Frontiers Reach News

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.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

On the hangar controller updates.
First Friday of the month and as such, it is update time! A lot of new things and we're going to get right into it:

- New loadout system
Save, load, and modify. The new system takes all of our previously constructed elements for managing your starfighter in the hangar to include paint jobs, and unifies them into the new loadout screen. When you save, it will now be displayed with its cost along the top side menu.

- New Helm menu
A new menu has been added for changing planetary locations. This new menu is also accompanied by updated lighting and transitions during the warp travel.

- Completely overhauled input system now supports three main control schemes. Generic joysticks are supported in theory but we've had some difficulty getting it to recognize a HOTAS setup properly. More updates to come.

- Completely overhauled mouse and keyboard flight system. Part of the input system overhaul was due to this right here. So much had to be changed in the input system to make mouse flight function the way we wanted, that we had to completely rework the entire thing. That said, the new mouse flight system may feel familiar to those of you who have played other flight games.

- New module outfitting updates and menu screen. This new screen is merely a preview. We have a LOT more to get done on the module system. Nothing too heavy a lift for us, just a lot of little things and some small but significant additions like a new camera system to zoom in on the modules as you work on them.

- Completely new Turret system.
This new turret system still has some kinks in it, but it's got a pretty awesome feature set that we're excited about since it allows us to setup turrets in just about any configuration and not have turret artwork intersecting into their own structure or ship hull.

- New bullet system.
Though not fully integrated, and more changes are planned, this new bullet system is far more accurate than the previous one, using more tools for precise detection.

- New missile system.
Missiles can now lead and chase targets and are much more accurate but will lose their tracking completely if they over-shoot their target. No more lasso missiles looping around until they hit something.

- Numerous tweaks to camera system to compensate for changes and additions in the mouse flight mode.

- Completely new countermeasure system.
As part of the module system, countermeasures have been added to the game as a whole new mechanic that will eventually accommodate three different types of defense. Currently we only have flares, which will dot the sky behind the player with enough flares to disrupt a dozen missiles. Eventually a chaff module will be added that disperses a disruption cloud behind the player, and finally an EM field that will project a disruption field around the player as they travel.

- Completely overhauled hangar system for landing and reloading. Much of this work is foundational. Still lots to wrap up here, but it's all essential work for the future. Some of which are the new AI, wingmen, new reload sequence, and mid-mission weapon swapping.

- Numerous changes to the flight model to affect feel, performance, and play. This required rebalancing several parameters on fighters to adjust performance.

- Fixed another edge case that was causing missile warning cones to not go away.

While this week’s update does indeed break some of our levels, we're in the process of getting a bunch more artwork overhauled and new stuff added before our next update on December 3rd. Rest assured all levels will be restored to full functional state and some, hopefully many, will be completely reworked with a whole host of additions added to them.

Additionally, we're beginning work on the first set of missions that we aim to build with the quality in mind for the final product. A lot of this is being focused around preparation for the launch of our Kickstarter but will ultimately play into a better experience for everyone in the long run.

We also want to take this time to give everyone a brief run down on our schedule the next month and our contingency moving forward.

November 22nd - team will review over the period of a week.

November 29th - Decision will be made on whether or not the demo is ready for Kickstarter prime time.
December 3rd - Launch new demo and Kickstarter.

Contingent timeline in the event that demo approval is not met on November 29th.

December 3rd - Demo release as usual.

January 7th - Demo release and Kickstarter launch.

For the sake of getting this out the door, we're only allowing ourselves one opportunity to push the dates back! There will not be a second delay in release.

Oh, before we go, you will need to make a new save file. We added a whole bunch of small changes that we didn't go into because they were parts of the large changes listed above. These smaller changes required adding a number of additional parameters to the players save file.