Proof of Life!

Hey folks. It's been too long since an update so I wanted to send a quick note. A few utterly self-inflicted crisis ate most of the last two weeks. Then this week is the Game Developers Conference, which tends to be a -75% productivity debuff applied across the entire industry. Excuses, excuses. The hardening sprint has made SOME progress despite those roadblocks. Airship Commander is now using the latest versions of Unity, SteamVR and the Virtual Reality Toolkit (the backbone of the touch controls). A couple of untextured props are looking better and the main deck of the Raptor is sporting much improved textures. We're currently in-progress on integrating the Interdiction and Escort mission gametypes into the Strategic Campaign. They're actually proving a little tricky from a design point of view. Let's look at Interdiction. The idea here is that if an enemy controls a Strategic Waypoint, and you send your fleet to that zone, you'll get an interdiction mission (destroy enemy cargo vessel). If you succeed at destroying the target, you return to the Strategic Campaign HUB, but the state of that Strategic Waypoint hasn't changed! You were successful, and the enemy Capital Ship won't get the resources from the waypoint, but the zone is still enemy controlled. This means if you go back in for another mission at that zone, you're going to get another Interdiction mission. You'll never get a Capture Waypoint mission. Setting up the logic for when you get specific missions is a fun design challenge, but one that is fraught with surprises and unintended consequences. Chasing each one down, trying a few things, is taking a lot more time than the "merge existing gametypes into the strategic campaign" Trello card would at first suggest :). I suspect we're looking at the back half of March for the next release, but things are fluid. The Single Pass Rendering feature added in the latest version of Unity is roughly a 20% performance increase on GPUs, so I may release a build with that sooner rather than later. The QA burden is always a factor in new releases and I'll have to marshal the team to see what's possible. A bit more rambling of an update than usual but I wanted to give a brief update. Airship Commander is barreling forward and I promise nothing will get between me and finishing the game before the end of 2017. It's because of players like you that this is all possible, and while I sound like a broken record, thank you from the bottom of my heart for keeping an eye on our little airship virtual reality game!