Frontiers Reach News

Hello. It's been a while. If you've been following the other platforms I post on then you've gotten a glimpse of what I've been working on. Nothing is quite ready for release just yet, but I'm posting today to share with you everything I've worked on. What you're about to see is no doubt a LOT of work in a short time, but it highlights an important aspect of brand of development. Which is that I can get a lot more done when I'm not trying to manage a team on top of everything else AND a day job. That said, let's get into the details of what's on the horizon for Frontiers Reach and why the heck I'm not ready to release an update yet.


[h2]Flight Mechanic Overhaul:[/h2]
The flight mechanic has been completely overhauled. This should eliminate some of the crazy spinning that could be experienced in the previous one. The most important feature of this overhaul is on the developer side. It's been drastically simplified to make it easier on my end to create and publish new starfighters. This new flight mechanic however feels a bit more like a traditional space game however, and less like an arcade aerial combat simulator though elements of that still survive. Below is some earlier test footage from a scene specifically setup to test the new flight mechanic in a combat environment.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


[h2]Weapons System Overhaul:[/h2]
Stripped down and streamlined for ease of development was the goal on this one. Not much has changed aside from how it works on the developer side. These changes will make it easier to introduce new and interesting weapon types into the game. The biggest change of which is the ability to swap out warheads to allow for interesting weapon types but we'll get to that in future updates. Another significant change is the elimination of cannon ammo. From now on players will have unlimited cannon ammo but will have to balance that with thermal load on the craft.


[h2]Cockpit View Overhaul:[/h2]
Believe it or not, I still have more I want to add and some tweaks I would like to make to indicator behaviors before I'm ready to call this done but it is in a state that is pretty darn close to completion. Below is an image and a breakdown of the different gauges and indicators.

1 - Boresight Scope : Not much has changed here. I'm researching some methods of increasing overall rendering efficiency. Eventually this will be setup with drift and lead so when the player puts the crosshair on something the rounds are hitting it, if it's in range.

2 - Fuel gauge : The resources have been simplified. You will use fuel as you play and the use will increase when you engage afterburner or RCS. This is something of a soft time limit as it can be refilled if you request a reload from the Heliosiren. Eventually the fuel icon will flash as fuel gets low.

3 - Thermals Gauge : Anything you do outside of normal operation of the craft will generate additional heat. Eventually the thermal icon will flash as the craft runs hotter.

4 - Throttle & Speed Gauges : This pair of gauges will show you the current throttle position and speed in meters per second. The blue light on the throttle readout indicates the afterburner state. The blue light on the speed gauge is a low speed warning indicator.

5 - Health & Damage Indicator : Indicates the health state of the player. Right now there is a red bar that indicates health percentage. The starfighter graphic doesn't do anything currently but I'm thinking either of changing the color to better communicate the current state or to show off damage hot spots. Right now the players health is unified. Meaning getting shot anywhere deals damage to the craft as a whole rather than to individual components. I am as yet undecided as to how granular I want to get with player health.

6 - Ammo Gauge Cluster : One of the more complex gauges on the instrument panel to read. This shows current weapon selection, current weapon ammo, current weapon state, and the reload time if it has one. Right now all reload times are the same but that will be changing.

7 - Wayfinding Arrow : This arrow indicator tracks the current target. However in the future it will also be used to indicate direction to waypoints and change color based upon what it is tracking.

8 - Angle of Attack & Gravitational Orientation Indicator : This gauge is one of my own design but is actually quite simple to read. The inner circle will drift showing the crafts true direction of travel with the arrow accentuating it. The blue arrows indicate the direction of gravitational pull.

9 - Mission Information Panel : Displays information relevant to the current mission objective.

10 - Radar : The radar has been completely rebuilt and now supports a true refresh rate and is affected by the module system in terms of range.

11 - Countermeasures Indicator : Indicates the current state of the countermeasure module that is current equipped.

12 - Rotation Control System Indicator : Indicates whether or not the rotation control system is currently active.




[h2]Starfighter Shading Overhaul:[/h2]
Starfighter coloring is now fixed and will blend the way it is supposed to. Most of the strange coloring issues are now gone though there are still some here and there that need to be addressed. The biggest change is in general cleanup of how the paint layers blend with one another and how wear and tear is blended into the paint layers. This overhaul also includes the addition of rain effects on the hull of the fighters which is tied into the starfighters rigid body physics to help simulate some semblance of relative velocity. This effect is achieved through blending normal maps and adjusting the clear coat value on HDRP materials.

