Roadmap

[INovaeFlavien]

Roadmap

This is our revised roadmap as of December 2022:

Disclaimer: the timelines are only estimations at a given moment in time and priorities may change at any time - stay in touch with our dev updates if you want to know why priorities have shifted. Also keep in mind we're a 5-devs small team, so urgent issues and bugs may slip in and delay regular new development features. TL;DR: this roadmap is not set in stone and will evolve dynamically.

Additional details can be seen on our Trello board:
https://trello.com/b/jNevKnfQ/infinity-battlescape

Implemented

Features already implemented in game since the early access launch. Note that some of these might require further tweaking and improvements at a later stage. We'll keep iterating on all aspects of the game for a long time.

• HUD cleaning / decluttering / making things more clear
  
• Team chat and improving communications
  
• Input event and control scheme unification ( a lot of players are confused by the way the current system works, and think their controllers do not detect pitch / yaw )
  
• Anti-missile / torpedoes laser counter-measures for capital ships
  
• Auto-repairing turrets / modules on stations and other installations
  
• Revamping capital ships control schemes, cameras and weapons management
  
• Extra joysticks / HOTAS / hardware testing
  
• Better anti-aliasing ( temporal AA )
  
• HUD improvements and custom MFDs
  
• Sensors overlay
  
• Making the star map more useful and interactive
  
• Helper screens and more alerts and contextual info tips in game
  
• Revamping the mission screen / objectives
  
• Ship upgrades ( first iteration; we won't necessarily have much new content there. Maybe a new weapon and EMP missiles )
  
• TrackIR support
  
• New planet: Rygol
  
• Doubled amount of music in game (+35 mins)
  
• Battle reports / statistics / player stats / team stats
  
• Credits redistribution and team scoring (/ladder rankings)
  
• Game balance: another pass on weapons / locking, corvette repairs / rewards
  
• Sub-systems targetting
  
• Navigation / Flight plans (WIP)
  
• Squads / Fleet system (WIP)
  
• In-game communication VOIP system ( this one is tricky, so we'll be looking into it, but it might easily slide to next year )
  
• Improvements to match progression
  
• Improvements to battle progression
  
• Revamping AI battle objectives
  
• Revamping / increasing static defenses
  
• Electronic warfare + new weapons
  
• Second pass over ship upgrades: adding more weapons, more upgrades and more variety to the content
  
• Orbital bombardment with nukes (Note: nukes were.. nuked. We replaced them with the spinal cruiser's long-range canon)
  
• Improvements to carrier gameplay + repair / resupply ability

H2 2023:

• Address main balance issues ( attackers vs defenders in battles )
  
• General AI improvements, fleet coordination, assigning orders
  
• Cross-server persistent progression ( stored globally per account, not per server )

2024+ / Before full release

• Assets streaming and performance improvements to eliminate the high video-ram needs, causing micro-stutter and freezes
  
• New battlescapes and new planets, including the first Ocean planet
  
• Localized damage ( disabling thrusters, armor pieces ) and visual effects ( damage decals, more effects )
  
• Revamping shields and adding localized shield systems ( front+back, 4-directional shileds etc.. )
  
• Networking improvements, especially related to client side prediction for projectiles )
  
• Persistent progression system with unlockable content based on your military ranking ( weapons, bobbleheads, skins, decals )
  
• New visual effects and improvements ( better HDR / tonemapping, new shader effects, glass / refraction etc.. )
  
• More planets and environments, maybe props on planets
  
• Solo / off-line sandbox + dedicated servers
  
• In-game tutorials
  
• Kickstarter rewards: bobbleheads, extra steam copies, statues, skins..
  
• Mission editor
  
• Marketplace

After full release:

Note: that list is not exhaustive - we can definitely consider adding new ships and more content, but it's too soon to announce anything just yet.

• Investigating VR support
  
• Additional missions / side activities
  
• Investigating modding support

Side missions content

Note that one important feature is missing from this roadmap: side missions. It's a tricky one, because it's important to retain the player's attention, but it requires a lot of work and will not delivered as a single feature in a single patch, but more progressively as we improve the system over a long series of patches, over the entire next year.

