Development update 7/1/2015

[Nacho84]

Hello all,

Happy New Year! I hope you had a great time during the Christmas break.

In this post I would like to share with you the progress we've making since the 1.1.0 patch was released in mid-November, in order to give you an idea on what to expect in the upcoming months.

The biggest task that has been taking most of our time is the mobile port for the iOS platform. After facing quite a bunch of technical issues, which ranged from making changes to the way the UI information is stored so that our development environment stopped crashing each time we attempted to build the game to spending countless hours trying different approaches in order to make the game textures look good while keeping the application size as small as possible, we finally managed to get the game working on a real iPad (see the photos below). We've sent an interim build to Slitherine yesterday morning, so that they can start performing internal testing.

SPM-iOS-MainMenu.jpg (221.11 KiB) Viewed 3479 times

A couple of nice points about the iOS version:
* Unlike the desktop version, the main menu loads immediately after briefly displaying a splash screen (i.e., there's no intermediate 'Loading Graphical Resources' screen).
* You can seamlessly play PBEM matches against clients using the desktop platform. You can even start a match on your PC/Mac at home and then resume your game in the train while going to work.

SPM-iOS-Personnel.jpg (236.6 KiB) Viewed 3479 times

On top of the mobile version, we have been adding a few new gameplay and UI changes, which we expect to roll out for desktop platforms as a patch sometime in February. The changes include a new set of photos that replace all the existing silhouettes used for employees, improvements to the Headquarters screens (e.g., critical information about programs and missions is now more easily accessible) and gameplay mechanics such as the addition of 'Tiger Teams', among others. Please make sure to check the changelog and our website in order to learn more about the upcoming changes.

SPM-iOS-Headquarters.jpg (242.32 KiB) Viewed 3479 times

Last but not least, we are working on the renders and the animations for the Luna 17 mission, which features the Lunokhod 1 rover. This was suggested on the Steam forums and we're planning to include it in the next update as well.

Lunokhod01.jpg (217.35 KiB) Viewed 3479 times

Please let us know if you have any questions.

Cheers,

Lunokhod02.jpg (229.26 KiB) Viewed 3479 times

[jjknap]

Luna 17 looks awesome! Thanks for the update!

[Kalesin]

Good news!!!!

[nats]

Great to see this game continuing development past release and especially to see real faces for the staff members.

[GreenMiniSean]

Glad to hear iOS version is progressing, please keep us updated.