Here is the second progress report since we introduced them. This one will cover our work in August and give an outlook on September. And there is going to happen a lot again!

This report covers Elemental War, Spine, Tri6: Infinite and our new main project.

Elemental War

After the release in July and various patches following August seemed a little silent for Elemental War. We released just one update for the game to version 1.0.5 improving the game, especially the alliances, and fixing several bugs.

But that was just the work you can already see. Behind closed doors we also added a co-op mode to the game that allows you to play Classic and Survial Mode together with up to three friends. This and several other improvements, balancing and bugfixes will be part of update 1.1.0 which will be released on September 6th!

To give a first look on our co-op mode, we uploaded a video to our YouTube channel:

Even though we’re focussing on our new projects now, we’re still keeping up the support for Elemental War. We will provide patches when necessary, discuss with you on our Discord and the Steam community and add some more content. Update 1.2 will introduce new official maps and is planned for October at the moment. We’re also planning to expand to new platforms to get some more players in the game so multiplayer will be more alive.

Spine

Spine itself didn’t get an update since the last progress report, but there were several mod updates this month. The German mods MorOrs, Die Rückkehr and Velen got updates and also some of the multiplayer mods. For the Polish community we updated Na uchodźstwie. There might have been more updates, but those were the ones I wrote a news for or got contacted. I also added a new German multiplayer mod, but that one isn’t public yet, so no more information from my side yet. I think it’s in beta at the moment.

To unify our projects I started the work on a web based login/register page that will also allow to manage your Clockwork account in the browser. Even though the basics are done, I stumbled upon a php problem I couldn’t solve yet and the whole thing looks ugly as hell, so it will take a while until we can release it.

The new account management will e.g. allow the following things:

• Delete your account
• Verify your e-mail address (this already works, but if you don’t use the link in the e-mail you initially received you can’t trigger it again at the moment)
• Change your password
• Change your e-mail
• Change your username

As all our projects use the same account this will help a lot and save us time to manage your requests for e.g. changing usernames and such.

Tri6: Infinite

Tri6: Infinite got just one update to alpha #2 even though we wanted to release more in August. But the game still made a big jump forward and the biggest obstacle is removed now. This was the movement. I wasn’t happy with the one of alpha #1 and knew what I wanted to improve, but it took quite a while to figure out how to write the code so it works like that. Now I’m pretty happy with the movement and it just needs some more tweaks. The best thing is that I have way more control over it and can easily add modifications to it to change the behavior for example through powerups.

New updates will be released more frequently now and do bigger steps. In September there’ll be probably two updates (every two weeks) tweaking the other vehicles, adding powerups and improving general stuff. I guess in October we’ll start to exchange the placeholder graphics with real ones, but I’ll write more about it in the next progress report.

If you want to join the Tri6: Infinite alpha just join our Discord and download it from the #download channel in the Tri6: Infinite section. It’s just a zip archive, so you want even need to run a fancy installer.

Project X

Well, sadly still not the time to announce the name of the project. But we worked a lot on the project in August and made very good progress.

Some concept art is currently in the works and should be ready in September. I guess we’ll show it off then, but I’m not sure about it yet.

Besides the concept art done by one of our freelancers I did a lot of programming work for the fight system prototype. But first some informations what the fight system is going to look like:

In the last progress report I already mentioned that it is turn based. During the game you will receive up to five different robots that can have different base models and be individualized afterwards. The robots will fight for you against enemies in 5 vs 5 fights. The fights itself In general are inspired by games like Divinity: Original Sin and Wizardry 8. So you will control your team, give them commands, send them to strategic positions and select the attacks and targets. With status changes like paralyzation you can do more than just damage. And after the fight with earned experience you can increase the skills of the robots.

So far the members for each of the two teams can be completely configured and the fight can be started. We have a complete extendible system that allows us to easily adjust attacks, attributes and skills to test different combinations. The fight process itself is the current task and is almost working. But that’s a complex topic and besides the basic functionality there is a lot more to add in the upcoming weeks. So there will be more to tell you in the next report. For October I’ll continue the work, get the first fights running and add more features like status changes and probably the movement of the robots (including range limitations for attacks).

Sebastian and I had a lot of discussions regarding the fight system as well and we’re convinced that it will be really awesome in the end. We have a lot of ideas that play together pretty good on paper, so hopefully it will be fun to play too.

The rest of the game design didn’t progress yet, so no progress on characters, world and so on as we’re still focussing on the fights as our core feature. But no reason to be bothered. We still have the goal to create an atmospheric world with interesting characters and room to explore, even though the whole project scope won’t be too big as we’re a very small team.

Keep an eye on our homepage, Discord and Twitter, as we’ll provide more informations there when we have something to share. And of course also check out the next progress reports in the following months. You can also leave a comment here to share your opinions and subscribe to our newsletter to never miss an important news.

If you missed our last progress report, you can find it here: Progress Report August 2019.