We haven't fully decided how far we want to go with side missions. At the very least we want to offer escort / attack missions, assassinations / bounty hunting, or things such as scavenging. Some of these missions could have conflicting objectives with players on the opposite team, which would in fact turn these side missions into "mini-game modes" naturally integrated into the game. We'll see exactly how far we can go with this, but keep in mind Battlescape is warfare focused, so you should not expect things such as trading or mining.

That's it for now - if you have more feedback, just let us know on the Steam forums or on the I-Novae forums. We still have a long road (map) ahead of us, but your support is appreciated. Thank you !

-Flavien Brebion
I-Novae Studios

[Lechuck's Beard]

Excellent :) I really hope this all works out..for all of us!

[Werty_mk]

No new ships? No different ships for each team?

[Chiggi]

I like everything in here.

What I was hoping for in the long term goals is something about distinguishable factions with different ships and asymetrical balancing. Really hard to do, but might be important for the longevity of the game.

[Leys Kilian]

Awesome news

[Zen]

Great news, this game looks amazing and love big space battles. Glad the hud will be worked on. Definitely needs a better feeling of locking on and knowing when to fire missiles that are locked (like in games like Project Sylpheed) but that is just a personal taste.

[Bonsai]

please integrate some kind of squadron mechanics similar to the game squad:
-1 squadron leader can lead like 10 squadron members
- squadron leaders have their own voice chat to coordinate
- squadron leaders can set waypoints
- within a squad everyboday is in the same voice chat channel
- you have an extra channel to chat if you are close to friendly units from another squadron

if you dont know what i mean pls try "squad", the implementation there is flawless and it would makes this game HUGE

[tabten]

What do you mean by ‘electronic warfare’?

[HairballHacker]

The only thing in that list that makes me sad is "Solo / sandbox mode". This is a PvP game. If people don't want to PvP, there are other games they can go play... most notably, Elite Dangerous which is more and more becoming a PvE experience and has that horrible division of players into Solo\PG\Open modes. Don't be like them IB. Please.

[KungFury]

Hi, are there new ships planned? What I have seen is great, but the game needs more diversity in ship designs.
Great that they want to add ship modules and weapons to fit.

[[ATHS] Tyroki]

Will there be directional shields?

[Pendrokar-OD]

Yes:

Originally posted by INovaeFlavien:

Revamping shields and adding localized shield systems ( front+back, 4-directional shileds etc.. )

[INovaeFlavien]

A FYI: this week / next week we'll be focusing on important bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements instead of "new items" from the roadmap. We'll be having another look at the following:

• As many bugs as we realistically can, and especially the frustrating / game blocking ones (I'm particularly thinking of the end-of-match issues, or disabled spawns forcing a disconnect)
  
• More UI improvements, especially related to the star map
  
• We'll attempt the infamous events / control scheme unification + better handling of keybindings and some remaining input issues
  
• And of course we'll continue to iterate on balance, better adapt credits rewards etc..

Every once in a while we'll "interrupt" work from the roadmap to spend some time on stability / bug fixes / quality of life improvements.

The week after we'll resume work on new features, and especially revamp the scoring system, team stats / leaderboards / ladder and start on capital ships counter-measures.

[DmAnd]

...LOOK INTO MY EYES, YOU ARE GETTING VERYYYYYYY SLEEPY..... TIK tok TIK tok.

As i count down from 5 you will become more and more willing to put vr into your game....

[Kubicide]

Any update on when we'll see the new features?

This roadmap OP or thread should probably be edited ASAP as it's clearly not realistic. It's been almost 6 weeks from when all the "coming in 1-3 weeks" items were said to be added. There's nothing worse than losing customer confidence!

[Roadie]

Originally posted by Kubicide:

Any update on when we'll see the new features?

This roadmap OP or thread should probably be edited ASAP as it's clearly not realistic. It's been almost 6 weeks from when all the "coming in 1-3 weeks" items were said to be added. There's nothing worse than losing customer confidence!

I mean looking at the daily player counts I'd say customer confidence is already at its lowest.