Any news on when the game will hit Steam?

No news yet, we will be posting an updated timeline near the end of this alpha phase.

Nice break down of the alpha and how content is going to be added during it. I am sure ship upgrades will need a lot of tweaking and balancing over this process.

Looks like the game will be delayed, not too surprising as most Kickstarter are. https://www.projectoriongame.com/news-06-the-road-ahead/

 

With the end of August fast approaching Project Orion is nearing its projected release date. Unfortunately that is the focus of our post today, and we want to be upfront with the news: Project Orion will be delayed.

This is something that we’ve been discussing internally for some time now, and after much deliberation we concluded that this is the best course of action in order to make Project Orion the game we all want it to be. However, we do owe you an apology. We set the release date too hastily. It’s a hard lesson, one to take to heart for the future.

It wasn’t easy coming to this decision. We took a hard look at current workloads and what we needed to get from where we are now to a polished and awesome final product . Even though everyone is working at full speed, we concluded that we need another 16 weeks to get there.

Good new is they don't anticipate any problems and you can check the new roadmap here https://www.projectoriongame.com/roadmap/

 

What’s Changing?

How does this affect the budget?

Obviously increased development time will cost more money. However, we’ve crunched the numbers and the results are good. We don’t anticipate any financial issues resulting from the increased development window.

Are you cutting any features?

Absolutely not. Wanting to stay true to our vision and keep our promise to our backers was the main reason behind extending our development schedule.

How will updates work going forward?

In order to focus more of our time on making Project Orion and pack more interesting and varied content into each update, we will be moving to a bi-weekly update schedule. This means every other week there will be a new entry in the Dev Blog. Of course we will still announce important updates and news as soon as possible.

New vid out showing weapons WIP

update on the blog. https://www.projectoriongame.com/dev-blog-14-development-challenges/

 

One of the biggest challenges we’ve encountered working on Project Orion is getting across just how massive some things are. Way back in the initial concept stages we had planned on most battlefields covering up to 10 square kilometers (roughly 4 square miles). We quickly ran into several issues, the biggest being it was hard to find targets, it was nearly impossible to fill a space with useful content, and things seemed way too small.

This might seem strange, but in order to allow maps of that size everything moved significantly faster, and a 2km long capital ship seems pretty small when you can fly its entire length in 5 seconds. The decision was made to seriously scale back both the size of the battlefield and movement speed.  This brought us closer to what we wanted when we designed the game: fast-paced intense dogfighting taking place in epic close-quarters battles. Still however, the scale was hard to really take in.  We’ve found that this is natural when the environments don’t provide a lot of reference points (space is like that), and you’re moving at high speeds.

With that in mind we put together a quick reference image comparing the scale of the current TDF ships, and yeah the capital ship is actually that big.

Massive ships aside, another issues we encountered with huge levels was actually a serious engine limitation. Unity stores all numbers relating to position and rotation with standard 32-bit floating point numbers. A float can only be so large, so as the size of the number increases you begin to lose decimal precision to compensate. Eventually (around 5km from the world origin of 0,0,0) the precision becomes so low that things seem to shake. What’s happening is precision values are being rounded, causing jerky camera movement.

The developers of Kerbal Space Program had to overcome the same issue, which if you’re interested you can read more about in their dev blog post here. So far we’ve managed to stay within that magic 5km limit, but in future levels we may be pushed to solve the issue once and for all, probably using a similar moving origin system that the Kerbal devs implemented.

Think this a hugely important if a game get it wrong then it does not matter how good the game it will always feel wrong.

Blog update 15 https://www.projectoriongame.com/dev-blog-15-alpha-2-prep/

 

Voice Acting

One of the most important parts of delivering a great story is having a cast of fully voiced characters. To that end we’ve been working on casting all of our major roles over the past couple weeks. We’ve received a huge number of great voice auditions recently and we’ve been meeting and discussing our potential cast frequently. Currently we haven’t made any final decisions, but we’re getting close to narrowing it down.

