Development Update - August 2025

Hello Backers,

I hope you all had a wonderful and relaxing long weekend! August saw us hit another important milestone on our development journey: the completion of nearly all programming tasks related to ground combat gameplay, with only a few animation sub-tasks remaining to tackle in September. This means our development velocity remains on-schedule, and we are ready to move onto the next important pillar of our game’s design: planetary navigation and exploration.

Programming Update

This month boasted many exciting additions to our ground combat gameplay loop. Maps are now obscured by dynamic fog-of-war, requiring more tactical planning by the player to explore the level, discover the enemy, and avoid ambushes. Player characters that are reduced to zero hit points now enter a downed state and need to be stabilized. The player can choose whether to patch them up and risk them continuing while injured, or evacuate them back to their ship for treatment. Two of the biggest changes implemented this month were Multifloor Support for our ground levels and Enemy AI Combat Behaviors

A medic uses his medkit to stabilize a downed teammate

Enemy AI Behavior

Enemy units now follow a complex decision tree when deciding where to move and which player unit to engage, based on one of many unique behavior patterns assigned to each enemy. Enemies will position themselves to place cover between them and their targets, set themselves up for the best chance to hit, and protect themselves from being flanked. More experienced enemies will attempt to outflank the player's party and pin them down so their teammates can advance. When losing, enemies will attempt to fall back to more defensible positions. The enemy AI is now also smart enough to use many of the special abilities and items we’ve added to the game, like grenades and special melee attacks.

Multifloor

Our level grid system now supports different elevations, opening up a whole new world of possibilities for our level designers, and making combat encounters truly three-dimensional. Ladders, staircases, catwalks, towers, rooftops, and ramps, etc. are now fully supported, dramatically increasing the tactical possibilities available to players and enemies alike. In addition, Isaac was able to completely automate the way cover is calculated, meaning our level designers no longer need to tag each piece of terrain with the appropriate cover type, greatly speeding up the level design process and eliminating much of the complexity and edge cases introduced with multifloor support.

Test level showing pathfinding working with stairs and ledges

Art Update

Environment Art

Thanks to your generous support, we have acquired several new, incredible looking environment art packages and have begun implementing them into our level designs, starting with some exciting industrial assets for planetary locations like factories, spaceports, and asteroid mines.

Character Art

Our partners at MLC Studios have completed the base models and animation rigging for our male and female characters, and have moved on to hairstyle and outfit modelling

3D Character Hairstyle Model

Jumpsuit concept over the female base model

Spaceship Art

Mark has completed designs for our second starter ship, a dedicated cargo hauler. Unlike the nimble and fast cutter, the Barque is slow and lumbering, but makes up for it with greatly increased cargo and crew capacity. Where the fragile cutter relies on its superior speed to pick its battles and escape those it can’t win, the Barque depends upon its firepower and increased hull integrity to muscle its way through problems. This ship provides a great alternative for captains who wish to make their fortune through trade between the colonies.

Barque Color Sketch

In-game model test of the Barque trading broadsides with a pirate sloop

Barque and Cutter side-by-side comparison

Thank you all again for your support in making this project possible. I can't wait to share our next update!

Best Regards,

Vincent De Tommaso

Game Director

Full Changelog

Ground Combat Gameplay

Unarmed fighting - Units with no weapons equipped can perform unarmed melee attacks

Dual Weapon Fighting - Units can now equip a one-handed weapon in each hand

Cover Animations - units now crouch or press against the wall when taking cover

Fog of War - Areas of the map that are out of sight from the player’s units are now obscured by the fog of war

Fog of War: Full Cover - Allow units taking full cover along wall corners or behind columns to see around them, revealing FoW

Run Animation for Movement - Sped up movement speed and added a run animation if the unit is moving a long distance

Grenades can be thrown around heavy cover - units in heavy cover are no longer blocked from throwing grenades around it

Implement Skill System - Units now have access to skills that improve their combat abilities

Actions Work with Multi-floor - now that levels support verticality, we went back through all existing actions to make sure they still functioned properly and corrected any unexpected behavior

Change Crit Damage Calculation - changed critical hit damage from a flat percentage bonus to a specific integer value

FoW with Multifloor - Ensured the Fog of War system works correctly on levels with terrain of varying heights

Utility Slots - As detailed in the game design document, every character now has two utility slots for equipping items like grenades, medkits, scanners, etc.

Utility Items for Grenade & Medkit actions - grenades and medkits now depend on having the relevant items equipped in utility slots rather than being hardcoded actions

Limit use of certain actions - some utility items can only be used a certain number of times before being exhausted (no more unlimited grenades!)

