Weekly Update #139: Bomber, UI, Next patch
Originally posted by
I-NovaeFlavien CTO/President & Cofounder -
source link
Steam store page
Hey everybody. It’s been a while since the last weekly update, as we’ve been pretty busy on a certain number of topics. First thing first, we are slowly preparing for our Steam launch in Early access. We’ve set up a store page, which you can see here:
Infinity: Battlescape is a multiplayer space combat sim supporting hundreds of players on a single server. Join one of the corporate factions and fight for domination of a seamless, true-to-scale procedural star system. Participate in massive space and planetary battles involving hundreds of ships.
store.steampowered.com
You’ll notice a bunch of new screenshots on it, however the trailer video is still the Kickstarter’s. We’re not ready to produce a gameplay trailer just yet as we need to finish texturing all the ships and replace some of the placeholders before we can do that. We’ve planned to work on the first visual polish phase next month and work on the trailer will start around July. In parallel, we’ll keep iterating on the gameplay and content.
Needless to say, now that we have a store page, even if it’s rough around the edges… it’s time to gather
WISHLISTS
As you may know ( or not ) Steam’s visibility algorithms on release are mostly based on the amount of wishlists, therefore it is of utter importance to our success to get as many wishlists as possible.
We have ~4 months until the Early access is launched, so from now on, we’d like to ask everybody who references us on websites, content creators, youtube / twitch streamers etc… to add a link to the Steam store page along with a small typical “
Wishlist Infinity: Battlescape on Steam” message if you can. If you already have a direct link to our website, you can keep both of course. On a side note, since we now have a Steam store page we decided to stop our IndieGoGo on-going campaign so it shouldn’t be referenced anymore either. Thank you for your support !
Hey everybody, time for another update. Before I jump in to development news, I’m happy to announce that we’ll be collaborating with
Markus Zierhofer to produce Infinity: Battlescape’s soundtrack. Markus is incredibly talented and the quality of his work so far gives us full confidence that he’ll be able to nail down the musical style for Battlescape. You can listen to some of his work on his website:
Markus has already completed the main menu theme, and I can safely say that the entire team is in love with it. In the coming month or two he’ll be producing a couple of ambient soundtracks, anticipation / thrill and finally battle tracks. We’re in the middle of figuring out how to seamlessly blend all these tracks together based on the game’s context dynamically.
We haven’t determined yet if we’ll patch the tracks into the game one by one as they’re produced or if we’ll wait a major patch in July / August to make them all available at once. More news on that in the coming weeks.
In other development news, Kristian has finished texturing the bomber. The bomber textures that were available in the backer’s beta patch 0.4.6.0 were still a work in progress, so now Kristian has been able to finalize them - especially everything related to rusty edges, roughness and small scale details. Here’s a screenshot of the updated bomber:
On the UI side, most widgets have been completed and are now functional. The UI code is getting integrated into the game and we’re now ready to build the new star map or ship selection / upgrade screens. The goal is to have a first version available in the next patch, next week. It’ll look pretty ugly at first, as we’re spending no time on “making it look good” - functional is the keyword here. The first version will be very simple and will definitely be lacking, but in the next few months we’ll continue to iterate on it until it’s ready for Early access.
Speaking of the next patch, we’ll probably be reverting the flight model experimental anti-drifting system introduced in the last patch. We didn’t feel comfortable releasing the game without at least testing it once. It’s possible that we’ll keep it in a reduced form as an equipment, for capital ships only. Another change that we’re thinking of introducing is aligning warp-out velocity to a target ( within bounds ) when a player disengages the warp drive. This should make it easier to catch up with a fleeing ship, which at the moment can be a frustrating experience.
That’s it for now, more news next week for the new patch, and (hopefully) the first pics of the star map !
-Flavien
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Infinity: Battlescape website:
https://inovaestudios.com/Battlescape
Infinity: Battlescape forums:
https://forums.inovaestudios.com