This update has been a long time coming. Progress on the update was slow initially, due to time constraints. It did eventually pick up, but there were many issues that soon arose. The AI behaviors had many unforeseen bugs that needed to be corrected, the game had serious errors that made it unplayable but these errors were only present in the build of the game and not in the editor, and many other issues. As such, what should have been released a few weeks ago has been delayed until today. However, this update is not out and contains many things needed to get closer to completion of alpha 1.

Spanish Infantry Model

The Spanish infantry are now modeled in the game and feature the same animations as the American soldier model. These new models are more optimized, provide greater detail, and are more historically accurate. 

In the previous update, the infantry models had a few issues regarding animations not being accurate and having guns float away from the soldier’s hands. That has been resolved in this update and gun models are not correctly attached to the soldier.

There are also LOD (level-of-detail) models for all infantry models. This squeezes a bit more performance out of the game by reducing the number of polygons being rendered for soldiers that are further away.

Hitmarkers and Damage Scores

Another new feature is the readdition of hitmarkers when hitting enemies. In a similar vein as other FPS games such as Battlefield, there are also damage score indicators that appear alongside hitmarkers to clarify to the player what parts of the enemy the hit (headshot, body, legs, arms, etc.). As the name implies, there are certain scores given to the player for shooting certain areas of an enemy soldier. Right now these scores do nothing, but in the next update a new victory/defeat screen will be implemented that will display the total score accumulated by the player during a battle. In the future, the score will also be used as a way to buy upgrades in the story mode of the game.

Artillery Implementation

The artillery was one of the few aspects of the game in the original version that worked mostly as intended. Therefore, when I re added this to the development map, I did not change too much in terms of the coding. I did make some minor adjustments in the transitions between map and artillery view, made some better UI improvements while playing as artillery, and fixed the notorious bug where artillery shells would “bounce” off of the ground or objects before exploding.

One change that I have made that I’m unsure if I’ll keep is to make the artillery unable to take any damage. The AI mostly avoids fighting artillery and the limited movement of the artillery makes them completely helpless if someone were to try attacking them. So to balance things out, I’ve drastically reduced the amount of ammo the artillery has while also making them immortal for the time being. This may change in the future depending on what everyone thinks of this change.

The Infantry AI (where it is and where it will be going)

I originally planned to finish all the infantry AI states in this update (the last few defend and scatter behaviors and all of the “survival” state behaviors). However, I did not have the time to implement these states since I was busy fixing the other behaviors to be functional. In addition, there are a few AI states that I now realize are going to need to be implemented that I did not know needed to (such as a state for infantry to run away from oncoming artillery shells). 

Due to the slow progress of the AI, I do not plan on making future updates to focus exclusively on the AI. Rather, I plan to work on the AI over time while making other components of the game. This way development can still progress normally and I do not need to backtrack on fixing AI states that were already implemented.

This all being said, the infantry AI is in a pretty decent place at the moment. There are a few quirks and fixes that will need to be ironed out, but for the most part everything works as intended and the AI can be quite challenging to fight against.

The Next Update (and Important News About the Itch.io Page)

The next update should be done much quicker. It will feature the new victory/defeat screens that appear at the end of a battle, fixes to the map objective points, a new damage indicator graphic that tells the player which direction they are being attacked from (this is a common feature in most FPS games and it’s surprising that I haven’t implemented it until now), and a new game settings menu that will be present both in the main menu as well as in-game. Afterwards, all of the content from the past updates that have been added to the development map will finally be carried over to all the other maps in the game. This will finally replace all of the old content of the game with the changes that have been made since the initial launch last year.

This will also be the last time that all the various versions of the game will be available on the Itch.io page. Itch.io only allows up to ten files to be available on a game’s page at once. Therefore, the next update will remove some of the older versions of the game from the download section (specifically, version 0.1.112 through version 0.1.115). If you still want to try out these versions after their removal, please make sure to reach out in the Unsung Heroes 1898 Community Discord server where I can send out the files to anyone interested.

Quick Reminders

Just as a quick reminder, all additional content in this update is only available on the development map of the game, not on the other maps (as stated before, this will be added to preexisting maps in the next update). You can join the Unsung Heroes 1898 Community Discord server (https://discord.com/invite/p8CA9qXgCN). This post is also available on the Venomic Games website: https://venomicgames.com/?p=734

Known Issues

(NOTE: many of these issues were present in the previous update and will be resolved soon)

• Some things that should count as cover, do not. This will be fixed in the main maps in future updates.
• The objective points have a “progress bar” above them showing if they have been captured or not. This is still not fully implemented yet and does not rotate to follow the player.
• Infantry can not see enemies that are too far away (even with clear line of sight). This is due to testing values on a smaller map and will be fixed at a later date.
• A bloody screen graphic can sometimes be seen on the artillery view. This is a bug that has been fixed since the making of this update’s build.
• Commanding officer SFX (specifically the sound coming from the horse) is quite off. This will be updated in the future with better sounds that fit the model’s animations and movements better. In addition, the death SFX and animations are still not implemented yet.

If you find any additional issues or bugs in the game, please report them in the community discord server.