Devlog 1: Our Very First Devlog On Steam

Firstly Let us introduce ourselves, hi! We are Iron Blood Games, we are two indie devs hoping to make a mark in the game dev space and shine a light on the budding games industry from our small island nation of Sri Lanka: Steam post imageSince we launched the Demo of Warfleet Captains on Steam, we have been thrilled and pleasantly surprised by the reception we have gotten. With the novice marketing we did do, over 4000 wishlists have come through Warfleet Captains to date. We would like to welcome all of you joining us so early on our journey. We have been reading your reviews, and forum posts on steam, as well as the 100s of suggestions from fans that joined our discord (haven't you done so yet?). This has energized us to give Warfleet a whole slew of upgrades, and we've been hard at work implementing it all in prep for a Demo upgrade that will arrive soon(tm).

Take a seat Captains, let us show you what we are cooking to improve the game.

Oh if you want to get to a "tldr how can I get my hands on trying these new stuff before an official patch", scroll to the last section of this devlog!

Incoming Improvements:

🪖Brand New "Operations" (Mission System)

📱UI Overhaul

📖 Lore

♻️ Emergency Systems & Hull Regen

🧩 Ship Modular Upgrade System

🚀 Ship Movement Upgrades

🤖 Better Bots

🎮 Controls & Key binding

📺 Graphical Upgrades

Considering how Warfleet Captains was originally concepted there was a lot of things within the game that needed to change in order for it to be a great PC title. if you want to learn about the history of our game's development you can catch up on this video:

That being said, all of the above listed changes are what we are doing to help give the additional depth and fun the game needs...plus some extra sauce along the way. So let us go into a bit more detail:

🪖Brand New "Operations" (Mission System)

Warfleet Captains will completely change the original plan for the game's mission system. Our new mission system aims to introduce the lore of the game within the missions themselves. In order for this to happen we will refer to all missions as "Operations" going forward.

Each of these Operations will have a specific objective. It can range from a straight forward skirmish between two fleets, to convoy escorts, to full on battles with multiple objectives.

This will allow us to also change up the way we server these operations to you. You are a mercenary ship captain, your allegiance is to the side paying you. because of this, in the future you can pick the Operation you're interested in from a job board that shows you ongoing operations as well as allow you to create you own custom operations.

We're super excited to make this change that your traditional "Hit the play button to be thrown int a random match" approach from the original game design. This new approach will help you immerse yourselves in the universe we are building with this title.

📱UI Overhaul

Of course with such a drastic change to the presentation of our game's missions to you, we will have to redo the entire UI of the game. from the main menu all the way to the game in "Operation" UI.

We have already started implementing these changes along with thought given to the additional gameplay features we are adding. for e.g We are introducing a ping system that will allow captains within an operation to quickly share information with each other, whether it is enemy positions or requests for assistance, here take a look at the early prototype of the ping system in action:

We'll be adding tons more to the information you will get through the new UI of incoming threats, improving your awareness and helping you make the best decisions depending on your situation.

📖 Lore

Going to be brief on this so we don't give any spoilers. We are working on fleshing out the lore of the game to help us narrate a developing story via our Operations. What this means is that you can look forward to characters that will introduce you to the stakes of the operation you are taking part in and as you play in each of the locations of the game you will be able to string together the developing story.

This is a cool compromise for us not being able to make a dedicated "Campaign mode" (We are two indie devs after all). It also allows us to keep pumping out more and more content to build on the lore and deepen the universe for all of our sci-fi fans. How big this gets is really up to how popular the game will be! (so tell your friends to come wish list the game and make it as big as popular as possible!)

♻️ Emergency Systems & Hull Regen

Our ships needs more ways to stay in the fight for longer. This is a bit of an oversight from us as we ported the game over from being a mobile first designed title. on mobile it makes sense to kill times to be as quick as possible, but in reality you are controlling massive warships that have many decks and crew that should be able to take a bunch of damager before going down. So with that in mind we are adding more ways for you to keep your ship in the fight.

We are implementing an emergency hull repair system that captains can utilize to recover a certain amount of damage a ship takes. Not only that, Ships will also be able to be affected by statuses. This can be in the form of onboard fires, bull breaches etc. As a captain you will have to react to these issues and command your crews to deal with the situations.

