instead of ours, for testing.
When the framework is more stable perhaps we’ll post a tutorial on writing tutorials š
This one is all about new AI Types and being able to choose between them in the Lobby.
There’s some neat new personalities in there (I’m especially fond of “Brawler”, but I always did love the Burlusts), but the more important thing is all the framework necessary to have different factions have their own set of dropdowns in the lobby, so we can support variable-intensity special factions later on, etc.
On the subject of modding, some significant improvements were made to how you can define XML entries in terms of other entries, and more specifically to how the AI’s unit “draw bags” are populated.
There’s also a fix to a bug that had broken the ability to start a multiplayer game. Thankfully the sim itself was staying in sync fine, there was just a null exception in the lobby for the non-hosts, when trying to show certain information.
Lots of quality-of-fun improvements here, including much-improved support for having selections of stuff from multiple planets, helpful new info on the AI Defenses galaxy display mode, descriptions of many common units, and another round of basic balance changes.
But the main thing is definitely the addition of targeting modes for control groups. Now you can go into a planet with your fleet using “Defense” targeting, and it will defend itself against the main threats to your shield cover. Then you can switch to “Siege” targeting to have your long-range units focus on knocking out the enemy units that can hit you back. After that, you can switch into “Pre-Assault” to focus on neutralizing the things that would mess you up if you just charged straight through (tractors, shields, etc). Finally, during an actual charge, you can switch into “Assault” to prioritize tractors and shields in your way. If things don’t go your way, “Retreat” prioritizes the enemies that can catch you, are near you, or can wreck your shields. Once you’re done you can change it back to “None” and the individual weapon system target sorters will do their thing (as they will anyway if your group’s setting doesn’t have a preference between two targets).
Modders can also change these modes and add new ones. Look at the “TargetSorter_Siege” class in the external code project for an example (to add a new one you also need to add a line to GameData/TargetSorter/KDL_VanillaEntries.xml , but it’s straightforward).
No one theme here, other than “make the game more fun to play” š
Opening with some UI improvements from community member BadgerBadger, and moving on to some behavior changes from me to make waves behave in a more familiar fashion and to make your ships not fan out in a counter-productive fashion when you give them an attack order.
Modders can now make different galaxy display modes change the text (and its color) around planets on the galaxy map, which really helps show the info you want.
And some various bugfixes in the middle of it all.
This one started with more work on differentiating the planets. In the last release we made it so the AI’s controller on each planet can be in different places. Now we’ve gone the rest of the way with all of the code for determining the position and type of the AI’s defensive units. The current set of AIDefensePlacer implementations (which you can mod, or add new ones to the mix) includes ones that split the AI’s defenses into two or three distinct locations on the planet.
Next, we’ve integrated four of the best map types developed by modders in our community. Draco18s’s “Density Map” is especially cool: it uses a bitmap to build a spiral galaxy by establishing different planet zones and only connecting planets within a zone (and each zone to each bordering zone).
Along with that, we added the framework community modder BadgerBadger developed for having map-type-specific lobby options, so you can configure how many arms an Octopus map has. This is still in early days, but it’s an exciting customization method beyond what AIWC offers.
Finally, we’ve made some more strides on the still-awful (because still-unfinished) UI: an improved metal display from Badger (along with tooltips up along that top bar), and the ability to color the lines between planets on the galaxy map. AIWC has a similar feature that is very helpful, and AIW2’s version of it is very moddable.
Chris and Keith here! Apologies for not having made any kickstarter updates sinceĀ June, good grief. Weāve had daily or weekly interactions and updates on ourĀ forums,Ā blog,Ā youtube dev diary, andĀ release notes pagesĀ for anyone who wanted the full firehose info dump, but thatās no excuse.
Schedule Slippage – Overview
Letās get to the toughest topic first. We had originally planned to have an Early Access release on Steam in May, and then a 1.0 release of the game this month, October. As you are no doubt guessing, a 1.0 release this month is not in the cards.
With the Early Access launch-pushback in May, we went ahead and gave out the keys to all of the early access backers at that time, even though the game wasnāt available for purchase on Steam yet. Weāre going to do the same thing with the ālaunchā backers: weāll have your keys to you later this month, even though the game isnāt in a launch state and wonāt be launch on Steam just yet.
In both cases, youāre still getting your key when we said⦠but, well, the game is not in the state that you would want just yet. So at best thatās a half-kept promise. Obviously schedule slippage is not exactly uncommon with kickstarters or game development in general, but we are still very sorry about that.
Where We Are Right Now
Code: Ā
All of the core code for the game is done.
Multiplayer is currently broken for some reason, but should be quick to fix.
Massive amounts of work on frameworks for a flexible UI and extra modding capabilities have been put in place.
There are actually a number of extra goodies in there, like multi-squad formations and some other surprises.
Gameplay and Interface:
Balance leaves a lot to be desired.
In a general sense, the āfeelā of the first game isnāt quite there yet.
Thereās no tutorial, which makes starting to play quite hard.
The lobby interface is very sparse.
