Summer Release Update
2017-06-24Hey folks. I wanted to give a quick update on the next Airship Commander release! Things have slowed down quite a bit in 2017. The main reason for that was the team had to get day jobs to support our families. For my art partner (who's also a new father) that meant pretty much the end of their involvement. For me however, my passion for military steampunk airships duking it out over smoggy cities remains undiminished. I've been steadily making progress on weekends and evenings, with most of my energy going into picking up the asset/art slack. This has meant I've been spending a lot of time far down the rabbit hole of 3d modeling, texturing and animation. The next release will include the first pass of those asset swaps. Two good examples are below: Vessel Augment Prop (old): Vessel Augment Prop (new): Strategic Room (old): Strategic Room (new):
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Beyond the new authoring burden of creating the assets, optimizing these spiffy props to run at VR friendly framerates on minimum spec machines has taken a lot of time. One of the main goals of the next release to ensure this new art isn't killing perf. The install footprint has definitely increased (getting close to 2 gigs). Last thing I'll touch on is a rough roadmap to completing the game. The summer release should be out by August at the latest. The current plan is to follow that up with a Fall release that includes the last major features being integrated (bombing and deploying minefields). After that, we hope to release the final Early Access build in the Winter. That build will incude tutorials and other first time user experience improvements. I feel pretty good about those commitments, but like anything in life, they're not guarantees. What I can promise you, without a millisecond of hesitation, is that Airship Commander will be finished. One tremendous advantage of working on things you are white-knuckle passionate about is you MAKE the time to push them forward. Realizing this game continues to be one of the greatest experiences of my entire life. To excavate these images from my head that have been haunting me for two decades, and make them VR-real is unlike any creative endeavor I've participated in. Going full One-Man-Band and creating the art content has made it even more magical. Failing to follow through on finishing my dream game just isn't a possibility, and I hope you'll come along for the ride!
