Beta Release!

After a few intense rounds of bugtesting, the game's main campaign is now completeable (albeit only a few chapters long).

Warfleet is now available for Windows as a beta release on itch.io.

Now to work on a trailer, something I've never actually done before!

Release Date and Graphics Update

I'm back, and that initial release date from 8 months ago might need a bit of revision.

In the last 8 months, the project has evolved quite a bit, mostly through balancing and bugs, but also some minor graphics features such as ship lights and UI redesign.

Piloting the ship is now much easier - it will automatically try to stay horizontal, and rolling is no longer possible. If you still want to pilot your ship like an F16, the complete flight controls are still available, but this makes for AI that keeps the ship steady and avoids crazy angles. It also makes it much easier to pilot a strange ship where the top might not be quite as obvious.

AI has gotten smarter - it won't simply target a single part of your ship, refreshing its targets every few minutes, but it's also much better at dodging other ships, keeping longer range capital ships stationary while fighters attack, and overall makes for a more fun experience.

You can add small ship lights to really make it stand out in the distance.

Also added a simple loading screen.

After the debacle that was No Man's Sky, I had to rethink what the progression in the game was and actually start adding a main campaign. It's not much, but it does show off the different unlockable features such as stations, fleets, missions and the like - enough to feel like you have a clear goal from the start to follow.

Expect more updates as we reach that initial release date. The game will first be available as a "Beta" version on that date on itch.io. Making this game has been a solo project for so long, I'm looking forward to getting any feedback!

Release Date

There's been some major things happening in my life and it's forced me to set back any plans for Warfleet for at least eight months. Can't go into details, but basically - I'm set on a release date.

September 19th 2016

That's it, that's the launch date.

Taking pictures

If I ever want to release this, I need to take pictures and I need some video for a trailer. Can't just expect people to buy the game on screenshots alone, right?

Playing through the game, taking screenshots normally just wasn't doing it - so I made a few interface shortcuts that allow you to pause the game, detach the camera and hide the UI. Let's call it Photo Mode. It really helps in showing off the game, and it's obviously available to players as well.

Warping from sector to sector

So cinematic

So comfy

Warping from solar system to solar system

As usual, bugfixing. Had to rewrite the way fleets are positioned in sectors - turns out you can't just assign a transform, use it to place objects and delete it on the same frame. Also turns out you can't just have saved files anywhere, so now they're stored in My Documents along with screenshots.

Impact Damage

Ship's masses change so much, it was getting pretty difficult to have a statistic on projectiles that appropriately communicated impact - the force of a projectile hitting your ship. Simply adding a force wasn't enough - small ships would reach ridiculous speeds while large ones would quickly not receive any. I also wanted stats to be as separated from looks as possible.

So now impact damage is reduced based on your ship's category. This means larger ship categories might be completely immune to the impact of small weapons. Impact also decreases global control of your ship which slowly comes back - reducing your turn rate and drag control. Ships receive the force, start moving and will have a bit of trouble controlling themselves after an impact.

Since categories are so important now (they determine basic movement capabilities), there's a little helper bar to show you how far you are from reaching the next category.

Finals are over, too!

Writing on your ship

Unity's new UI is fantastic for creating interfaces, but it turns out it's also very useful for general text in 3D space. It only took a few hours but I have surface text on blocks, so you can write the name of your ship or anything really anywhere on a block.

Writing the name of the ship

It even supports rich text so you can change the color!

Just another fun little feature for personalizing your ship. It supports regular rectangular blocks and normal slopes (so no corners).

Finals are almost over, so these little bits and a lot of tweaking are the most I can do at the moment.

Asteroid fields and ship wrecks

Some battles are heavier than others - they will leave wreckage that a player can salvage. Of course, you have to get there before any other scavenger. Ship wrecks are based on the ships made by players.

I also made some improvements to the asteroid layouts - asteroids close together will have smaller asteroids in between them. Basically there's more asteroids and they're placed in a more artistic way in the sector.

Other upgrades this week are to ship damage effects - not done yet, but with Unity 5.3 I can do some more interesting effects on ships and other meshes.