Commander,
The week of December 29, 2025 through January 3, 2026 brought major progress as we push toward external QA testing.
Mission Development
Unity Developer Dustin Weitkunat continued work on graphics quality for the newly performant build while addressing numerous regressions from the rework. One major change: how we display you on the bridge during combat while showing exterior action simultaneously. Camera stacking was the previous solution, but Dustin implemented a brand-new method that dramatically expands future possibilities.
He also crushed many bugs from the internal QA list.
After declaring a spike on graphics improvement (Agile term: allotting fixed time to a task, then moving on regardless), Dustin shifted to implementing the rest of the demo mission for the week's remainder—continuing through the weekend as the team pushes hard toward external QA readiness. He's currently working through the conference room scene. Once complete, he moves to the final combat sequence of the campaign demo.
Media Production & Performance Showcase
Brian's entire focus was creating a dev blog showcasing massive performance improvements, including special gameplay recordings from four different test machines Dustin configured.
Literary Completion & Game Production
Daniel Gibbs completed Deep Strike, book 6 of The Iron Fleet (the series where the game is set), and hunkered down entirely on game tasks. He delivered scene-by-scene breakdown of the campaign demo's third section and created dozens of in-universe names for various CDF ships. Next week: League of Sol and PFLOS ship names. With 25-ship matches now possible, Skirmish mode demands extensive naming per ship class as we know players will push the limits.
And to close out today – please view our latest dev blog where Dustin walks through the performance improvements:
More dev blogs, information, and media coming next week.
Happy New Year, everyone!
v/r
Daniel Gibbs
Military Science-Fiction Author and SCOS Producer