Almost missed that it’s already February again. So time for the second progress report this year!

This report covers Elemental War, Red Skies: Ascension, Spine and Tri6: Infinite.

Besides the projects we also had some other insights this month. On January 17th we released our annual summary of the past year and an outlook of the future. Okay, annual might be too much as we did it the first time now. But we will make it an annual thing now. If you missed it, check out Past and future 2020.

And the German games blog Gamerrepublic wrote an article about us and our way from being Gothic modders to becoming indie devs. You can read about it in our blog bost From modding to indie devs.

Elemental War

This month’s maintenance update to Elemental War 1.4.0 was released around a week ago. We fixed some more bugs, mostly minor stuff and some usability/optical issues like controller navigiation not working properly under certain circumstances, not completely refreshing all UI elements when restarting the game and so on.

As requested by some of our players we also added the an automatic camera rotation so when you start a map, the entrance portal is always in the upper area of the screen and so directly visible. In case the map has multiple entrance portals at least one has to be on top. This should make it easier to not get confused directly on game start.

We’re also still improving performance with every update. CPU performance though is almost at the end now. We will try to improve GPU performance as well now.

Another good news is that we ported all code to Xbox One and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) now. The second one is for the Microsoft Store. We had some trouble setting up the test environment so everything took longer than expected, but we will start testing UWP now and Xbox One soon as well.

And another good news: Elemental War also got approved for development for PlayStation 4. We will start to set up everything the next week and then work on that while testing and fixing UWP and Xbox One.

Red Skies: Ascension

There was again not that much time for Red Skies: Ascension in January. But we started work on our dialog tool we will need for the demo. It’s the basic setup, so the toolchain and the code architecture. We decided to make it open source on GitHub so others can contribute their in the future. The tool we be very flexible in the end and work for every game due to a plugin structure. With that you will be able to just write an own plugin for your game, define what features are supported and then export to the format required. As it’s open source one will be able to look how we did it for the Red Skies: Ascension Demo and later on the real game and everything after that.

The game itself didn’t get much attention in January, but will get more again in February. More on that in the next progress report.

Read more about Red Skies: Ascension on the dedicated homepage. There you will also see how you can support us with the development of the game.

Spine

January started with a poll regarding The future of Spine. We have 135 votes now and we will stop the poll with the next Spine update in two weeks, February 14th.

After that we also finally released Spine 1.15.0. It was not a huge update, but fixed some bugs, added automatic error reporting of download issues so we get informed about all issues and not sporadic from time to time and people then complain.

As a first reaction to the poll we also added experimental Steam support. That means when you have the Steam version of Gothic 2 you will be able to start the mod over Spine and still track your time via Steam. In Spine 1.16.0 the feature will leave beta state and it will also work for Gothic 1.

Update 1.16.0 focusses on the download queue. That’s also an often requested feature even though not the top feature in the poll. It allows to start download of multiple mods while still browsing the database or even play another mod. So it will no longer block the UI while a download is running. It’s also used for the profile, the start page and info pages, so all graphics there will also be downloaded in the background and become visible when they’re available. The only downside at the moment is that downloads can’t be cancelled anymore and you don’t see what’s downloaded at the moment. We might add a download view as in Steam in the future though, but this won’t be part of 1.16.0.

If you still miss mods or have problems, feel free to leave a comment or join our Discord.

Tri6: Infinite

While not having released anything for Tri6: Infinite in January we’ve been busy improving the game. The next alpha version will probably be released next Friday, February 7th. It depends until when we will receive the first sounds and music. Yes, that means audio stuff is in progress now.

While waiting for audio and the next graphics batch (which will be worked on in February) we improved gameplay a lot.

It seems like the physics bugs are gone now. We also created a new more interesting track, a small camera rotation when starting a race, bots are way better in avoiding obstacles now and a lot more.

We will release a new gameplay video together with the new alpha build with all the changes. In the meantime, if you haven’t seen it yet, check out the video for alpha #7 from December.

If you’re interested in this kind of game and want to try it out and share your opinions with us, just join our Discord, download the alpha version and play the game. Every feedback is appreciated and will really help us!

We hope to get some feedback from you on the alpha on our Discord.

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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 January 2020.