September Development Report

Hello, Steel Dragons!

It's been a while since we last checked in. If you’ve been following us on Discord or the Steam discussion board, you might know that we've hit a delay with our intended release date. We're behind schedule due to setbacks with the character art. As a small team of just three, we've been doing everything ourselves up until now, and we believed we could complete the characters on time. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.

To speed things up, we've recently brought on a dedicated character artist to help wrap up everything more efficiently. As some of you know, the character models you saw in previous demos were placeholders, but we now have their final versions! Here’s a sneak peek at Patches, Scarlett, and Altan, in that order:

We’re thrilled with how they turned out! With these final models, we’ve now completed the starting cast for the game. Here are the full Steel Dragons mercenaries:

Of course, character art isn’t the only area we’ve been working on. The level design for the game’s story campaign has been complete for a while now, and we’ve steadily been refining the lighting, art, sound, and gameplay for all levels. If you’ve played any of our demos, you’ll notice some significant improvements across the board!

We’ve also built a few new Skirmish maps, which look and play great. Here are a couple of them:

So what does this mean for the game's release?

While we still have other work to do and improvements that we'd like to make, character art is the biggest blocker. We’re still assessing how long it will take to finish the final characters. The game has a fairly large cast—around 50 unique character models, not including civilians who use a modular system. As we’re still refining the process, we can’t promise to have all the characters done before the end of the year. However, we hope to share a concrete release date with you soon.

The development of Project Haven has always been iterative. We build, we test with the community through demos, assess where we stand, and then improve from there. This approach has led to some big changes along the way—changes that have made the game better, but also altered our timeline significantly. We’re aware we’ve shifted the release date multiple times, and this was especially impacted by our decision to drop procedural generation for the missions.

For the past two years, we’ve had a clear final vision of what the game should be, and we’ve been executing that vision step by step. Now, it’s just a matter of crossing the finish line.

We truly appreciate your patience and support throughout this journey. We’re eager to get the game in your hands, and we hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we’ve enjoyed making it!

See you on the next one! Code Three Fifty One

https://store.steampowered.com/app/443190/Project_Haven/