Hey everyone! We hope you've enjoyed Steam's Base Builder Fest, to keep that momentum going we've decided to keep the new demo up until Monday 6th Feb! Use that time to carry on your exploration on Shoal with friends in multiplayer mode or explore solo.
Thanks to all of your feedback throughout Early Access, you have helped shape this game to be where it's at and what direction we have taken it! So, once again a huge thank you. 🙏
Let's get into what's to come in 2023!
Coming soon
Multi-select + Execution
This are around the corner. Multi-select and execution has been a major request, and for good reason. It cuts the number of clicks to do rote actions like "move this group of units forward" into only a few clicks instead of needing to manually select each unit.
Chapters 4-6
YEP. We've got the next part of the story coming to you. You'll meet some new characters and experience some things you had no idea were part of Cantata. We aren't gating the content by progression, so feel free to jump in wherever to check out the maps. As always worth saying: there will definitely be bugs! We do our best to test but can't catch everything, so as you're playing if you encounter any issues, please let us know using the in-game feedback tool or Discord what's broken! We'll fix it!
AI Improvements
We've beat this drum a fair bit, but AI improvements are coming. There will be a general AI fix for the campaign matches, as well as an actual Skirmish AI to play against inside skirmish. There's a lot of complexity here to do this even "not terrible" so it just takes time. Our team has shrank since early access as well and we now have only one programmer, so on top of all the other work it's just a lot to do!
UI
We've got a HOT new UI "look" coming. All the locations of buttons and such are largely the same, but we heard people on wanting a more flavorful UI and are happy to say that it's coming.
Steam Workshop
We're launching on workshop SOON. With that will be custom data as well, so the floodgates will be open for Cantata modding. We're really trying to make sure it's GOOD — handling things that are typical pains like dependencies and such, so it's taking a bit of time as well. But the end result will be well worth it — you'll be able to upload fully custom units, use them on fully custom terrains on fully custom maps, and upload all that to workshop for people to use in their own maps or games. The end goal is to make Cantata _THE_ tactical sandbox of choice, and we think we're really going to give people everything to make it happen. Additionally...
Map Generator
This is already sort of in the game right now, but we haven't talked a lot about it because 1) it's really powerful 2) we need to actually explain how to use it 3) did I mention that we're busy? The best way to put it is that the Cantata map generator basically allows you to _design your own map generator_. Did you make a really cool fantasy terrain pack? You can design a "pallete map" that can act as generator input to allow you to generate an infinite amount of playable maps using your terrains. We'll say more about this around when workshop launches, but we'll also be shipping a standard "Cantata" generator that allows you to play on a random Cantata-flavored map in Skirmish. And of course, all this will be available for online play!
Tutorials
We need them! We had some at EA launch, but the game has changed enough since then that we took them down because many parts of them were no longer relevant. It is our full intention to put out some new tutorials around the 1.0 release (and hopefully sooner!), but for now we're hoping we can tell people as much as they want to know through our tooltip system. If you have specific questions, our Discord community is really good about helping people through any pain points of the game, so feel free to join and ask there.
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We've got a whole host of other small (and some big) things cooking that we'll also be rolling out over time, but for now we think this represents a good state of affairs of the game. We're eternally grateful to everyone for ushering us through early access to help make the game the best it can be, and hope you'll all stick with us up to and through 1.0.
For now, don't forget to
Thank you,
Afterschool & Modern Wolf
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