I am going to start this dev log with some bad news and some good news.
The bad news is that I didn't manage to release a new alpha build at the end of June as planned. That's because the amount of work needed to finish it was just too much to handle in a single month.
The good news is that I am going to release it this afternoon or only 1 week later it was originally planned.
If you want to try it, make sure to join my Discord server, where you will find a Linux and a Windows build for the next 2 months or a new build is released.
In the next few days I am also going to publish a video dev log that will showcase all new features and changes of this new release, Make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel to watch it.
As I mentioned in the intro above, this month I worked extremely hard and the result of that is a big number of new features, fixes and changes. These are some of the major ones.
Most of the work this month went into the second tutorial mission. Pretty much everything I did this month was dedicated to it. This new mission represents a big improvement over the first one, in both terms of things you can do and size.
Just to give you a quick comparison, it's possible to complete the first tutorial mission in 5-10 minutes, whereas the second one takes 20-25 minutes. That's not just because the map is bigger (70x70 vs 50x50), but also because it introduces a lot of new gameplay elements to the player.
We could say the first one is a teaser while the second one represents the actual game more closely!
Even if the tutorial guides you during the whole mission, you have much more freedom and choices compared to the first one. The idea is to hand full control to the player gradually. Testers will tell me if it works or not!
One of the key aspects of the new tutorial mission was setting up defenses, like towers, walls and gates.
During the development of the tutorial I realized that asking players to open and close gates manually every time was a bit annoying, so I decided to automate them.
Now when any of your units crosses a door, it will open automatically and it will close right after your unit moves away from it.
It is still possible to open and close them manually if you want and as a bonus features they will all close automatically at the beginning of your turn to avoid to leave gaps in your defenses.
Another game element highlighted in the second tutorial mission is the research center, so I spent quite some time improving and expanding its features.
First of all you will see the Research Center flashing when a tech upgrade can be unlocked and if you select it, you will immediately see the number of upgrades you can unlock as a notification floating over your action buttons.
I also wanted to make more clear which upgrades can be unlocked and which can't, so the former have a different color now.
Finally, in case your Research Center stops to generate research points because it runs out of resources, you will see a blinking icon that notifies you of that.
They are all little improvements, but combined they help a lot the user experience and they make the difference between a prototype and a full game.
Some other changes worth a mention are:
when setting a unit's action to attack, it remains set after shooting (it used to go back to move).
barracks have new graphics
Added several new tech upgrades that can be unlocked from the research center
also a lot of fixes and changes that you will find in the full changelog accessible from the main menu of the next upcoming release.
As mentioned in the intro, the first thing I will do after publishing this dev-log is going to release version 0.6.7, make sure to join us on Discord if you want to try it.
After that I will spend the rest of this week working on the game announcement and on the announcement trailer, so expect big news coming soon!
Once that's done I will go back to development full-time aiming at releasing the final 0.6.X version by the end of August. That version will be the final alpha of the demo, but I will tell you more about that in my next dev-log at the beginning of next month.