Hey everyone!
Once again, we are at the end of the month and it’s time for a new update! The structure for this update will be a bit different due to needing to discuss the plans moving forward with the project (don’t worry it’s all great stuff!) Instead of the standard 3 part breakdown I’m going to write this out as one continuous “letter”. We’ll go back to the normal format next month, unless you all prefer it this way!
To get us started, as predicted I wasn’t able to get quite everything done this month I wanted to engine side; however I did manage to get all the core elements that I discussed laid down. All that remains to finishing milestone one is to get the logic for the damage system, hit detection (more on this in a second) and to finish implementing the actual ammunition. It sounds like a lot, but again the core for these things has been started, so it shouldn’t be too bad.
I should take a moment and let you know that my school is going to get significantly lighter later in the next month (just due to how the schedule played out this semester) so I’ll have extra time to put towards the engine work that I didn’t this last month.
If you all didn’t see, we have the hit locations built and loaded for the Fletcher and Fubuki. These are already running inside of our physics engine and will be able to handle the collision from shells. This is a huge step as with developing these boxes we now have a script that can export these hit locations automatically. So now for all ships in the future you just have to put boxes around a model and hit export, super easy stuff that’ll speed up asset creation in the future!
Alright, now to the big thing I want to discuss. We are reaching the end of milestone one. This first milestone was to get us all the way to the first ship vs ship combat. We wanted to get two ships out (the Fletcher and Fubuki) and have them be able to do a 1v1 (possibly more ships in a battle than just two) combat scenario with our hit detection, damage, shooting, movement, and particle systems. This first milestone also included building the entire foundation for the engine that we are working on. It’s been a lot of work, and we’ve had some fantastic people working on all areas of the project. Our goal is to get this first milestone done this coming month, and then we will work to refine it. During this refinement phase we will release a single closed test for our patreon (or paypal) donators, as well as a few other specifically selected individuals. They will be able to look over all of this early work and share their feedback as well as try to break the game (Looking at you Tore :P). Depending on their feedback and findings we will go back and fix bugs and refine elements of the engine. Once we feel we are in a good place we will then look into doing a public test! It’s amazing that after a few long years we are finally at a point where we can begin testing real ship combat!
After Milestone One comes Milestone Two, but you’ll have to wait till we get Milestone One finished to hear about all the cool things we have planned for it!
As always, Thank you all for supporting our work, and I hope you were able to enjoy this format of update!
God Bless & Let the Storm Begin!
WWJD