Dev Update: Mid-May

Maddy here! We’re trying a new format for our dev updates, something a bit more conversational, chatting with the team about their recent work.

I’ll start. Over the past few weeks I’ve been looking into cool things for our discord (tournaments are in the works), as well as a fun physical event that could happen soon! If you’re based in Melbourne keep an eye out for that one. We’re also preparing for something big in June that will be announced shortly, so I’ve had my hands full getting ready for that. 

And now onto the important dev updates! It was a super busy week for everyone, as we prepare to push a small playtest update to Steam, while wrangling a couple of other big design additions. Let’s check in with the rest of the team…

BEN

Ben’s been doing awesome work getting the new procedural image generator implemented, creating random portrait art for units. Basically, it’s a system that references a template script and assembles art elements into a bigger image. Now all of the spies and soldiers will have their own unique portraits!

The whole system has been designed to ensure that it’s fairly easy to spin up a new generator, and Ben is excited to see the system evolve and make more cool new art for different parts of the game. Character portraits are just the beginning…

LUIS

Luis has been busy getting the new update ready for the Steam playtesters, with this next one rolling out some big changes to the core display system, which will allow the game to maintain better resolutions across a range of screen sizes. Hopefully everything will look just the same, just a bit sharper, and with way less UI layout bugs. 

The tutorial speech bubbles (Luis’ ancient enemy) have been notorious for these kinds of layout bugs, and with the latest changes he’s been kept busy vanquishing them. But we hope with this new system, they have been conquered once and for all. The UI elements now all look, in Luis’ words, “crisp and delightful”.

He also managed to find a hidden bug that had been lurking behind the scenes. The server database service happened to be a little slow this week (who knows why, something in the weather) which caused an occasional internal server error, resulting in looping turns. The error is normally incredibly rare, so getting the chance to reproduce and fix it was actually very lucky. Luis’ quick fix means we can avoid the crisis of finding it at a more dire time in the future. And the fix even gave us a performance boost, so turns now resolve quicker!

It hasn’t all been bug-hunts though! The cool single-player campaign mode that Luis has been hammering away at is coming together nicely. The big breakthrough this week was a fresh design that utilizes our current map generation system in new ways, allowing us to get the feel of an ongoing story line, without having to write a whole new process. It’s still very much a work in progress, but even the early tests are looking promising. This has seen Luis digging deep into the map generation code, one of the very first things Ben wrote for the game.

JIM

Jim’s been busy masterminding the game’s progress during the recent sprint week, as well as creating art and template scripts for the new image generator. 

Now that spies are working, it’s on to soldiers. A more complex challenge, due to the portraits being groups of figures, which requires planning out nested generators to assemble all the parts. The generated art is something Jim’s been looking forward to getting in the game for a long time, so he’s excited to be implementing his original art concepts into the game at last!

Jim’s working hard to keep ahead on the game design front as well, tackling a range of things including sea route mechanics, tuning the new AI, overhauling the campaign mode to fit the new map concept, and numerous UI bug fixes.

As he handles most of the design, art, and production responsibilities, Jim has had to juggle a lot of different aspects of development (a topic which frankly deserves its own blog). Balancing new features against the need to keep the project on track, especially with a lot of cool new things being added, means ensuring we stay focused on those tasks that are priorities for upcoming updates. It can be tough at times, but keeping an eye on scope is the only way to stay on track and get the game done.

We’ll expand upon these exciting developments in the coming weeks, as well as dish out the big June announcement! 

Meanwhile, the playtest is still running! You can jump in and check out the new update by going to the Steam store page and clicking “Request Access”. As always wishlists are super appreciated!

To keep up with the latest news follow Ghostbat Games on Twitter or join the Spies & Soldiers Discord server.