The overall GUI is ugly, but becoming increasingly usable through iterations. Our goal is for it to be better than the first game in terms of incorporating a lot of the longstanding requests people had for that game.
The Spire, Nemesis, and Interplanetary Weapons stretch goals are delayed, possibly until after launch.
Unexpectedly, we have a whole new minor faction in the form of The Nanocaust, created as the first mod for the game by BadgerBadger and integrated into the official builds by us.
Art:Ā
All of the ship models and textures — all two hundred and six of them — are complete as of last week.
The actualĀ integrationĀ of those ship models and textures is only about halfway complete, give or take.
The ship model and texture work includes all of the Spire, Nemesis, and Interplanetary Weapons stretch goals stuff — so the art for those are already done, at least.
The far zoom icons are done, although we will probably change some of the āflairā parts of them as we get closer to release.
We have done a number of pieces of concept work for the GUI in terms of figuring out a style, but none of that is integrated into the game yet (no point until the actual underlying elements stop shifting around so much), and thereās still more concepting work to do in general.
The visual post-processing stack is still evolving at this point, to give the game a more sophisticated look and avoid the ācircus lights in abundanceā feel that sometimes hits right now.
The visuals for different shot types are still on the todo list.
The visuals for how ships die are also still on our todo list. Thereās a balance there between performance of particle systems and the frequency (read: very high) at which ships die that we have to work out.
Weāre still working on inside-one-squad formations that look awesome, although some of those are already in place. Basically making them look more like actual naval or air force military formations rather than just grids of ships. This has been pretty cool to see evolve.
The āships flying around inside one squad with flame trails everywhereā approach has just turned out not to be feasible on modern hardware without impacting our ability to have really large-scale battles, unfortunately. There are some special tricks we could do to still make this happen, but that would get into some budget that we donāt have. This is a real shame, because this was something we showed off a lot in the kickstarter videos, but in pretty much every other respect our art is exceeding what was shown in the KS videos, so this has been a pretty decent tradeoff — and something we can return to in the future.
Audio:Ā
A lot of the sound effects for different shot types have been selected and set up, but are not integrated into the game yet. So the battles donāt sound as variegated yet as they will later.
Another bonus that weāve chosen to explore thanks to the urging of backers is extra voiceovers for human ships when you give them orders and when there are various alerts. Weāve done about 30% of the recording with a variety of voice actors for this, and weāve integrated maybe 5% of that into the game so far. Itās something that brings more of a feeling of commanding actual humans rather than just lifeless ships, and itās something youāll be able to disable. Itās also something that weāve got a system for making sure it doesnāt over-saturate you with the same voice cues over and over again, too.
As far as AI taunts or human taunts that you can give back, we have not yet started recording any of those yet.
The music is partly in place, but overall only a few tracks thus far. Pablo tends to work in a massively parallel fashion, and so a lot of his tracks are at various stages of completion rather than him finishing one piece fully and then pushing it out and repeating. Bear in mind he has to compose them and then perform them and then do all the audio engineering and mastering on them, so this process gains a lot of efficiency.
(The GUI is being gradually blocked out and iterated-on in that fashion before being made pretty.)
Upcoming Schedule: October through November
During the next two months, more or less through December 6th, thereās going to be a flurry of extra work going on to try to get the game to a point where all of the AI War Classic enthusiasts are able to come to the new game and feel both somewhat at-home as well as like theyāre in the next era of the game.
Exactly what that means is a bit unclear at this point, but we know it focuses on usability, balance, the interface, and possibly tutorials. The reason for the lack of clarity is that thereās a big back-and-forth between us and you in this section — this is aĀ hugeĀ game, and so we need feedback on things that are unclear or break balance, and then weāll respond to those items, and repeat.
There are a number of things we already have planned to work on through the early part of October prior to us releasing the ālaunchā Steam keys, and then after that point we hope weāll see an uptick in the number of people who are giving us feedback.
Upcoming Schedule: December
After the December 6th date, or thereabouts, we hope to have things in a state where a LOT more people are comfortable jumping onboard and testing and giving us feedback.
Right now feedback has been really limited to only coming from a few people, largely because the game has been too unapproachable and too unbalanced. So thatās on us.
But we just absolutely cannot go to launch, or even to giving out press previews, with that little feedback. Our goal is to get our side of things to where we can start getting your feedback — from more and more of you — while at the same time seeing more and more of you enjoying simply playing the game without having major complaints.
Upcoming Schedule: January
Once the new year rolls around and weāre into 2018, hopefully weāre pretty close to where things are so polished that we can start handing out keys to the press and getting some previews. We donāt know if that will be at the start of January, or later into that month, but either way the goal is sometime in this time period.
At this point in time, when we start sending out press keys we plan to disable our backerkit preorders store and our paypal preorders. This is also likely when the āComing Soonā page on Steam will go live, although we might conceivably do that in December.
Upcoming Schedule: February
This period might start sometime in January, if things are going really well, but either way it bleeds into February. Basically this is the āpress review period.ā
During this time weāre not taking any new sales for the game, and press are able to play and review the game. We hope that you folks are also playing the game and enjoying it and giving us feedback on how to make it better during this time so that we can apply some final polish to it prior to launch.
