Coming Soon: Achievements, and other near-future additions.

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott Park)]

Hey folks!

So... I thought I was going to be able to get achievements in prior to launch, but it looks like that's a post-launch thing instead. There were just too many other important things, and general launch prep.

My Schedule, Launch Week

I don't want to make any promises about specific new features THIS week, because I'm likely to be pretty busy running around doing launch stuff and answering questions and so on. There's always that sort of thing, and I'm doing a reddit AMA on Thursday on /r/Games if you're interested.

Badger and Puffin and Asteroid and WeaponMaster have all been working on various things big and small, though, and I'm trying to get some things of my own in in the meantime, too, despite the other interruptions.

My Schedule, Next Week

Next week will be calmer for me, so for the things that I'm working on I figure a lot of that will be started next week. Right now I have a priority list of what I'd like to work on, but again I don't want to make specific promises because most of those are nice-to-haves in the grand scheme of things, and I want the flexibility to react to things that new players here bring up that nobody else thought of prior to now. So I expect some of the new stuff will wait for bugfixes and QoL improvements that people come up with.

With that in mind, I figure that most of the things I have in mind will probably be complete-able in the next 3 weeks.

What's On The List?

* We have a goodly number of achievements that I plan on integrating here and... elsewhere unannounced.

* The planet sidebar is something that deserves some love. A few things with that. Firstly, making it so that you can see the local fleets there and not on the fleets tab, at least optionally. Secondly, making it so that ships with different icon colors (different enemies with same ship types) are split out. Thirdly, sorting the icons better by name. Fourthly, making it so that the icons are naturally split out by mobile ships and big things that you can capture.

* I'd like to go even further with the planet sidebar and make things like per-faction sections (for when there are many enemies) and a text-line-based view instead of an icon view, both as optional things you can switch to. But whether or not those happen in the next 3 weeks is a question mark.

* There are more voice lines that we plan on putting in, that have already been recorded and prepped, which include things like the chief adviser reacting to minor factions, etc.

* And then obviously there's a "large amount of random misc" that's is reactionary to what folks report here (or ideally on mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/)

You can see what has changed recently and what is inwork at any given time here: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:_Pre-And-Post_Launch_Polish

[MrPeters]

Speaking of your schedule; Do you have specific days of the week when you push updates or do you release them when you feel an update is ready?

Cheers for a great game, btw!

[vinco]

I can answer that one for you, MrPeters... Updates do not go out on a set schedule, but they're likely to be frequent (multiple per week) in the short term at least. Based on past history, the typical Arcen process is many quick small updates, then a slowdown for a major update, then more small ones, then a slower, major one, then...

[MrPeters]

Originally posted by vinco:

I can answer that one for you, MrPeters... Updates do not go out on a set schedule, but they're likely to be frequent (multiple per week) in the short term at least. Based on past history, the typical Arcen process is many quick small updates, then a slowdown for a major update, then more small ones, then a slower, major one, then...

Alright, thank you for the response ^^

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott Park)]

Yep, it just depends on what we have going on with the builds and when there's a break in testing that means it feels like nothing is going to be heavily broken if we do a push that night.

Cheers folks!

[falk]

I keep looking for the achievements to coming out :)
Only played the Tutorials so far and then saw that the game is going to have achievements... so I'm patiently waiting for these before I dive full in this probably super great game.
Any estimation when to expect them?

[Strategic Sage]

Not a dev, but from the statements that have been made in various places they want to get through the post-release polish phase (which is where we currently are), and then achievements will *likely* be one of the first things done after that. There are still a moderate amount of bugs to squash and whatnot, plus Chris was sick for a while. In other words, getting there but not quite there yet is my completely amateur and somewhat ill-informed opinion.

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott Park)]

It's on my shortlist, at this point. I don't want to make any definite promises, but I'd like to have them in this week if I can. Fingers crossed. This particular element went much longer than expected.