Hey!
I'm here with the monthly development summaries from August and September, enjoy :)
TFE Development Summary - August 2025
📽️ Lots of work for the Gameplay Video, which was shown at gamescom
🛠️ More character system rework
🛠️ Pathfinding improvements
🛠️ Balancing of wood production times
🛠️ Fixed a problem that harvestables were not reachable in certain situations
🛠️ Added a benchmark flyover for consistent performance measurements
🎨 Designed and implemented the Roman Great Fort building (landmark)
🎨 River visual tweaks
📔 Finished evaluation of the playtest from June
📔 Organized & clustered all bug and improvement tickets from that playtest
📔 Organizing and planning upcoming features after the big gamescom milestone
TFE Development Summary - September 2025
Notification System
🛠️ Implemented a Notification System where notifications can be reported to from everywhere (e.g. from Buildings, Units, GameState, etc)
🛠️ Implemented a configurable grace period when to show the notification after it has been reported
🛠️ Created a flexible Data Lookup System so that notifications can be easily extended or modified in the future
🛠️ Implemented different types of notifications (Show in a List, show as 3D Widget in the World, show as one time Notification in game world or at screen center)
🛠️ Implemented a Notification List, that shows current notifications on the left side of the HUD (scrollable)
🛠️ Notification in a list can be dismissed or jumped to reporting actor by clicking on it
🛠️ Notifications can be resolved by the reporting actors
⊞ Added camera preview snippet of reporting actor when hovering a magnifying glass icon on notification in the notification list (you remember the focus camera snippet from Settlers 4? ;))
⊞ Show different 3D Notifications widget in game world based on notification type
Skirmish Lobby
🛠️ Implemented a Map Data Catalogue system that automatically fetches all available maps and their data
⊞ Created the first iteration of Skirmish Lobby layout
⊞ Map can be selected from a dropdown
⊞ Possible Start Positions are drawn on the minimap preview
⊞ Each player can change the start position (if not already occupied)
⊞ Bots can be added and customized
⊞ All kind of settings for players can be changed (like the player's color, teams, difficulty of bots (even though thats not yet implemented), etc)
⊞ Global match settings like GameMode, Start Goods and Start Units, Combat Power at start etc. can be adapted
⊞ First Steam integration which means that the steam avatar and steam name of the player are collected and shown correctly
More Stuff
🛠️ Increased penalty for bad digging spots
🛠️ Balancing of start units and start goods
🛠️ Added Map Bounds
🛠️ Fixed that camera could go out of map bounds
🛠️ Fixed that camera kept moving when Alt+Tab to Desktop
🔁 Shared how the new Notification System works (Patreon vip)
🔁 Shared how the new Skirmish Lobby works (Patreon vip) See you next time and let me know what you think in the comments! :)
Best,
Sebastian