Icon: Voidfall - Alpha v0.1.11
"Let's All Go To The Movies"
Alpha v0.1.11 is here, and this is easily the largest update we've shipped for Icon: Voidfall so far.
This release touches nearly every part of the game. We've rebuilt our portrait pipeline, given every structure its own construction presentation, added a full Keybindings Editor, expanded formation movement, introduced Steam Achievements, added new music for the Arx Imperium, overhauled the camera, and launched our new Replay and Theatre systems.
Underneath all of that is another enormous round of work on multiplayer synchronization, CogSys, combat behavior, faction progression, performance, presentation, and the core RTS experience.
Replay & Theatre Mode
One of the biggest additions in v0.1.11 is our new Replay and Theatre system.
Matches can now be recorded into
.voidreplay
files and saved from the End Screen with your own replay name. From the Main Menu, Theatre provides a browser for your locally saved matches where they can be loaded and watched as read-only simulations.
New recordings include periodic keyframes, allowing Theatre to provide a timeline with:
- Play and pause controls
- 1x, 2x, 3x and 5x playback
- Timeline scrubbing
- Previous and next keyframe navigation
- Team perspective switching
- Preserved camera, weather, and time-of-day state while seeking
Replays are more than a spectator feature for us.
The replay format was designed from the beginning to also function as a CogSys training dataset.
Alongside the executable command timeline, recordings capture strategic intent and outcomes, research progression, combat damage and deaths, economic state, match results, and other information that can help us understand why a strategy succeeded or failed.
That means community replays can become an incredibly useful resource as we continue expanding the strategies and behaviors available to CogSys.
Watch Matches Live
Theatre isn't limited to recordings.
Hosted Steam matches now generate a secure Theatre Game Code that can be shared with other players. Entering that code through Theatre allows someone to join an active match as a read-only observer without consuming either combatant slot.
Observers can switch between the two competing teams and receive the live armies, structures, resources, research, wildlife, Malignance, weather, and other match state without receiving gameplay authority.
You can now quite literally grab some popcorn and watch the war happen.
A Completely New Portrait Pipeline
Every Unit and Structure portrait in the game has been re-rendered.
We've built an entirely new in-engine tool called Portrait Clipping Studio specifically for generating Icon: Voidfall's animated portraits.
Instead of maintaining collections of individually authored portrait frames, units and structures are staged inside an isolated capture environment and rendered directly from their actual in-game models, animations, and effects.
The system supports:
- Animated units and structures
- Full squads and carrier drones
- Camera orbit, pan, and dolly paths
- Dedicated portrait lighting
- Malignance environments
- HDR capture
- Loop and Ping-Pong playback
- Baked Fade, Dither, and Retro transitions
- Automatically generated sprite sheets
Resources, Mines, Slipstreams, Lexicon entries, Units, Structures, and construction states now share this same animated portrait-sheet architecture.
Most importantly for players, every Unit and Structure portrait has now been recaptured through the new pipeline, giving the game a much more consistent visual language.
Every Structure Now Builds Differently
Construction has received another huge presentation pass.
Structures now use their own authored Structure In Progress presentation rather than relying on a generic construction state.
Every structure in the game now has its own construction presentation.
Arafel construction goes even further. Their structures physically grow as construction progresses, driving their organic growth shaders from placement through completion.
Construction sites can also have their own spatial construction audio, giving active building sites a local soundscape without filling the entire map with construction noise.
We've also removed the old completed-structure scale-in effect. The construction state is now the complete construction presentation, and the finished structure appears at its proper authored scale when completed.
Formation Movement Expanded
Formation movement has grown considerably in v0.1.11.
The active formation can now cycle between:
- Triangle
- Square
- Hex
The new Move In Formation toggle allows groups to preserve their active formation while actually travelling across the map instead of only arranging themselves when they reach their destination.
Formation-capable units share an in-transit formation corridor while retaining individual movement targets, helping groups maintain their intended shape through movement.
Mixed selections still respect each unit's authored movement behavior, so units that aren't intended to travel as part of a formation continue receiving independent movement orders.
