Hi Everyone!
Today we are continuing our series of quick news about the progress of UBOOT. For the beginning we want to assure you that we are alive, feeling good and working hard
As we mentioned earlier in other updates, the main part of the game is already almost finished. Now is the time for filling the gaps, tuning and complete the rest of the project.
Now we'll briefly describe to you what we have dealt with recently, what has changed and what new has been added. As always, we've taken a few steps forward and some backwards to fix old things which over time ceased to suit the rest. We hope that you will enjoy what we have prepared today. So, let's get to the point.
Campaign
We're still spending most of our resources into campaign missions, but we can't go into much detail about them to avoid spoilers.
Starting date in our game used to be middle of 1940, but we moved it to 1939 so that player will be able to play through the whole war. Players will start the game as a NCO on VIIB u-boat and get straight into adventure on Atlantic just after Great Britain joins the war.
Fog of War
We listened to your feedback and limited what player is able to see by introducing more intense fog of war, so that even in free camera mode player won't be able to see something that his crew doesn't.
Enemy ships were always forced to be invisible out of the sight range, so this change affects mostly the environment.
Players can still see everything at any distance in FPP view by using the periscope or binoculars.
Storage
We finalized our interface work for storage UI. It's far better doesn't it? It's now designed to also start hauling tasks that we described in the previous update ( players can tell the crew to move items from A to B ).
Character system improvements
We're having some artist power at this time and we decided to upgrade our character system here and there. It was pointed by you at a few places that we would use some cosmetic upgrades.
For now we added 10 new face meshes to fight the repetitiveness.
We've also started to work on a greater level of detail for characters when seen from upclose. We're also putting work to unify our u-boat characters system with low poly characters on other boats and ports into one system with all LOD transitions for extra diversity and performance.
Modding
We included a C# compiler in our game so that Steam Workshop mods will be able to add advanced content of pretty much any scope into the game. Mods can now be specified as "safe" and use limited, but generally safe API or may be specified as "unsafe" and access much wider API, but game will carefully ask the user to make sure that the modder may be trusted. All scripting mods will be supplied in a source code form.
We are still working on our modding API to make it understandable and pleasant in use. It's not our top priority at this time and we may publish it after the game release to avoid extra delays.
Save system
We had to revisit our save system to ensure that all new features in the game are saved correctly.
We ran careful tests, found dozens of bugs and fixed them all to ensure that you won't loose your valuable progress in a middle of a playthrough.
Release date
We're on track for the release in Q2 and it stays as our current goal. Game is getting closer and closer to its full shape.
We still don't have plans for any notable features and will be focused mostly on bug fixing and improving the existing features.
