Thunder Tier One News

Hello Operators!

We’ve been quiet for a long time. It doesn’t mean we’ve been idle all this time, though. Thank you for sticking with Thunder Tier One.

Thunder Tier One started as a side project, as some of you know, and we’ve kept it in the drawer in 2018 due to our own professional constraints. Being self-funded means that we can’t always spend as much time working on it as we’d desire. But we’ve picked up work early this year and despite our silence, work on Thunder has never been more intensive since then.



Currently, Thunder Tier One has a team of 8 people working on the game, with part of the team working full time on Thunder, on a cosy little place we found. The pace has never been better, so we thought about keeping you up to date with what’s being done. We’ll be starting a new run of Devlogs to show you a bit of the work we’ve been doing on the game.

Our main focus is currently aimed at the Campaign structure, which you'll be able to play with your friends or with your AI squad members, should you prefer to play alone. We’ve been developing the narrative and closing up the missions flow as well as their logic and gameplay.

We’ve been working hard on squad and enemy AI and you’ll be able to play the missions with the help of your NPC squad or with your friends. We’ll provide more details on the work that’s being done with the AI soon, but you can expect realistic decisions from your friends and foes, based on what they perceive from the battlefield. We’ve also started working on the inventory management, enabling you to more actively interact with weapons, ammunition and items you may encounter during the missions, storing them in different pockets or in your backpack.

We’ll be offering sneak peeks of the development on a regular basis from now on. Once again we’d like to thank you all for your support and feedback, but mostly for your patience. You’re welcome to pay us a visit and give us your feedback on our Discord Server.

See you soon!

Here's a short update/information after unexpected long radio silence over the holidays.



We are closing on completing our EA content list - there are just under 10 assets left to be developed (aside from level content) to satisfy our internal checklist. We decided to try and push to include at least one more new map in for EA while the other gameplay items are being finalized.

Optical attachment

Our operators obtained new addition for their weapons - optical scopes. These aiming devices allow you to gain additional precision by enhancing field of vision around your current target. Small scopes (up to 4x magnification) will be available while standing still or walking, however, it will be impossible to use them while running. Longer range scopes will require the operator to stand completely. On the positive side - they will additionally slightly extend the range beyond which they can aim.



Link in case you cannot load url



New item types

Our art team has recently been reinforced by a new artist KeyboardOreos (You can follow him on twitch and watch some real time WIP. He is currently working on adding new graphical items to go along with new systems coming into the game: backpacks and nightvision goggles. Below are some screenshots of his work.







As mentioned previously, we are currently working on new PvP oriented game mode that will take advantage of recent addition of vehicles as well as make the gameplay even more smooth and engaging. To go along with the new mode, a much bigger, tropical themed, map is being developed. More WIP screenshot/gifs will come with next update.



Unfortunately, due to multiple reasons (IRL related) we were again unable to meet our internal deadlines. We are working on establishing a new date. We will try to keep in touch. Again, as always, please do pop on our discord channel - we will be able to respond on daily basis.



We will start running dev streams on weekends starting from 8th of October! You can follow the channel here if you are interested in looking up the progress, talking to us in real time or occassionally playing with us. See you there!


Finally, we would like to thank all the community for the support and trust put in the game. We continue to use our free time and work on this project so that it can become an enjoyable experience for all tactical/top down shooter fans. We invite everyone to join our discord server to engage in day-to-day exchange of suggestions and ideas for the game.

Summer is coming, finally! Hope you guys have your holidays planned out. Meanwhile we will continue working on making sure you have a solid top down tactical experience when you come back. Also, we have a couple of updates and announcements to make. Before we get to those, we would like to thank you all for your continous support, feedback and good word! We really appreciate that.



First of all, we have decided to shift the EA time to Q3 2017. We are unable to give you exact date but we will be running extensive pre-EA tests before that time so you can definately hop on our discord server and queue up for the pre-EA test game key.

More information on reasons for delay etc. can be found in this topic





We are continuing to make progress in vehicle department. To improve the immersiveness we are adding in some more animation features. All seat positions will have fully animated entering, exiting, idling and even removing body actions! Take a look at some rough examples.



Last but not least - Dev streams are here! Every now and then we will try to get you up to date with development progress via Twitch stream. At the same time, you will get a chance to see us playing with our community members who have been accepted for Alpha tests. We will be expanding the pool of testers very soon when we release the Update 2 (ETA 25JUN17). The streams and tests will be targeted at two timezones at which we are located: Europe and East Asia. Dates and times for streams will be announced on our official Twitter and Discord channel so make sure to subscribe to either or both of them!

A highlight from a test stream that we ran yesterday

Official Twitch Channel: https://www.twitch.tv/thundertierone


More updates coming next week.
STORM out!

We're sorry for the radio silence, but worry not, we are still full at work on Thunder Tier One! We will try to keep updates coming on at least a weekly basis where we will show off the progress on the game.

We will reschedule the Early Acess release date because the team really thinks that some extra time will make sure that the initial release is as stable, fun and enjoyable as possible! That's why we're trying to sneak in some new features we think are very important for Thunder Tier One. More news on that very soon!

We went ahead and extended the Interaction System, we now support both instant and time based, abortable actions, for example, when healing a team member you will be able to stop to shoot at a spotted enemy by releasing the action key, and to keep doing the action, players will have to keep the action key held down for the duration of it.



So far during our closed Alpha tests we mainly had small, CQB focused Levels. These went through major work during the last months both in terms of optimization and visuals. We also added different time of day and weather settings per Level as well.

Additionally, we think that for Early Access Thunder Tier One would really benefit from having a larger scale Game Mode, so we have a created a PVP Sector Control mode which require players to fight over the dominance of sectors in a mix of infantry and vehicular gameplay. And so we started preparing a large scale level for it.

Because we felt some lack of navigational awareness we started working on a Navigation Map, bellow you can see a quick work in progress gif of it.



As mentioned above, we also intend to have drivable Vehicles in Early Access.



Vehicles are not only useful for transportation as they provide the ability for characters to shoot from them, creating a more diverse set of challenges players will face.



Make sure to keep an eye out for more info soon!

Hello Operators!

We have had yet another rather longer-than-expected radio silence since the last update. This was caused by multiple issues, most of them related to work overload all of us had in last a few months. This includes, but is not limited to, Pawel's work over https://www.playbattlegrounds.com/ which just went live into Early Access and required great deal of extra time to finish.

So that bad news is - we need to push the release of Early Access further. Our final EA date is May 2017. We are very happy about all the positive feedback we have collected from our Alpha testers that joined our little community, but we strongly feel like the game is not yet ready to publish, because of several critical issues.

However, there are some good news. Because of the extra time we give ourselves, we can push the project further in all other departments. To compensate for another delay, we have decided to extend the content base of the game and deliver, additionally, the following:

- a whole new map for up to 16 players with a new gamemode of Sector Control style
- Windows dedicated server support
- more customizable items (uniforms, headgear, backpacks)
- more guns (3 shotguns, 1 handgun and 1 submachinegun)
- small MP-focused gameplay additions such as target spotting etc.

The Early Access build will help us establish financial support to deliver the remaining content (Operations and Gamemodes). For now, all we ask for is your patience. You can always support us in game development by cheering up on our discord server: http://discord.gg/a8khDrc

STORM out.