In this month’s progress report we’re talking about our four active projects, what we did in October and what will be done in November.

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

Elemental War

As we already told you in the last progress report we started a map contest for Elemental War beginning of October. The contest ended in the meantime and so we released update Elemental War 1.2.0 on October 25th. This updated added 10 maps submitted by our community and also 10 maps created by us. This doubles the amount of maps in the game and of course you still can create new ones via the built-in editor!

Of course there were more fixes in this update. But besides that, there was another hotfix released on October 30th, Elemental War 1.2.1. This update addresses an bug introduced by the work on the Xbox version of Elemental War that caused the register button in the login menu to be hidden by the new button to open the privacy policy after login.

The next update is planned for end of November if nothing special happens in the meantime. We’re going to continue the work on the Xbox version and some of the changes will also affect the PC version and improve it. Besides that we already slightly improved CPU performance in the game and will continue looking for issues there.

Red Skies: Ascension

There’s not much to share about the progress of Red Skies: Ascension this month. We’re still working on the combat system prototype. We updated the camera handling and added some models from Elemental War as placeholders so we don’t have to deal with the purple cubes we had before anymore. But it still needs time to become really fun, it’s very clunky at the moment.

In the meantime we had an interesting discussion in our discussion thread @ World of Gothic (German). Feel free to join the discussion there.

We also finished our first poll for the game regarding what’s most important to you in games. You can read our evaluation here. We also started a new poll which you can find on our homepage. This time we want to know which of the robot base types is your favorite. Share your opinions with us by participating in the poll, write a comment here or in the linked thread @ World of Gothic or on our Discord where we also have a section just for Red Skies.

Besides that we made a rough plan for a helper tool for creation of dialogs. Why that? Well, we already knew from our Gothic modding experience that complex dialogs are hard to write down in some simple document. If you have multiple branches and conditions it becomes confusing very fast. And as dialogs are a big part of Red Skies we need a good system to work with. So we’re probably going to create our own tool there to make it easy to write complex dialogs. Maybe work on this will also start this year, but we’ll see, the combat system prototype has a higher priority at the moment.

Knowing this November will be used again to work on the combat system so we get closer to something being fun in the end.

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

Another month has passed, but this time there were even two Spine patches! In preparation of the upcoming Ninja 2 release I added some more functionality that is required for it in the updates Spine 1.14.14 and Spine 1.14.15. Most of it is generic enough the be even used by other mods, so that’s a nice thing. Of course I used this update to also fix some small bugs especially affecting the offline mode of Spine.

I’ll try to release updates more frequently now, so one update per month is my goal. Don’t know if it works out that way and the updates won’t be that big, but at least the most urgent stuff will be fixed a little more frequently than it was the case the rest of the year.

The next update will focus on porting the tutorials for developers to our homepage and add at least another one for the new functionality that has been added for Ninja. And Union support shall also finally come to Spine! If you want some functionality to be explained, feel free to contact us. I’ll add some tutorials for the hidden features of Spine either way, but I’ll prioritize the ones requested by you.

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

Tri6: Infinite

Tri6: Infinite again made really great progress this month. We released two updates with many improvements and fixes. The newest version is available via our Discord.

The first update to alpha #5 was released on October 15th. It unlocked all powerups also for singleplayer and so also for mobile. It also fixed bugs with the powerups, added more effects and improved existing ones and adjusted other aspects of gameplay.

Alpha #6 from October 28th fixed the Shock Wave powerup, UI issues for different resolutions and split screen mode, added a new obstacle and code for bots. The bots aren’t part of the game yet, but will be soon. Then you can use your powerups to defeat them so they can’t defeat you anymore!

A good portion of the time spent on Tri6: Infinite in October was spent on research. The newer versions of Unity introduced new ways of coding via the Data Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS). That allows to write more CPU friendly code using the Entity Component System (ECS) and easily utilize all CPU cores via the Job System. I played around with it a lot as I couldn’t use it for Elemental War (Unity version too old) and already could achieve awesome results. If you play the alpha you will see the new data stream obstacle that wouldn’t be possible at all using the old way of coding. It’s very interesting and all our game projects will profit from it in the future. I also ported some other functionality like vehicles and bots to the new system for better performance.

In November we’ll further improve the existing gameplay, add some functionality like Google Play support for the Android version and finally start the graphics work. We already have first results and it looks pretty, pretty awesome. We’ll share some screenshots/renders soon.

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 October 2019.