Once we’ve chosen our cast we’ll be able to begin the recording process for our voice acted content. This means we’ll finally be able to create fully voiced story cut-scenes, allow the crew of your capital ship to interact with you between missions in a meaningful way, or allow you to hear your allies fighting alongside you in battle. Basically, this is a big deal for us.

After we’ve gathered our voice recordings we’ll of course need a system in game to play those lines of dialogue at appropriate times and sync them with their matching subtitles. Over the past week we’ve designed and implemented a system that neatly handles all of these functions, and in the next few days we’ll be testing it to ensure it’s ready for full use in our next Alpha.

Let hope it not as bad as The Tomorrow War then again nothing can be as bad as the voice acting in The Tomorrow War.

No new of the Steam access yet?.

Blog update 15 https://www.projectoriongame.com/dev-blog-15-alpha-2-prep/

 

 

Let hope it not as bad as The Tomorrow War then again nothing can be as bad as the voice acting in The Tomorrow War.

 

No new of the Steam access yet?.

Believe me, we've heard enough terrible voice acting that we wouldn't force it on anyone.  From the casting we've done so far I'm confident that the quality will be there.

Concerning Steam, it and the DRM free version are scheduled to be released simultaneously in December.  We don't have an exact date nailed down yet.  Or were you asking about a different kind of access?

Nope Steams the one I was asking about as I bought the game through the PayPal option and have been waiting for some news about any early access or release.

as you are here, I have a couple of question for you.

1 Will there be any side missions maybe for some one on the base ship, flown outside of the main missions/story.

2 training/ tutorials more of a suggestion this but you may want to think about putting the training/tutorial mission in a simulator which can be accessed in game by the player when on broad the base ship instead of the usual way of having them in the first mission. reason being that I find if I stop playing a game then return to it a few months later I can never remember what does what and have to start the game again in order to access the in game tutorial.

We always looking forward to answering questions, the more the better  🙂

1. We haven't thought too much about side missions at this point.  We're definitely not against having more content but that will really come down to how much time we have after polishing off the important story missions.

2. You're absolutely right, and this is something we've thought a bit about.  Right now the plan was to have the tutorial accessible from the main menu, but having it somewhere in the ship would make it more of a part of the world rather than disconnected from everything else.

2. You're absolutely right, and this is something we've thought a bit about.  Right now the plan was to have the tutorial accessible from the main menu, but having it somewhere in the ship would make it more of a part of the world rather than disconnected from everything else.

I Know I would like to be able to access a simulator at any time in the game but some people may be expecting the first mission to a training mission as normal.

It's just occurred to me that the first mission in the game could be run as a normal training mission, But at the end of it, it is reveled to the player that they have been in the simulator. That way you get both the in game simulator which can be accessed at anytime and those player who expect the first mission get what they expect with a bit of a twist.

Some important news about he release of the game. https://www.projectoriongame.com/news-07-the-state-of-affairs/

 

First off, we would like to thank all those of you who have been following our progress throughout the development of Project Orion. Everything we’re announcing today is intended to be in the best interest of the game and all those who want it to be the best it possibly can.

Previously, we had planned to release Project Orion this December, a goal we thought we could meet if we worked as hard as possible and dedicated every minute possible to the game. Since our Kickstarter finished we’ve done just that,  and have been working non-stop to meet that deadline. Even after all the progress we’ve made the reality is we haven’t come far enough. After a long and hard discussion about the slim possibility of completing Project Orion by December, especially with the the level of quality we want, it was clear that we needed to modify our plans.

 

So, what were we going to do? Pushing the release date wasn’t an option as we’d already done it once, twice was unacceptable. Cutting missions and reducing the scope of the project was immediately dismissed. We know what we want the game to be, and we were not going to release what would be a shadow of our original vision. We considered several other options that could allow us to release by December, but when it came down to it none of us were willing to sacrifice any amount of quality or to compromise the scope and ambitions of the game.

