March Development Report

Hello, Steel Dragons!

We know it's been a while since our last update, and we're truly grateful for your patience and dedication to Project Haven. We understand the silence has been frustrating – we've seen your comments and messages, and we genuinely appreciate those who have shared their thoughts and concerns constructively.

As a tiny team, any personal commitments can significantly impact our development timeline. Recently, one of us faced circumstances that required their attention, affecting the team's progress. Despite this, development hasn't halted,—we've been steadily working, albeit at a slower pace, and we're excited to share some meaningful updates with you today.

More Character Models

As you may know we've recently hired a character artist to help us finish the last big ticket item remaining, and it has been progressing well! You'll be seeing a lot more variation of enemies visuals and in gameplay too (more on it below)!

We currently have a good chunk of the high poly models done, but we still need to do the low poly version - which we will start working on them soon. So, stay tuned, we might show off some of the Haven's city new members in the next devlog.

Level Design

We have implemented a series of new mechanics to enhance the levels! Openable hatches, drop ladders, breakable windows and a whole revamped alarm system. As result, the interaction with the levels has expanded quite significantly. For good measure we've also added many more destructible props to the environment, making it feel a lot more alive during a gunfight! Besides these upgrades we've improved the art both in visuals and audio elements to make each mission feel more atmospheric and true to our vision.

We've also added more skirmish levels and are working on a overhauled skirmish mode which we aim to have ready for testing in a future demo to gather valuable player feedback.

Gameplay

Besides the aforementioned new features we've also finished implementing other mechanics that were on the to-do list for a while, those include melee weapons, smoke grenades and in-mission save system. Even though, this last feature has been on our roadmap from day one, implementing a robust save system in a turn-based tactical game like Project Haven is far from trivial and takes time. We had to make sure everything—from where your units are positioned to their status effects and the state of the environment—is saved and loaded perfectly. There are still a few things left to tweak, like polishing up the load file interface, but the core system is ready to be tested in our next demo.

What's next?

Basically, we're continuing to work on expanding the game's content, slowly but steady, while polishing existing features. To accelerate development, we're considering growing our team, particularly by bringing in an additional programmer. However, as a core team of two (financed and led by two people) and self-published, our limited budget means this process might not be simple.

Meanwhile, we started working on an enemy class system. If you've played one of our demos previously you know the enemy behave differently based on their weapon - which behind the scenes it worked almost as a class for each enemy. Recently, we've decided to expanded this concept and not only expose it via their weapon, but with their character model and an actual icon in their UI indicator. Besides variation, this gives you better tactical understanding of each situation you face - instead of having to zoom in (or get shot at) to figure out which