Pristine Paint


Worn Paint


Rain FX

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


[h2]Scale Overhaul:[/h2]
Environments and other assets have been touched up for scale across the board. While most things are supposed to have a larger than life appeal to them, various assets and environment pieces have been rescaled. This was partly done to get the game back to operating within the range of scale that Unity's lighting engine prefers. This should yield overall better looking shadows in most instances as well as a bit of a performance boost.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


[h2]Environments/Levels Overhaul:[/h2]
One of the goals behind environments/levels in Frontiers Reach is to create spaces that are rich with interactivity and interest, and it is certainly a challenge when your resources for interesting environment pieces are limited. After all what kind of things do you put on a remote world with little in the way of human civil infrastructure? Well, I've got some ideas and the content below isn't even scratching the surface. Most of this is still work in progress so I don't have much to show outside of the one level as this method of level design inherently takes more time and thought for the layout. Some things are also dictated by the needs of the story.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


[h2]Module System Overhaul:[/h2]
The module system is now integrated into each starfighter and will have real affects on the performance characteristics of your fighter. This overhaul also includes the addition of the new Q-Field Emitter animation. This will play a small animation on the Q-Field Emitters when the player is boosting. The intention behind the module system is NOT to give you more powerful modules and climb a power ladder, but rather it is to give you different capabilities. In this way each module, even when of the same type, affects the craft differently.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


[h2]Camera System Overhaul:[/h2]
This new camera system is stripped down and simplified from the previous version. The mouse control for camera look has been simplified somewhat too. The biggest change is mostly in just how it works and is a change that is best experienced. It will be ready in the next update. For the time being, camera locking to horizon is not an option. This is partly because I'm sticking with the space game feel and locking the camera to player rotation with smoothing and dampening.

[h2]Scenario Management Overhaul:[/h2]
Oh boy, this is the big one. Previously I built something called the Mission Manager that drove all of the missions through a very simple and rigid data oriented system. That system has since been refactored and the data model along with it. This new system and data model will be expanded over time as it is based more on rules established for the environment, or level, rather than trigger zones and events; though those things do exist in the levels but are leveraged in other ways. The biggest advantage of this new system is just the depth to which it both interacts with the level and analyzes the level for conditionals.

A great example of this is a new component I call the Town Controller which works as a subordinate component of the Scenario Manager. This is a simple bit of code that keeps track of all of the destructible pieces of a town each time an event is thrown. And when the Scenario Manager wants to know if a town has suffered damage to it's fuel tanks then it simply asks the Town Controller for that information.

This change of course requires that all levels be rebuilt and all missions be rewritten/scripted in the new data model.


[h2]The Story Overhaul:[/h2]
Last but not least there is the story telling overhaul. I've actually begun working on the official story. The story that will actually be released. The next update should include a small selection of missions, likely the first 5 or 6. But this isn't just a story rewrite. There is more to this than just a rewrite. The Galley is also in the process of being overhauled and I'm trying to get more character artwork done through a contractor on Fiverr before I can fully realize the system I have in mind for character interaction. I'm not sure how long this will take so I'm hesitant to say when exactly the next update will be available. I need at least 2 to 3 more characters for the Galley to make it really come together as a system that can be experienced before releasing anything else. I do however have a test image below. Still working on lighting.



Last but not least, Frontiers Reach is essentially funded from here on out. I can't go into the details of exactly why this is because it involves my personal health but the end result is one in which the financial future of Frontiers Reach is irrelevant as to whether or not it makes money.

As much as I tried, I couldn't help myself and proceeded to get some work done on levels and art. Happy holidays and see you in the new year.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Hello, my name is Scarlett Toney.

We’ve recently had a shake up in the team. One for which I assume full responsibility.

When I started Frontiers Reach, I was alone. It was well into the pandemic lock downs, and I was renting a room in my bosses basement after having lost my apartment because I simply couldn’t afford it and did not want to sit around racking up debt under the eviction moratorium.

Much of the core infrastructure you play with in FR was actually built by myself in the 1st three months of development. The AI, while not perfect and definitely in need more work, did the job I needed it to do and a recent tweak has made it even better. I wasn’t too concerned initial as the game was being built for portfolio purposes since my real work is all under NDA.

The initial intention behind Frontiers Reach was to create a story driven sandbox experience that would be near infinitely scale-able. To achieve this I chose a data driven solution that would define simple conditions for a player to achieve within a data model. The system would then check every other frame to see if the player was within or had achieved the conditions defined by the data model. When the condition was met, the objective would be considered complete and the system would then load the next objective in sequence contained within the data model.

This data model is simple enough that it can even be constructed with a 2D interface built right into the game and I plan to eventually build one. And for the record, that kind of work is precisely what I do in the real world. Connect external data to runtime applications and make it do real meaningful things for people on the digital side and vice versa. I’m attempting to take those lessons learned in the corporate world and apply them to Frontiers Reach.

