Where we are?

Before starting posting updates I would like to highlight a bit the background and the current state of the game. The Warfare Heroes project has started approximately two years ago and since then went through some major changes. The initial ideas was building a pure 2D side-scroll game, which after some prototyping was found to be a bad idea, mainly because of the assets available at that moment, but also because while playing something did not feel right. Making it fully isometric was not an option either, since it would be a completely different game from what was originally planned. Therefore a decision of adding a bit of perspective sounded like the way to go, allowing to maintain the original concept, but also make the game more attractive from the point of view of gameplay and graphics (not much, since there are still no artistic hands around :D). 

The major setback came when the things seemed sorted out. At some point, around a year ago an artist joined the team, which allowed to divide the responsibilities and focus on what each of us knew doing better. After a couple of month however, due to person reasons, he had to move on, leaving the graphics part of the game once again pending. At the time, the decision of learning 3D modelling looked like a solution which would allow to progress further without spending too much resources (most of indie devs know the struggle) and actually achieve some results. Starting from April, all of the efforts were directed towards learning Blender modeling, animation, rendering (yep, right, at the moment texturing is not done at all). At the beginning the task looked epic, but with patience and a lot of failures definitive progress was made (I believe I did not mention before, I am only able to work 2-3 hours per day on the game, due to the full-time job and family, therefore it might look like the progress is painfully slow, but actually it moves at a decent pace I believe).

This leads us to the actual question, at what point the game is now? The answer is a bit relative, mainly because there are different milestones: the extended pre-alpha demo and further alpha release. I will focus more on pre-alpha demo release. This one will include a couple of playable levels, with many of the features which will be available in the full game. The idea would be to collect as much as possible feedback and apply the major changes before releasing fully-playable version. From the point of view of coding, there are still a couple of major functionalities to be implemented (for example unit death animation integration, building destruction animation, game controls rework). From the point of view of game graphics, most of the models are already rendered, but not fully integrated (miss-configured hitboxes, missing support for multiple rendering layers, etc). From UI point of view, the whole work of integrating the graphical components is to be done (the skeleton components with placeholder graphics is already there). Those tasks should not give much hustle, but will definitely take its time, however, even after finishing those there is some polishing work to be carried out (game balancing, fixing minor issues, adding some effects). As you can see, a lot of work is still ahead, hope you stick around to see where this journey ends! 

See you around!