Group Selection Gets Smarter
Mixed army selections are significantly easier to control.
A group now maintains a focused unit type that determines which command page is shown while commands continue to cascade across eligible members of the larger selection.
The focused unit is clearly framed in the group panel, and you can:
- Click a unit to change focus
- Double-click to narrow the selection
- Press the new rebindable Cycle Group Selection Focus action, defaulted to Tab, to cycle between unit types
Inventory, carried resources, production stock, dropship cargo, squad commands, transformations, costs, and tooltips all update based on the currently focused subgroup.
Unit transformations also preserve selection, focus, position, and control-group membership.
Full Keybindings Editor
The Keybindings Editor has been rebuilt for v0.1.11 and is now available both from the Main Menu and the in-game Escape Menu.
Bindings are organized into a scrollable editor where changes can be made before committing them.
You can:
- Rebind gameplay actions
- Clear bindings with right-click
- Review bindings by category
- Save changes when you're ready
- Use newly rebindable actions such as Cycle Group Selection Focus
Critical bindings such as primary Escape, Left Mouse, and Right Mouse remain protected.
This also completes a larger migration of our gameplay controls onto the new local keybinding preference system.
The Camera Gets Dynamic
The Player Camera has received some substantial new behavior.
Zooming close to the battlefield now dynamically changes the camera angle. Across the final zoom steps, the traditional RTS angle gradually lowers toward the action while preserving your current focus point.
We've also added Alt + Middle Mouse Free Look, allowing you to temporarily look around from the current camera position before snapping exactly back to your previous RTS view when released.
Camera confinement has also been rebuilt around the actual authored map boundary rather than navigation space. This allows the camera to freely cross cliffs and other non-navigable terrain while remaining smoothly contained inside the playable world.
Arx Imperium Joins the Soundtrack
The world music system now supports independent Arafel and Arx Imperium track lists.
The opening tracks are selected from your starting faction's music, while later tracks can move between both sides of the soundtrack with a strong preference toward the faction you're currently playing.
An off-faction track is always followed by music from your own faction, keeping the soundtrack varied without losing faction identity.
With v0.1.11, the Arx Imperium's music officially joins the OST.
Steam Achievements
Steam Achievement support has arrived.
The first Alpha achievements are now live, including achievements tied to:
- Participating in the Alpha
- Providing development feedback
- Entering Theatre Mode
- ...and perhaps doing something you weren't supposed to be doing.
Achievement unlocks use a new in-game toast system, and clicking the toast can take you directly to the Steam Achievements overlay.
Combat & Unit Behavior
Combat positioning has received a substantial upgrade.
Units now understand preferred, minimum, and maximum engagement ranges. Ranged units attempt to establish safer backline positions instead of collapsing directly onto their target, while frontline and backline roles influence local crowd movement.
Formation members also account for how far an engagement would pull them away from their group.
Other combat and control improvements include:
- Hold Position is now a true toggle.
- Held units ignore opportunistic attacks until intentionally ordered otherwise.
- Structures can similarly toggle Hold Action.
- Shared combat behavior continues respecting explicit movement and formation orders.
- Hidden units can no longer be selected through Fog of War.
Day & Night Now Affect Gameplay
The dynamic day/night cycle is no longer purely visual.
Arx Imperium thrives in daylight. Arafel thrives in darkness.
Arx units and structures gain up to +2 Sight around noon and fall as low as -2 at midnight.
Arafel receives the inverse effect, reaching its greatest vision during the night.
The Time of Day tooltip now reports both the current simulated time and exactly how much visibility your faction is gaining or losing.
Economy & Faction Changes
Several faction systems received meaningful changes.
Arafel
Arafel units no longer manually fell terrain trees. Malignance is once again the faction's interaction with the forest.
Harvest Hooks now increases Malign Mine capacity from one harvester to two, and CogSys understands the additional staffing opportunity.
The former Arafel upkeep structure has also been split into clearer roles:
- Abhorrent Wound now provides population/upkeep capacity.
- Maligneum focuses entirely on spreading Malignance.