We finally settled for the only plan we could agree on : a two part release.

Two Part Release

We realized the one thing that was stopping us from finishing in December was also the one thing we could sacrifice to keep the project on track – time. As long as we were willing to keep working beyond December we could maintain the scope and quality we wanted for the game. This means Project Orion is still going gold this December, just not all of it. We will instead be releasing Project Orion – Part One.

Part One will contain all of the gameplay features we’ve announced thus far including all combat systems, character interaction, and ship customization. However, the campaign of Part One will consist of the first six missions covering the initial months of the Arckin war, with the remaining missions and conclusion to be released in Part Two. This means the full story of Project Orion will be split between two releases, but there will still be plenty of content for you to play through come January 8th.

Yes, Part One has an official release date of January 8th, 2016,  launching on Steam and DRM free!

Project Orion – Part One will release January 8th 2016!

We realize that this may raise some questions and concerns, so we’ll try to clarify a few things right away:

• Anyone who purchases or has purchased Project Orion will receive Part One and Part Two. Part Two is not an expansion or DLC, it is a free addition to the game.
• We are not removing features, missions, or any other content because of these changes.
• We will not need additional funding to complete Part Two, we will never ask you to pay more.

 

For those of you who contributed to Project Orion on Kickstarter and are looking forward to your physical rewards, such as the Collector’s Edition of the game, we will be reaching out to you in the near future regarding when and how you would like those rewards to be distributed.

Don't forget about us who bought the physical game through PayPal.

 

Don't forget about us who bought the physical game through PayPal.

Don't worry, we definitely haven't.  We should be reaching out to everyone later this week.  Also, good idea for the simulator/tutorial integration, I'll definitely be running it by the team 🙂

Couple of major changes to the game in the latest dev blog https://www.projectoriongame.com/dev-blog-18-narrowing-our-focus/

New blog update https://www.projectoriongame.com/dev-blog-19-holiday-update/

When that Steam release coming.

New dev log out. https://www.projectoriongame.com/dev-blog-20/

With so many changes they could do with doing some new video.

New game play video out and blog https://www.projectoriongame.com/dev-blog-21/

Gone a bit Battlestar Galactica at the start   , like the little detail of the thruster being fired on the ship as it turns , weapon sound are still bit on the weedy side and what is that red honeycomb that appears, shields?.

 

Gone a bit Battlestar Galactica at the start   , like the little detail of the thruster being fired on the ship as it turns , weapon sound are still bit on the weedy side and what is that red honeycomb that appears, shields?.

Glad to see you like the launch tunnel, it was definitely Battlestar inspired.  I've forwarded your feedback on the weapon sounds to our audio guy, and he agrees. He's been wanting to take another crack at them for a while, but has been pretty busy with voice acting.

That red honeycomb indicates the edge of the level.  It's not the most elegant way of showing it, but we haven't thought of a better way of doing it yet.

That red honeycomb indicates the edge of the level.  It's not the most elegant way of showing it, but we haven't thought of a better way of doing it yet.

You could always just have the ship computer/AI tell the player to "stay on target" (guess which films that from ) and have the player ship change course automatically.

You could always just have the ship computer/AI tell the player to "stay on target" (guess which films that from ) and have the player ship change course automatically.

Haha, yeah we do have code in there for a voice prompt when you go beyond the border but we've never tried taking control of the ship to force you back.  Might give that a try in the future to see how it feels.

I would definitely say take the red honeycomb out as it just looks totally out of place.

New dev blog out https://www.projectoriongame.com/dev-blog-22/

 

Last week we ran our first large-scale playtest session in almost a year, and were happy to report it went great!

It took place at Algonquin College (where Project Orion began) and involved almost 30 current Game Development students.  We’d like to take a moment to thank all those students for playing and everyone who helped organize the playtest, it will definitely help make Project Orion a better game!

