Non-RPG General News - Alliance of the Sacred Suns Dev Blog

Development Blog - 1.19.21: Scouting System and what's new for 2021!

Hello everyone! Hope everyone had a good holiday season, a happy New Year, and that 2021 is off to a better foot than 2020 for you! We have certainly kicked off the new year running, and that's what we want to talk about today!

We wanted to touch on our timelines for the year, and our plans for the next few open alphas, as what we're working on now. I want to have a new development diary go out about every 2 weeks, as those are the lengths of the development sprints we are working on in the studio.

First off, with the funding provided by HH, we'll be able to add another programmer to the staff to work on things like UI scripting and data conversion, which will free me up to do a lot more with the AI, optimization, and game mechanics. We hope to announce their addition in early Feburary. Also, AotSS will now have a custom music score, done by Cody Still, who has composed for Hollywood trailers and movies for years and has already composed some amazing music for the game, including the main theme. If you're on our Discord (and if you're not, why not?!) I have posted a preview of the main theme there.

Now for our timelines. We'd like to do our next Closed Alpha II sometime in April, and our Closed Beta in late July. We haven't finalized an EA release yet, but it would be at the earliest in August or September. Of course we'll let you know when that happens!

Next, I wanted to talk about a concept of the game that is getting a polish - Scouting. Specifically, scouting systems and planets. Currently, you can either send a probe to the system that you want more information on as a Project, or a scout Force, and a scout probe will increase the intel level of the system by 25%, while a Force will increase the intel level by the Scouting value of the Force every turn. While it's not a bad system, it had room for improvement. So this is how it's going to work going forward:

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