This time period is pretty critical for a number of reasons. Firstly, it gives press a chance to have reviews ready for launch, which can help a lot with purchase decisions. Secondly, it gives the game time to āsettleā and hopefully have a lot fewer changes required despite a lot of backers playing it.
Thirdly, it gives a period of exclusivity where only backers and the press are able to actually get the game. People have an increased desire for things that they cannot have, and the press prefers writing about things that the general public cannot yet have, so we wind up with this funky period because human psychology is what it is. Hopefully this doesnāt feel manipulative to you, but weāre being upfront about why weāre doing this — basically it will increase the strength of our launch week (which is critical) and the number of reviewers who will play it during this month (also critical).
Upcoming Schedule: March
Obviously these dates get less certain as time goes out further, but the idea is that about a month after the press gets their hands on the game, we launch the 1.0 on Steam.
The exact day will partly be determined by what is going on with other game releases by other developers, what conferences and conventions are in that time period, what store-wide sales might stomp our launch, and so on. We wonāt have visibility on what the exact ideal release date is until probably 6 weeks prior to choosing the day; and even then we might need to shift the day forward or back a week or so because of something else in the market that comes up.
Launch Discount
Speaking of the importance of a good launch week, one of the things weāre going to need to do is have the traditional 10% launch discount for the first 7 days. This is potentially contentious, because thatās a $2 discount that all of our existing launch backers (early birds aside) are not getting.
If this is something that angers anybody to a huge degree, then Chris will refund the $2 discount to those individuals out of his own pocket. So please put away your pitchforks. š
That said, I think we all have the same vested interest in seeing this game do well and go on to have lots of post-launch support (which require sales to fund), and expansions, and so on. Basically we all want to see the same sort of arc that AI War Classic had, I think?
The market is a lot more hostile now than it was in 2009, however, and the launch weeks are more and more critical to having any sort of momentum. The more weāve looked at the data and talked to other indies, the more it has become clear what a problem it would be to not have a good leadup to launch (that month with the press), or not have a launch week discount that buyers have come to expect.
The backers and preorder customers here are the customers who have made this game possible in the first place, and so the 10% launch discount can really stick in the craw of some people when situations like this occur. Weāve witnessed the backlash against certain other games and developers when a development like that comes up out of the blue, which is why weāre telling you now, way in advance, and offering that $2 refund to non-earlybird launch backers if anyone is angry enough to take us up on that.
THAT said, in general weāve been taking the approach that Prison Architect did, where āyou pay more if you buy earlier,ā which is counterintuitive in a lot of ways, but something that weāve talked about the mechanics of with backers for a year or so now. Obviously the alpha and early access tier backers paid a whole heck of a lot more than the launch folks did, and those backers both help to support this game getting made at all, as well as having the game earlier and being able to influence the gameās design from an earlier stage.
We could go on at length about this particular topic, and we feel guilty about that as well as about the general schedule slippage here, but hopefully you read our reasoning and it makes sense — particularly if youāve been watching the PC market as a whole lately.
(The above image is a good example of us still needing to do some work on the post-processing pipeline, although it’s already much better than that as ofĀ today’s release of 0.522.)
Backer Rewards Status
There are a variety of backer rewards in a variety of states of completion right now. For practical reasons, itās pretty much breaking down like this:
Now that weāve finished all of the ship art for the base game, weāre starting in on fulfilling backer rewards that are ship-art related. Weāre working first withĀ the custom Arks, since those are the most numerous and most complicated of the backer rewards, and then weāll be moving on to the others that are art-related.
For things that are design-related (custom AI types, ship stats, etc), we probably wonāt get to those until December. Itās better if things are more stable and you can play the game more before you get into that sort of reward.
For the audio taunts and the text and lore bits, Iām expecting that probably January would be the timeframe, just to balance with our workloads.
As far as all of the digital rewards, other game keys, etc, those are available now and you should already have them. The wallpapers aside, which again will likely be January.
To reiterate, the last of the AI War 2 game keys (those for ālaunchā backers) will go out later this month, and anyone else at a different tier should already have theirs.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully that covers the questions of where we are, where weāre headed, and why. The blogs and dev diaries and release notes show where weāve been recently. Again we apologize about the delay, but weāre doing our best to mitigate its impact on you, and are feeling good about how it will impact the project as a whole.
Lots of crazy going on lately, hence it being two weeks since the last release (sorry!)
This time I focused on articulating some key “joints” in the skeleton of how the game comes together:
– Wormhole placement now has much more variety, while maintaining the rule that you can tell which direction the other planet is in based on where the wormhole position.
– The AI’s main defensive position is also no longer always in the center of each planet.
– Finally, under the hood, much of the info tracking how strong the AI is and the humans are is now no longer specific to those two “main” factions but is now fully available for all special factions as well. The changed symbols impact existing mods, of course, but now you can do a lot more with them.
There’s also a variety of other changes; major postprocessing stack switch by Chris, more Nanocaust updates from Badger, and some key bugfixes that will make the AI not just bumrush every force that attacks that planet.