Greetings,pilots!

We might have not updated you much during these past few weeks, but rest assured, Strike Wing is moving ahead at a rapid pace. The past few months have been critical to the project and we have made some pretty big steps towards completing the game for release.

So here’s what happened:

• HUD Overhaul – so, for most of the people who have been following us on Facebook or Twitter (if you don’t already you should, btw) this whole HUD business is not really news. However, what happened was that we have totally replaced the old interface for the game and we obtained something that’s easier to use, more clear, elegant, has better feedback and gives overall a much better experience to the player. We have some pictures that you can gaze at to see the difference between our placeholder HUD and the new and improved one.

On the left side there’s the old HUD, on the right side the new design.

• Internals overhaul – many internal systems of our engine have suffered changed to allow us to create a more stable game, faster. They may not be apparent to the naked eye, but rest assured, the game will be launched quicker and with a higher quality because of these changes.

• Game center integration – everyone loves achievements and getting stuff, ranking the top on leaderboards and other things like that. We worked to add proper leaderboard  and achievement support for the game. You will be able to compete with your friends for leaderboard supremacy (in the first phase) or gather various achievements. These achievements are not your run of the mill rewards, instead we aim to create a mix of easy and difficult ones. Our philosophy is that in order to master a game you should play it in several styles, sometimes out of your comfort zone, and we’ll use the achievements to guide you on this path.

• Menus overhaul – The menus,and general controls have suffered dramatic improvements, both in terms of functionality as well as esthetics. Strike Wing is a game which will offer you a lot of things to do, and our menus will allow you to do them without effort.

• Public presentation – In early April we have presented our game to a large audience at a local game development gathering. During the presentation we have also told the story of Strike Wing and it’s “father” project, Heresy War.

• Playtests – Several playtests have taken place with people from outside of the development team, ranging from hardcore gamers to people which dabble more in Facebook games than anything else. People loved the game, regardless of their experience level, feedback was given and has been taken into account. It was very interesting to see how some were rushing to blow stuff up and others were acting as if playing Dark Souls. Both very positive experiences. We even had one person, which after half an hour of playing the game for the first time went to shatter all the dev team records in one of our missions (and no, we don’t suck at our own game)

• Expansions – we plan to expand the initial experience with new missions,  ships, and other surprises to keep the game fresh. These expansions will be available for download for FREE. The beauty of this system is that you get to choose what content you want on your device, update it whenever you desire and it allows us to give you more things to do with the game. Groundwork has already begun on our first expansion pack which should become available for download shortly after the game is released.

Next steps:

• Testing testing testing – it’s very important for us to launch Strike Wing with as few problems as possible (ideally 0) so after we finish the work on menus efforts will go into testing the game and fixing eventual issues that appear.

• Polishing – Better effects, shinier graphics, fine-tuning of the experience. This is polishing, and it’s something that we’ll focus on during the last few weeks before release.

• Release – We can hardly wait for it, really, so stay tuned 🙂

TLDR: The development is moving fast towards release, more stuff for the game will be free and available after launch.

Over and out

PS: Raptor Rising will resume soon as well