DEVELOPMENT UPDATES

Happy New Years, Everyone I hope 2015 will be a great year for WOSN, and we'll have tons of stuff to show soon.

The main things we've been working on are closing the main gameplay loop of Mission Briefing > Select Fighter > Launch > Go on Mission > Land > Debrief > Next Mission. With that complete, we can actually make a game that's fun.

So what we still have to do is the Briefing Screen, which involves some character artwork (the use of some of our auto-lipsync tech as shown here) As well as some mission graphics, like those seen in TIE Fighter or Wing Commander.

Then we need a Unity scripting framework to read in the mission structure and display it for the briefing. This should actually be a lot of fun, as both Jan and I love automating this sort of system. With any luck we could pretty easily assign the first mission of a campaign, and have the story flow through it automatically, even including win/loss mission branching.

This leaves the actual mission structure - We still have to come up with a way to add primary and secondary goals, achievements, stat tracking (for the Debriefing and mission branching) and mission flow. We've had great success at adding nav points to the game, they work wonderfully and really make it fun to zip around the world.

In other news, we also updated the Unity version we're using to 5. This will hopefully fix many of the graphics bugs we've been experiencing with builds on the Linux and Mac platforms.

Anyhow, We probably won't release a new public build until the mission structure is wrapped up. We will be attempting to share more progress with everyone here, and on the forums!

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Hello, everyone!

Over the last few days I've been working on polishing a rather stale part of the game - the orbit camera. As most of you know, you can trigger this by holding down tab, and then rotate around your ship. It's very pretty, but the motion of it and the general feel was very, very basic.

So I took some time away from extremely frustrating bugs (more on that later) to build myself a better, more dynamic system. I focused on making the motion smoother, having the camera react to the action around it, and generally tying to make it feel more exciting. Here's where I landed!

As you can see, we also have reverse thrusters working on all the fighters, now. It definitely adds another wrinkle to the gameplay, and I know I will have to revise the missile AI so they aren't constantly fooled by it. :D The other part this Orbit camera revamp allowed is more cinematic external shots of your ship. That being so, I took the opportunity to add a long-missing part of the game... Autopilot cinematics.

These play when you transition from one nav point to the next. I'm pretty proud of how these are looking. I still need to add some trail/engine effects to the whole shebang, but it's still really neat looking.

I love the homeworld style cinematic black bars, and I always have.

Anyhow, I'm working on polishing this up, and then building the first actual demo mission! the only cinematics/gameplay loop left to do is the landing sequence, and I have a pretty good idea what needs to happen there.

Till next time!

(P.S... Those frustrating bugs were fixed within 5 minutes of Jan signing on yesterday, making me feel like a right moron. :)

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