Project Haven News

[h2]Heads up, Steel Dragons![/h2]

If you've been downrange in our Demo during Tacticon, we salute you. Your debriefs have been pouring in and we've been combing through every piece of intel. We've already started patching up a few weak spots based on your feedback.

Now, let's bring you up to speed on the recent developments since our last devlog!

[h2]Level Design: Crafting the Battlefield![/h2]

When we embarked on the development of Project Haven, our initial plan was to use procedural generation for level design. We even posted some of the tech we’ve developed for it on this platform.

However, as time went on and we further honed the game's storyline and gameplay, we realized that procedural level design wouldn't do justice to our vision.

Despite the monumental task it posed for our small but dedicated team, we made the conscious decision to craft each of the 45 mission maps by hand. And now, having completed the vast majority of the levels, we can confidently say that the extra effort and time invested were undeniably worth it.

While handcrafted maps may limit certain aspects of replayability, they significantly enhance the overall experience. Having said that, we’re happy to report that our missions offer a diverse range of approaches tailored to different playstyles and squad compositions, ensuring ample replay value.

[h2]Environmental Art: Elevating the Visual Look![/h2]

Besides gameplay, an important aspect of level design is the look.

We have what we’d say is a fairly distinct look to our game and we want to bring it to the next level. With this in mind, we have dedicated some time to revisiting and refining every level, elevating them to their final polished form so we can achieve our unique artistic vision.

Before:

After:


[h2]Pathfinding: Navigating the Warzone[/h2]

Implementing a new pathfinding system was another major task. While Unreal Engine 4, our chosen engine, includes its own path finding system, despite multiple attempts at adjustments, it never quite hit the mark for Project Haven. While UE4’s path finding system is generic and works for the vast majority of use cases, we encountered significant hurdles in adapting it to the complex requirements of Project Haven.

Thus, we took it upon ourselves to construct a brand-new pathfinding system from scratch—one that encompassed all the necessary functionalities. This has resulted in cleaner paths, improved control when moving multiple mercenaries simultaneously, and an overall smoother experience.

[h2]Characters: Reinforcing the Steel Dragons Initial Roster[/h2]

As some of you may have noticed in our new Demo or in the Tacticon’s trailer, we’ve added three new characters to the starting roster, expanding the pool of mercenaries available for your selection.

Here are the eight starting mercenaries you’ll play with in Project Haven’s campaign:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]User Interface: Improving the Tactical HUD[/h2]

After carefully observing numerous players in action, we identified a recurring issue concerning cover selection.

To address this concern, we've implemented a new snapping mechanic and UI, that seems to resolve these difficulties. With the updated system, you will not only be able to visualize nearby cover options relative to your cursor, but also preview your character’s stance and how it will be positioned. For those that like extra control, you’ll be able to select the snapping distance or use a modifier key to temporarily disable the snapping behavior.



Another common complaint is the HQ UI being confusing, which we definitely agree with. The current UI implementation was a temporary solution to facilitate early functionality testing. However, we always had plans to revamp it entirely, and now, we have started the process.

To enhance usability, we have divided the squad and loadout screens, so you can now view all your mercenaries at a glance and quickly equip everyone in the Armory screen. While squad selection screen will be exclusively dedicated to selecting the mercenaries you want to take to the current mission.



[h2]Looking Ahead to the Future![/h2]

But what lies ahead for Project Haven, you may wonder? Closed Beta Testing of course!

Your valuable feedback throughout the Demo phase has played an instrumental role in shaping and improving Project Haven. As we’ve finalized all the mechanics and polished the gameplay experience, we have decided to have a closed beta testing period. This testing phase will provide a longer playtime than our Demos, allowing us to ensure that the campaign progression aligns with our standards. If you're interested in participating in this exciting phase, stay tuned for an upcoming post detailing how you can sign up!

As always we’d like to thank everyone who dedicated your time to play our Demos and supported us throughout Project Haven's development journey. Your unwavering support means the world to us, and we sincerely appreciate it.

See you on the next one!
Code Three Fifty One

https://store.steampowered.com/app/443190/Project_Haven/

[h3]Greetings Steel Dragons![/h3]

We are excited to announce that Project Haven will be showcased at Tacticon!

Tacticon is a digital convention dedicated to strategy and tactical games that takes place from May 11th to May 15th. This year, brings together over 106 hand-picked recent and unique strategy games by long-established studios to solo indie game developers.

But that's not all! We are also delighted to announce that a new demo is now available for players to try out during the event. This demo features significant improvements from the last one, including the full initial campaign roster to choose from, enhanced level design and art, new weapons, new items and a totally new mission! We are confident that these enhancements will make the game even more enjoyable. We can't wait for you to try it out!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Also stay tuned for a development update coming up in the next few days where we’ll detail everything that we’ve been up to these past months and what’s left until release!