Having the testers and developers in the same room provides a great opportunity to see issues that might otherwise go unreported.  The playtest involved two Missions with different environments and objectives, and our primary goal was to get as much gameplay feedback as possible.  Our testers provided us with great detailed feedback on what they liked, what they didn’t, and most importantly why they held those opinions.

The immediate result is that we’ve prioritized several changes that will make the game drastically more fun and satisfying to play.  We’ve also compiled a list of new features and issues to fix that are lower priority but will definitely help improve the experience.

For our Alpha testers reading this and wondering “When will we get to test the new build?!” we have good news: we plan on having a new release within a month!  The work that went into the playtest was exactly what needed to be done for the next Alpha build, so we’re very close to having a new version ready to release.  The only things remaining are those newly identified high priority issues and putting the final touches on the Project Orion launcher so we can release patches and new builds easily.

New warp video and dev blog out https://www.projectoriongame.com/dev-blog-23/

Think that might be a nod to Starwars or the first Star Trek film. 😎  wounder if they sorted that honeycomb issue out.

Looks pretty good, I take it the warp process can be interrupted by outside forces other than you stopping the process?

wounder if they sorted that honeycomb issue out.

The honeycomb effect at the edge of the mission area is still on the list of things to improve. For now we've toned it down to make it less solid-looking and less intrusive.

Looks pretty good, I take it the warp process can be interrupted by outside forces other than you stopping the process?

Definitely.  The main thing that will interrupt the process is becoming unaligned with the vector, so collisions would definitely cause issues there.  Also, if anything were to come between you and the warp target the jump would no longer be safe and interrupted as a result. There may be more mission-specific things as well, like warp field disruptors and such.

We're also toying with the idea of the jump requiring enough energy to execute. As an example, if your shields are online and you're taking damage you would quickly be too low on energy to jump.

new dev blog out. https://www.projectoriongame.com/dev-blog-24/

 

Customization Update

Ship customization is a big part of Project Orion.  It’s the best way for us to allow players to tailor their experience to their specific strategy and playstyle.  This month we’ve been working on everything from the user interface to how we handle weapon and attachment data internally.

The first thing we should talk about is how you get more weapons and attachments while playing.  Previously we tried an approach based on a currency we were calling â€œresearch points”.  Completing missions would reward you with these points which would in turn allow you to acquire a new attachments.  They were limited, so you could only acquire  a limited number of attachments by the end of the campaign.  While this added to replayability and made choosing a bit more difficult we also realized it limited the player’s ability to try new things.  We’ve now moved to a tiered approach, with new tiers being unlocked as the story progresses.  You can then mix and match all the new weapons and abilities without any artificial limitations.

The only limitation now is how much power you have to work with. Different attachments have different power requirements, so you’ll have to balance more powerful attachments with those of other systems. Another important consideration to make is that remaining free power is available to use in combat when routing energy, so maxing out your energy usage with attachments might not be the best decision.

We’ve also been spending a lot of time implementing the new user interface for customizing the Orion. While the layout and appearance are likely to change down, the road the UI is now fully functional and ready to go! This is one of the last big milestones we needed to reach before we felt comfortable releasing a new Alpha build, so stay tuned for more information on that in the coming weeks.

Here is short video showing how the interface functions. Excuse out placeholder assets!

 

 

This month a lot of work has gone into deciding which attributes of the Orion are controlled by the attachments you have equipped. Some are fairly straightforward, like top speed, hull strength, and shield resilience. Others focus on the Orion’s unique energy abilities, and in many cases there is an entirely separate set of specifications for when energy is routed to a system.

All of this information was previously saved in a way that made it impossible to modify once the game had been built, making it very difficult to test and balance these values. To remedy this issue we spent a lot of time converting all essential data to be read from external files. This is typically how this kind of data would be stored, but unfortunately it wasn’t how we initially designed these systems two years ago. While this isn’t a change you will see directly when playing Project Orion it will really help our internal testing and balancing, resulting in a better experience overall.

Read the rest on the blog.