July Development Update

It has been a few weeks since the Steam Next Fest, and we hope you’ve had fun playing the Project Haven demo. While still relatively early in development (we’re officially still in alpha and almost everything is still subject to change), we feel it represents our vision for the game going forward, and we’ve been overjoyed with the positive response to it so far. We’ve been relatively quiet since the festival, as we’ve returned to our natural, subterranean home in the Code Mines, slowly excavating the bits and bytes required to construct the final game.

You talkin’ to me?

From the feedback we received on the demo, we’ve identified and squashed a lot of the biggest issues with the game already. Check out our Twitter feed to see some of our smaller updates. Still, one element clearly stood out as especially divisive among players - our combat bark system. While it’s functioning as intended, players are split on whether it brings flavour to the battles or just adds unnecessary noise to the battlefield, and player response varies a lot between characters.

While we’re tweaking some lines of dialogue to better represent battlefield conditions and our thematic intent, we’ll be taking a hard look at ways for players to control the frequency and intensity of combat chatter.

Move like you mean it

Beyond that, we’ve been focusing on character pathing to make sure that characters no longer wiggle into locations that they can’t path their way out of. On the subject of movement, we’ve implemented a whole new advanced technique - a combined ‘slice the pie’ command that allows characters to strafe their way around an obstacle while maintaining aim on a fixed point. A great technique for passing a potentially deadly doorway, as you can see in this clip:

We’ve also improved how characters move when leaning around cover. Characters can now take a half-step out of cover to get a better look around a corner at the cost of a single action point, or just lean slightly to minimise the amount of meat you’re exposing to incoming lead.

And because you should never skip leg day, we’ve added more Crouch and Prone options to the UI. You can now perform these actions through the radial menu or via the action bar. Of course, true operators have their hotkeys memorized to keep that workout going all battle long.

On the subject of UI improvement, your character’s planned movement path is now fully visible during Free Mode. You’ll see a continuous line drawn along your planned movement path, instead of just the dashed version during Turn-based mode.

And one frequently requested quality-of-life improvement: You can now hold the Middle Mouse button to open up a whole new world of camera movement options, for when you absolutely need the perfect angle on a firefight.

The Future Of Combat, Tomorrow

And we’ve got plenty more changes in the pipeline. The UI is getting some more love across the board to both make it quicker and easier to use, but also present more pertinent info to players at all times. We’ll also be implementing a way to control camera visibility especially within buildings to better navigate in those situations.

We’re massaging the brains of our AI grunts so that they’ll have a more natural range of behaviours. Right now they’re either very deadly who’ll set up the perfect shot, or blind to the easiest opportunity. Plus, some bugs have been identified causing NPCs to play