Being a captain of a ship is not easy and your decision making skill will be tested in the future of Warfleet Captains. take a peek at the early implementation of this system in action:

🧩 Ship Modular Upgrade System

Ships will not have static abilities locked to them, in the future you will be able to outfit your ships with different weapons systems, internal components as well as your secondary suite of abilities. Speak sense man! we hear. well... What we mean is Your ships turrets will be able to be swapped for different types, internal modules such as your shields, thrusters and even the armor plating can be side-graded. Your abilities you were using (the middle 4 icons in a match) they can be swapped out and changed.

Each of these ships will be more like a platform that you can build out and customize to your playstyle. but of course the location and positioning of the weapons systems and modules will be static. this is what will give make each ship feel unique. Unlocking and playing with a new ship means you can gain experience flying it, and the more experience you gain the more modules you will have available to you to play with.

We are still prototyping these features but you can take a quick peak here:

🚀 Ship Movement Upgrades

Now something we have gotten criticism on is the movement of the ships felt weightless. We've always had an issue with this ourselves and now we have implemented it the way we always wanted our ships to behave. Our ships now have weight behind their movement and inertia is also being calculated. to support this we even added some retro thrusters all over our ships to show how they are being brough to a stop and other maneuvers. not only this, we went one step further.

Our ships can now roll and yaw to your heart's content. Go upside down or side ways, what ever you want. You are in space after all. this really opens up you tactical options as you can observe your enemies then maneuver your warship to best engage with them. check out some footage from internal playtest sessions, it's been super fun!

🤖 Better Bots

To make our single player experience more rewarding we do need to upgrade our Bot behavior, we have been tinkering and upgrading them in the background. They are starting to be more smarter now and you can expect them to give a bigger challenge when we update the game. Right now we are focusing on getting them to use the full suite of abilities and not just one or two.

It's currently going pretty well:

🎮 Controls & Key binding

You'll be happy to learn full custom key binding is already implemented into the upgraded demo branch. You can customize the Key bindings to your personal preference and we have already had internal play testers even binding controls to HOTAS setups and it all works.

We are yet to decide on the best bindings for controller players with the new capabilities we have added to the game. Which has given us the idea perhaps we should ask directly from our fans to set up the controls to their preference and then the most popular layout becomes the default.

Might not be a bad idea...

📺 Graphical Upgrades

Finally the visual overhaul. We feel like it's high time we updated the game's graphics. Since this game was built originally ground up for mobile in 2018. We had taken an aggressive approach to our optimization in order for the game to run like butter (60fps) even on low end mobile phones. This meant massive sacrifices had to made to the quality of the game assets.

Now that we have pivoted to PC these shackles are gone! and with that we are going over all our ships and existing map environments and improving all aspects. More detail isn't the only improvement.

We are also improving the lighting of the game, and layering in volumetrics into our environment. Better lights, better shadows, and even better particles. It's all getting a massive improvement. but these are still early days:

Alright We've been showing a bunch of stuff we are working on and its been a lot. So we'll wrap it up here. If you want to stay up to date on the latest go check out our You tube channel just search up Iron Blood Games.

We are working on a lot right now and that's why we've been pretty quiet. Most of you that have found us on discord however have been able learn a bunch of the stuff mentioned here through talking directly with us. So for sure come and join our discord and ask us stuff. (links should be on our Warfleet Steam Page).

There's a few more cool stuff we are cooking but we will reveal those on a future devlog. For now this is everything we have to reveal.

OH ONE MORE THING

If you're interested in getting hands on with this new stuff we are making, keep an eye out for an announcement on our STEAM of playtest build access events. We are going to open up access to our playtest soon as we have a stable build of all the new features we are working on. You'll be bale to jump on try it out and tell us what you think. this will help us fine tune and adjust the game to make it as awesome as it can be.

This is the plan we have. We are going to implement all the listed improvements to Warfleet captains and once it is ready we will do a major upgrade patch to the DEMO of the game. Once that is done we will focus on the content of the game and push towards Early Access.

This is the plan. wish us luck?

Well hope you all enjoyed getting this update of the things happening behind the scenes.

We'll catch you on a future devlog, bye for now!