April Progress Recap!

This is the classic monthly recap compiling all the little progress updates I do on Discord weekly (or more often).

April started with an April Fools joke where I switched to working on The Last Mayor (a city builder) instead of The Last General, causing mass panic and a few people to leave the Discord (almost everyone finally realized it was a joke and came back now). We also reached 125000 wishlists on Steam, it's wild how fast it's growing!

Here is a bunch of stuff I have been working on, besides fixing little things here and there all the time:

ECONOMY

• New panel showing income and expenses (screenshot).

• When running out of money your entire economy throttles down, including construction, unit production and salary payments.

• Operational costs now increase faster as your army grows, representing inefficiencies in a larger organization.

CONSTRUCTION

• Construction panel now shows costs, and it deducts 25% of the cost when you start building and the rest during construction.

• Construction preview ghost now changes colors to indicate where you can and cannot build.

• You can no longer build anything if you can’t cover the initial 25% downpayment.

• Added error messages and sounds so you know what’s going on.

• Added sounds during construction.

• Now you can rotate buildings in 22.5 degrees increments instead of 45 degrees, so you can place them in more specific orientations when needed.

MAPUCHE 64 HELICOPTER

Finally added a second attack helicopter to the game!

PRODUCED UNITS ASSIGNMENT

New produced units now join existing companies that need them automatically with the same prioritization system used for unit requests and transfers between echelons.

CONTROLLABLE AIR DEFENSES

I added first and third person control of buildable air defense systems (Legion C-RAM and DSAMS) (screenshot)

MENUS

• Added a menu with 3 procedural maps to choose from for the alpha: Anatra (6km x 6km), Braccia (8km x 10km) and Calda (8km x 14km).

• Added some particles animations until I can implement my actual idea for a crazy main menu.

• Added a proper loading screen progress bar and messages explaining what the game is generating at each point. This should help show the progress and debug any slow/stuck parts of island generation during the alpha.

• Added automatic calculations for settings defaults based on player's hardware so if a player just press play it doesn't try to play in ultra settings at 2fps on a laptop from 2015.

• The resolutions list now highlights the ones that match your monitor aspect ratio so you can select one that doesn't show black bars on the sides (or top/bottom).

NEW UNIT INDICATORS COMING?

I decided to test using APP-6 indicators so they are more readable from the distance, and can show more information than the current ones. They can show special weapons/capabilities of a certain group, unit counts and other information. I will probably switch to using these indicators soon.

CPU AND GPU OPTIMIZATION

• Made unit indicators not transparent anymore, which save tons of draw calls. Most of the time the indicators weren't really transparent anyways.

• Suggested optimization to Latios Framework and it was implemented so started using it to eliminate motion vectors and shadows on some very distant objects.

• Improved LOD distances and created a lot more LODs for objects that were missing them or had high poly counts even in the distant versions.

• Reordered multiple systems and removed dependencies to be able to parallelize more jobs and avoid main thread blocking.

OTHER IMPROVEMENTS

• Added environmental sounds in different areas of the islands (oceans, cities, forests, farmland)

• Matched farm colors with their vegetation better.

• Improved day/night cycle using shorter nights (nights last about 25% of the whole day now)

• Units are slowed down when driving on water, and destroyed if they go too deep.

• Restored object destruction due to explosions shockwave or projectiles hitting them directly.

ALPHA TESTING!

I started testing the game with some family and friends, including a test in person with one of my friends. It was a pretty good test, with surprisingly good performance for an alpha. There were a few crashes and bugs of course, and found some usability issues that I will be improving on very soon for a new alpha version. Next step is opening the alpha to the Discord moderations in a week or two, then start expanding in the Discord by levels of activity there until everyone gets to try it!