Armor & Accessory Slots - Characters now have slots to equip armor, clothing, headgear, and accessories that affect their attributes and provide bonuses in and out of combat

Outfits - equipping different outfits to a character changes the physical appearance of the character’s model to reflect it

Prevent certain actions if elevation difference beyond threshold - with the addition of multifloor, actions like melee and medkit can no longer be used on adjacent units if there’s a large difference in elevation between them (ie no more hitting someone two stories above you with a sword)

Injury & Death - Instead of dying outright, player units with no injuries who are reduced to zero hitpoints enter a downed state, and will bleed out if not stabilized by a medkit in a limited number of turns. After combat, downed units are revived with an injury, which gives a large penalty to their combat abilities. The player then has the choice to risk them carrying on and dying, or evacuate them back to the ship for treatment

Ground Combat AI

Enemy AI Ranged Attack behavior - Implemented a complex decision tree determining how the enemy chooses targets and which weapon to use. The enemy will now also use grenades and reload their weapons

Enemy AI Movement Behavior - Each enemy in a level is now programmed with one of seven unique behaviors, which determines how they move through terrain to engage the player

Enemy AI Melee Behavior - Implemented a complex decision tree determining how the enemy chooses targets in melee. The enemy will now also use special abilities like charge and cleave

Ground AI Switching Behaviors - Enemies will change their behavior based on the conditions of combat. For example, they will fall back into better positions if losing, or pursue the player if the player tries to do the same.

Enemy Groups Move to Cover when Revealed - to make fights more challenging, enemy groups get a free reaction move when revealed by the player, diving to nearby cover

Ground Combat Level Design

Ground Combat Base Scene - Created a base scene with all the necessary gameplay components as a starting point for level designers when creating new environments

Spawn Points - Rather than having to place each enemy individually, game designers can now place spawn points in levels, where enemy groups will spawn around. Not only does this simplify level design, it also improves replayability by increasing encounter variety. There’s no longer a danger of players memorizing which and where enemies spawn on every level

Grouping Enemies - Level designers can now pre-populate different groups of enemies of different types and different difficulty ratings that the spawn system will pull from with a preprogrammed degree of randomness, allowing greater encounter variety and improving replayability

Multifloor Implementation - ground levels now support different elevations, allowing ramps, staircases, ladders, climbing, and falling.

Ladders - game designers can now add ladders to levels that units can climb to reach higher ground

User Interface / User Experience

Right Click to Rotate Camera - The camera can now be freely rotated by holding down right click and move the mouse

Refactor camera rotation hotkeys - The Q & E keys now rotate the camera in 90 degree increments

Allow Queuing Actions from Movement Ghost - Players can now order units to perform actions while the movement ghost is active. The ordered unit will move to the indicated location and then perform the selected action

Sentry UI Icon - Units in Sentry mode will now have an icon displayed above their health bar to indicate it

Camera Follows Enemies on Enemy Turn - The Camera will follow enemies who are visible on their turn

Character Cards - The UI now shows character cards for each member in the Character’s party, which displays their current status, and can be clicked to select that unit

Remove Turn Counter - The turn counter was not conveying useful information, and has been replaced with a simple indicator stating who’s turn it is (ie enemy or player)

Don’t Display Hit percentages over Player units during enemy turn - The enemy’s chance to hit when shooting at the player is no longer displayed over the player’s units

Fog of War: Don’t follow hidden enemies - The camera doesn’t follow enemies who are hidden by FoW during the enemy turn

Display remaining Action Cooldown - Display action cooldowns on the action button UI

Pause System - The game can now be paused. This is a prerequisite for the menu and dialogue systems

Tech Debt

Refactor Offensive Actions to Inherit Melee or Shoot Action - code clean-up to reduce areas that need to be changed or updated when balancing or writing new actions

Refactor Finding Cover - Rather than calculating cover for the entire level at load time, cover is now calculated at runtime by the currently active unit. Besides vastly improving performance and reducing level load time, this also greatly simplifies the level design process, as game designers no longer need to tag each piece of terrain individually with the appropriate cover type.

Additional Weapon Properties - added fields for name, type, and armor penetration parameters to weapon scriptable objects

Research Best Approach for Mod Support - What separates games with a 5 year sales life and a 20 year sales life is a healthy modding community. To ensure our game is ready for Steam Workshop integration and modding without requiring major refactoring of our code, we devoted some dev cycles to exploring the best approaches to Unity modding, the findings of which will be used to inform our code architecture going forward.