Aside from the story I wanted to tell within it, it would be a completely player driven and expanded retro science fiction sandbox. A library of voice over, music, sandbox style levels, and starships of all classes would be at your finger tips. But this would all have to be built up slowly over time. Especially voice over and my plan originally was to use an AI generated voice over and possibly tie it into the game so players could generate their VO for missions if they wanted(profanity filters applied of course). This AI would be the main narrator and drive you through missions. Almost like the AI was telling the story to someone else.

The biggest reason I chose this structure is because as much as I love a certain science fiction intellectual property now owned by a certain mega media conglomerate, I wish they would approach fan created content differently. And so Frontiers Reach was also born out of a desire to set a different precedent than those who came before. Rather than smacking the fans on the wrist, I want to give them the tools to tell their own stories right in the game.

The team however did not want to do this. They wanted to create a very cinematic experience, with lots of heavily scripted sequences. And the programmer I was working with wanted to abandon the data model I built all together and re-engineer the whole thing to use Unity Editor side tools to setup the missions. Even if we could save the data out to the file format we needed, this would have required we build two sets of tools. One for ourselves, and one for the players, and would have extended our development time and scope well beyond our ability to manage things. We started missing deadlines, voice actors weren’t showing up when we needed, we had a writer just quit all of a sudden. It was already falling apart as we became a chaotic concerto with no conductor.

And this is where my responsibilities as a leader overtook me.

I simply don’t have the experience or the time and focus to manage a team of 10, that should be more like 20, and a project being over taken by scope creep. 3 weeks from what was supposed to be our kickstarter launch and we were adding completely new features and re-engineering existing systems.
So I decided that before we got ourselves into a really sticky situation and owe a whole bunch of people a whole lot of money, that I’d just pull the plug on it as a team venture more or less and go back to my very clearly defined scope where I’m pretty much a dictator about the scope and direction. It was manageable for one person and would have been great if I had been able to get the team on board in the manner I had envisioned with each member being responsible for a section i.e gameplay, creatures, characters. This would have been similar to the “art-house” environment that the founders and I fostered when we were in college together only in a Discord server. And I was paying for a lot of things just to host this space for us to create without having to worry about things like deadlines and investors.

The team will still work together in various capacities but I think the time has come for me to take the reigns again and start unifying and solidifying the experience a bit before adding anything new. I’ve also got a major infrastructure change I’ve been meaning to work on for scenario management that should yield some interesting results and a couple of starfighters that have been neglected. We’ll see what comes in the days/weeks ahead.

Till next time pilots, stay safe and I’ll see you out on the frontier! We'll be back to work on Frontiers Reach after Jan 1st. I've got an apartment to get moved into and would like to spend some time this Holiday with friends and family as much as can remotely.

The past week has been extremely stressful. Deadlines have been missed internally and we've come to a point where the focus of earning money and creating something cinematic has overburdened the project beyond what the team is capable of.

All of this is the result of leadership not being experienced enough to manage a team of this size effectively on top of having a day job.

We're going to hold development, cancel the kickstarter, and drop the games price drastically to refocus efforts. Development will resume in a few weeks.

We have entered the final month before the launch of our kickstarter campaign and the release of what we intend to be a highly polished version of the game. As such we've continued our efforts to refine existing mechanics as much as possible and and are working on wrapping up all of our major systems additions.

One of the major systems coming into this update is the completion of the artwork integration of the module system. Each module now has a description, and some have visible artwork. Eventually all of them will have visible artwork of some kind and will affect performance parameters of various aspects of your fighters. This also is accompanied by the first implementation of the Quantum Flux Field being visually represented in the game. We're still looking to change it but want to experiment with this one a bit.
This past month also saw a bunch of artwork for starships get done that will not be made available until demo release. We've got to get them all rigged with the new AI which is still in progress.
But let's get one with the patch notes.

- Module system artwork is fully integrated into module system and will display both in hangar when setting up a fighter and when on mission.

- The hangar now supports a camera position bar that will allow the player to change camera position when outfitting modules. Future plans to expand to all hangar submenus.

- New loading screens and descriptions.

- New music for Frontiers Reach Patrol mode.

- Major performance optimizations allow for the game to now be played in 4K on some video cards. (We tested on a Sapphire RX 580 8GB card running 4K at 20 FPS with 2 monitors)

- Completely new space station artwork additions for some levels.

- Major changes and additions to some levels.

- Tweaks to starfighter performance and handling.

- Complete revamp of lighting for bridge and menu environment.

- Complete overhaul of the Galley which now includes a kitchen and dining area. (To be filled out with characters at a later date)

- Completely new camera system for the bridge and main menu area. Now consists of better transitions between areas.

- New opening cinematic.

With that we're off to continue working on the game. There may be some things broken here and there so expect us to deploy hotfixes to address any critical issues that may come up.