Hey there AFF Community!
The time has finally come to update the public branch with all the changes we've been making to the game over the last few months! We've received some incredibly detailed feedback while releasing the test builds - big thanks for that! AFF certainly wouldn't be the same game without all the late-night discussions with our lovely Community!
While our work here is certainly not done, we now feel like the new UI and all the massive changes it brings are ready to be released to a wider audience. So just to recap what this update brings:
New UI
We've completely redone the HUD and all the menus. AFF's gameplay should be much easier to understand thanks to that - the HUD is more readable, the objectives are clearly highlighted, the flow of the menus is more user-friendly. We're aware not everybody will like with the new, less stylized aesthetic. We're not 100% sure whether these are the final looks of the UI either but iterating upon it is also an order of magnitude easier than what we had to deal with in the old UI. That means we can also respond to player feedback with fixes and new features much faster now.
New soundtrack
The game now features an entire album's worth of music by celebrated cinematic composer
Edward Patrick White. The tracks are picked dynamically based on the current situation around the player - ambient melodies for calmer periods, more up-beat tracks for combat and faction-specific themes for intro and debriefing sequences.
Visual customization
We had to add something special to reward our awesome Community for the patience you guys and girls have, for dealing with us and waiting for the public update for so long. We've implemented a camouflage customization system where you can pick patterns and colours to paint onto your armour. Separate themes can be selected for infantry and each vehicle. If you don't want to see other players' customization, we've also included an option to not display them on your client in the settings menu.
We're not sure yet whether we'll tie it to any sort of in-game progression or achievements. We do understand that progression appeals to a lot of gamers but we don't want a feature to exist purely for the sake of unlocks. The AFF ethos is to give players ways to have fun in their own way, express their own style of playing, not artificially limit the choices. So we'll see where this goes, nevertheless we want this feature to be a milestone marking a new period for AFF - a period of new, shiny content.
Lukather Seaside Spaceport maps
Speaking of content, we've added 2 maps, for the Incursion and the Territories game modes, based on the old Lukather Spaceport location we had in the early prototypes of AFF. You'll get to fight through landing pads, cargo areas, passenger terminals and in the parking lots on this one, with plenty of opportunities for both close-quarters and long-range combat. These maps also focus on providing the players with more light-weight armoured assets - LAVs, mechs and gunships will help fighting through the tights areas between freight containers and damaged structures of the spaceport.
And we're just getting started with this! Watch this space for much more content coming your way in the nearest future! In one of the previous announcements we've also mentioned we'll be releasing experimental maps to the test branch after this giant update. We will probably skip doing that and instead release them directly to the public branch, and retire the test server for now. The reason for this is we don't want to split the small Community any further - and those maps aren't in particularly early stages either. They're close enough to completion to not be out of place on the public branch in the near future.
Other notable changes previously only present on the test branch include:
- New spotting mechanics
Spotted infantry only remain so while you have line of sight. Enemies generate a stationary "?" icon when they make noise or are tagged by friendlies when out of sight. Big vehicles - capital ships and tanks - will remain spotted all the time. This enables more nuanced gameplay, asking the players to be more aware of their surroundings, while at the same time keeping the big battles centered on key assets like capital ships.
- Changes to Territories mode rules
We've been experimenting with the Territories game mode and now blowing up enemy vehicles will impede opposing team's progress, subtracting a few percent from their score accumulated by capturing objectives. How many percent depends on the importance of the destroyed vehicle. This should encourage the teams to conserve their assets more carefully, especially defend their battleships in space. When your team's vehicle is lost, the whole team will get a message informing about the setback.
- User settings should no longer be wiped between updates
Configuration files were getting overwritten whenever Steam decided to touch them, resulting in losing loadout configurations, graphics settings and so on. They should now merge correctly every release instead of getting overridden, unless we deliberately need to reset some settings.
- Smoother interactions on boarding and docking
We've put a lot of effort into making the ships behave in a more stable manner on docking and boarding, especially online. Dropships should now properly attach to enemy hulls without phasing through the target ships or station and fighters will dock for rearming much more gracefully.
One thing conspicuous by its absence is the tutorial in the main menu. We had to disable it because, with the advent of the new UI and all the changes to the game mechanics, it got really outdated and broken. We'll re-introduce it in a more comprehensible form in the nearest future.
Whole changelog can be found under the link below, as it's simply too big to fit it into a Steam announcement:
FULL CHANGELOG
