Hoping I can reach and live up to that standard!
Let's do a transparant development update. I mean, this is what you wonderful backers have pledged tens of thousands of moneydollars for after all, jpg's of ships and the most transparant development in the history of the gaming industry.
A gazillion months after the release of episode 1 later, where are things at currently? Assets wise, things are looking pretty good, with two models in queue to be textured. And the remodelling of the Hertak capitalships still pending. Once all of these have been added, there's little work left on this front for any future episodes. Almost all of the aliens have had their ship models updated in some form, providing a decent amount of variation to shoot at.
Player flyable ships are plenty as well, with 10 unique terran ships plus 6 variants. And 4 unique CSA ships. (Not all of them pictured here)
Which should help keep the game varied and fresh over the episodes. As you unlock more options to wreak carnage with!
For characters, it's a bit more work left, with four characters that I still have to start on for episode 2, and several characters that still need some degree of work in Emofuri (headani's and VN portraits). Then after this upcoming releases, there's still a few more characters I plan on adding, so there's still some long term effort to be put into this. (A better artist would probably get this done in less than two weeks, but alas, its just me. )
Currently it's already over 240 apng's for 16 characters, coming in at 1.78GB. By my conservative estimate, this number will easily end up reaching 300.
WoD's soundscape has also been much improved, now fully utilizing all of the nice new sound code that has been added recently. Now sounds won't be excessively culled anymore, and sound effects that would repeat a lot, like shield impacts, are now a lot more varied.
As for the actual meat of the game, Missions.
Progress on these have actually only started kind of recently, several of the missions of episode 1 have been reworked/replaced in some form or another. Making the campaign a bit more straight up, 'fly&gun' and a bit less 'gimmicky'. Which I believe is generally more what people want&expect from a campaign (Not to mention that those kind of missions are also significantly easier to make). In addition to reworks, there have also been two extra missions added to episode 1.
Axem has been working on redoing the mission to ambush the Contravention, the mission has become a bit more straightforward and much more cinematic, and ends in a cool final showdown with Ophelia. Really happy with how it has turned out.
As shown here, Axem has also put some effort into replacing a lot of the big asteroids previously used in WoD. (and considering how many missions seem to take place in the proximity of Asteroids, thats a good thing indeed.)
Episode 2 is roughly 30%ish there in just raw missions. Now 30% may seem like it's not really coming along quickly, but it's not the missions I'm personally concerned about. Missions are relatively quick to create (unless you construct absurdly amazingly complex missions like seen in JAD). It's the visual novel segments that I'm more worried about, there hasn't been that much progress made on them yet, outside of converting the episode 1 ones to the new file version format (which is kind of dumb busy work, but has to be done). There's still a lot of words still to be written. Which then have to be checked&edited by someone.
In addition to that, the backgrounds for the VN parts also still need to be done. Work work.
So when's a release realistically to be expected? As is common in gamedevelopment, its often hard to gauge how long things will take. (Amirite Croberts?) Especially since my motivation to work on things kind of ebs and flows. Some months progress is rapidly made, others... well, not so much.
April maybe? Who knows.
