Development UpdateWeek one after Early Access launch.
In case you haven't noticed, the game has just released on Steam Early Access, and, as they say, it has been quite a ride.
This was the turning point for the game, the moment of truth, whether or not Call of Combat legacy still holds today.
Launch Aftermath
Well, the result is that, together with you, all the member of the community, the first step was a success. There are now way over a thousand owners on Steam and we were thrilled to see massive battles of 15 vs 15 players (that's 120 soldiers), and it seemed that the game could technically handle this quite well.
Maybe we will experiment with even bigger battles in the near future, 32vs32 and who knows, maybe 64vs64?
Regiment games are also raging now with BHB seemingly at the top. And the external reviews are also pretty encouraging. Rock Paper Shotgun2 had some kind words both for the game AND the community, yes, that's you, guys. So did OpNoobs2. We're really honored to be making a game for such a great community, we can all be proud here.
The bad side is that although the game is quite well received by new players, there are three recurring complaints:
In spite of the current in-game tutorial, some new players would like to experience the game against some scripted AI. We agree this would be cool, but building such a feature properly will be a very big task and there are a lot of other things we have to work on.
Some new players seem to have been thrown off by the amount of grenade fights.
There has been reports of crashes The good news is that we have already quite a bunch of them, and we will continue bug monitoring and smashing over the weekend.
Good news is that we see beautiful plans being made:
Community stuff Regiment games have been going very strong, a lot of battles have been fought. I look forward to seeing more of them, and maybe some of you will be eager to make some videos out of them which I will add to our playlist of regiment games.
Two very nice guides by @Monkey_Bullet and Little Mac have been made. You can also check them out on the guides page on Steam1 and upload yours if you have made one!
Updates so farWe have already released a few updates, mostly to fix some crashes and bugs such as the glitches in some maps, or the crash when trying to join or quite a room. We've also updated the UI to make each soldier more identifiable with a little number on the halo. We have adjusted briefing times, we have made the tutorial more visible to new players. Full changelog here.
What's nextNext week's development effort will be concentrated on bringing medals, ribbons, officer ranks and maybe more Steam Achievements. There will be new ranks added, which means that everyone's rank will be readjusted to reflect their PPS and efficiency.
There are a number of UI tweaks to come, such as ready buttons before starting games and during briefing, I'm also currently working on a minimap in game (mostly to show the orders).
The demo got delayed a bit but it seems to be almost ready now, and we expect to release it early next week. You will be able to show the game to even more people. Tomorrow, @Florian will be online monitoring bugs and fixing them on the fly, you can help him by being around and reporting issues, so you can expect a bunch of fixes in the weekend.