As we reach the end of June we’re racing ahead towards trying to get an alpha out sometime in July along with the beta at PAX.
Here are some screenshots of where things are (some old, some new):
Note: Shadowing isn’t in yet so these are not representative of what the final game (or even the beta) will look like.
Cities exist on the map itself. Clicking anywhere on the city will bring up the city menu.
Players can zoom in and out as they see fit. Players design roads ala Simcity but they are built automatically by workers (similar to Civ IV).
Players can zoom in very close to cities. Eventually you’ll be able to see your population at work. It’s purely cosmetic but it’ll cool to watch your cities grow and thrive.
The tactical battles are very different than what we’ve seen before in these types of games. The best way I can describe the battles is that they’re tactical with XCom being a major inspiration but designed to be relatively short. Depending on how well they turn out, we may make the tactical battles an optional mini-game that people can play online if they just want to play a simple arena-style strategy game.
Players will be able to zoom in and watch the battles very close up. This screenshot is of an internal technology demo so it’s designed to show you what our goal is.
We’ve been hesitant to show too many screenshots until the shadowing is in. Those of you familiar with this stuff know how weak modern games look if you turn off the shadows. We’ve been working on a shadowing system that scales really well but still looks good.
Also this week we’ve been developing a new type of font system that is compatible with DirectX 9 (we’re not using DirectX 10 or 11 and won’t be until Windows XP is very legacy). Ironically, DirectX 11 has a pretty decent font system but few cards support it. But the font system we’re doing will let us have really cool alpha blended fonts on a variety of textured backgrounds. If you look at most PC games, they either have few fonts or have them on a black background. But we want players to (optionally) be able to read a lot of information on the world they’re creating. Each game will play very differently.
The beta version should be ready in around 60 days. Hard to believe that we’re finally getting close after all this time. Players who pre-order it will get access to the betas and qualify to have access to the alpha version.
More to come.