Hey, everyone! Steve here, and it’s December. Here in Texas, it’s not really cold yet, but we’re still busy with moving full speed ahead in getting Alliance ready for release! Since it’s been a little while since I posted an update, I wanted to tell you in our own words what we’re working on, the state of the team, and some of the new game systems to look forward to upon release!
First of all, we are delaying the game until Q1 2022. I know that seems to be a common thing nowadays, but I can assure you that we’re doing it for the right reasons. Now that we have a complete team of seven working on the game essentially full-time, we’ve made more progress in the last 3 or 4 months than we have since the end of 2020, and we’re moving faster every week! The game is fully playable and at this point quite stable (I routinely play 40-50 turn games every evening now as a quality check to check longer-term trends and systems) and much of what we’re doing involves things like optimizing the graphics and the UI (a major area where Unity has really helped us), adding some amazing universe art, balancing out the economy and costs of things, and especially the tooltips/help system, and we are completely rewriting the tutorial to just have a tutorial campaign that utilizes very little ‘hand hold’ as our previous version, and uses a guided campaign with goals, subgoals, and an overarching plot to keep players interested while they learn by doing- rather than by watching! Basically – we want to get the game right on release, and it is our full intention to do so!