CogSys has been updated to understand and exploit both roles.
Several Arafel research paths have also been reorganized, including progression around Glare, Imp, Null Gaze, Testing Mettle, and later-game vision research.
Arx Imperium
Tree harvesting has become substantially more physical.
Felling an authored resource tree can now produce actual Tree Logs that tumble into the world, settle onto the terrain, and are harvested by Laborers before being returned as Materials.
Laborers can continue working through the local log cluster and resume nearby tree felling afterward.
Ichorite harvesting has also gained faction-specific worker limits:
- Arafel: 2 harvesters per Ichorite source
- Arx Imperium: 3 harvesters per Ichorite source
CogSys understands these limits and will stop wasting workers trying to saturate a full node.
CogSys Learns From Replays
CogSys receives another major behavioral expansion in this release, including the first decisions directly informed by replay analysis.
New strategic branches include:
- Better preservation of active worker and builder tasks
- Explicit Opening, Timing Attack, Defend, Recover, and Finish postures
- Defensive reactions that suppress discretionary expansion under threat
- Punishing exposed enemy construction
- Reinforcing existing offensive and defensive missions with newly produced units
- Reacting strategically to a visible enemy Tier 2 transition
The Replay system gives us an increasingly rich source of real match data to continue this process.
As more games are played and more replays are shared with us, we can examine what players attempted, what happened afterward, and where CogSys' existing strategic vocabulary needs to grow.
Effective APM
Session Metrics now tracks Effective APM.
Rather than counting every physical input, Effective APM focuses on meaningful gameplay actions such as selections, orders, construction, research, command actions, and control-group operations.
The Metrics panel displays both an Effective Actions chart and a live Effective APM readout that freezes with your final match statistics.
So yes, now the game can officially tell you how sweaty you're getting.
Structure Scrapping
Completed structures can now be scrapped.
Scrapping places the structure into a five-second self-destruction queue and refunds 25% of its standard resource cost.
Scrapping can be cancelled during that window, but a structure being scrapped cannot continue producing units, upgrades, or drones.
The command is fully multiplayer and replay compatible.
Multiplayer & Stability
v0.1.11 also contains an extensive Steam multiplayer hardening pass.
Work includes:
- Stronger initial army synchronization
- Better late-join Theatre synchronization
- Improved wildlife replication
- Research-state repair
- Economy synchronization
- Unit identity validation
- Ghost-unit cleanup
- Reliable command journaling
- Bounded network payloads
- Packet validation and malformed-packet containment
- Improved environment synchronization
The Replay system has helped here as well. Recording deterministic command timelines and state checkpoints gives us another tool for exposing synchronization problems instead of quietly hiding them.
Performance & Presentation
There's considerably more under the hood in this update, including:
- Reduced late-game CogSys diagnostic overhead
- Reduced wildlife simulation cost
- Better camera occlusion performance
- Reduced reactive Malignance fog rebuilds
- Improved dynamic shadow management
- Better UI and hover performance
- More robust session metrics
- Improved terrain-tree interaction
- Better structure-selection presentation
- New movement dust effects
- Improved wildlife lighting and reflections
- Additional reactive Malignance fog improvements
In Memory of Aurora
Finally, there's one small addition in this enormous patch that means a great deal to us.
Aurora has been memorialized among the ambient wildlife flocks of Atrum.
Sometimes the smallest line in a patch log carries the most weight.
What's Next
0.1.11 represents a major step forward for Icon: Voidfall.
We're increasingly moving beyond the systems required to simply make an RTS function and into the systems that define what kind of RTS this is going to become.
Replays give us a way to study how people actually play.
Theatre gives us a way to watch those games unfold.
CogSys gives us a framework for turning what we learn into increasingly capable opponents.
Formations, camera controls, keybindings, portraits, construction presentation, music, achievements, faction systems, and multiplayer are all pieces of the same goal: making Icon: Voidfall feel like a complete RTS rather than a game jam prototype.
Thank you to everyone continuing to play, test, break things, send us replays, and tell us where the game still fights back harder than the opponent does.
We'll see you in Atrum.