We hope that all of you Steel Dragons who have been following us are as excited about this showcase as we are! Remember to follow Project Haven on Steam, join our community Discord server, and sign up for our email newsletter to stay updated on all the latest news and developments.

Thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to seeing you at Tacticon!
Code Three Fifty One

https://store.steampowered.com/app/443190/Project_Haven/

[h3]Hello Steel Dragons![/h3]

You heard right! Project Haven's Demo is now available to download and play until the 3rd of October as part of the TactiCon event!

It's been a long time coming, but it's now possible to test out all the new features we're been working on these past months.

We'd be super grateful if you could play it and gives us feedback on what you like, what you don't like and how we could make it better!

So what's new since our last update? We're glad you asked!

We've continued with backend updates we've mentioned in the previous update, this time focused on AI and the perception system (hearing and visibility). We've also done some art and animation updates, and finally a new Skill system. Let's break it down!

[h3]AI[/h3]
Our main goal with a new AI system was to make it more dynamic and better behaved in a range of situations, after careful planning we decided to change from using Behavior Trees to Utility AI.

We feel Utility AI suited our intended goals much better, also allowing us to more easily add additional AI actions. After some testing and tweaking the AI is already in a much better place than it was before, and there's still more we want to do it with!

CALLING REINFORCEMENTS:
One of the new actions we added to the AI was calling for reinforcements, which better explains a mechanic that was part of the game for a long time, but was pretty much invisible to the player.
You can now see when an AI intends to call for reinforcements, and they will actually sprint over to some location to do so.
Although not currently in the Demo, we intend to also add some AI banter to add further notice to their actions.



[h3]Skills[/h3]
We've went through a few iterations of the skill system but we feel like we finally reached the correct one for Project Haven. It's a modified version of our previous one, but that should add more freedom in leveling up your mercenaries.



Each of the 6 attributes, Constitution, Strength, Agility, Marksmanship, Technical and Wisdom has its own Skill tree. Spending a point in one of those skill trees increases the relevant attribute value, which in turn unlocks an additional perk (e.g. Increased Maximum Carried Weight in Strength). You can spend a maximum of 10 points per tree.

Skills are gated by attribute level and some have other skills as a prerequisite, but otherwise you can spend your points in any fashion you'd like. We've tried to add a mix of passive and active skills per tree although some trees lend themselves more towards one of the two. We're aiming to have over 20 skills per tree so what you see in the Demo are not the final available skills/perks.

[h3]Art[/h3]
We've redone the downed animation which finally replaces the funny butt dragging animation we had for the longest time :D



We've also continued our improvement of environmental art with some new props and graphic design (in things like arcades, computer screens, posters, fictional Ad's) to flesh out the world. And finally we've continued with set dressing and design of the very final missions of the game, but we can't spoil those. :)

All in all we feel the game is in a great place, we're very near to completing the full 45+ campaign missions, and we can't wait for you to see them!

All this of course is pending any feedback you all give us. As we've mentioned before we want Project Haven to be a game you really like, and as such any suggestions you may have are truly appreciated.

Which brings us to the final point of this update.

[h3]Release date?[/h3]
Being transparent with you guys is very important to us, so we'll just tell you that finishing the game for a 2022 release is not very feasible at this point. Although we hope to be content complete before the end of the year, we want to properly test and tune the game to make sure your experience is as good as it can be from day one. It's a large game made by a truly tiny team.

We ended up doing more work on replacing large systems of the game than we had planned, but they ended up being necessary to improve the game to the standard we want to achieve. We hope you understand and bear with us just a little longer and we hope to bring you something special in return.



We also hope with your feedback we can bring to light all remaining gameplay issues we need to tackle. But just a Demo is not enough, so we're going to have a Closed Beta Test coming soon, please stay tuned for more details on that!

And that's it for this update! As always, thank you! And see you next time!
Code Three Fifty One

https://store.steampowered.com/app/443190/Project_Haven/

[h3]Hello Steel Dragons![/h3]
Welcome to another Project Haven development update!

This time we have quite a few gameplay additions to show you, some art updates and more, so let’s get straight into it.

[h3]Gameplay[/h3]
One major task we’ve finished since the last update was reworking the whole action system backend. While it’s not particularly visual or exciting, it allows us to more easily add complex gameplay systems. It was also designed with modding in mind. In fact, every action in the game is done with the exact same tools and system modders will have available to them! We hope to see some really cool things from the community!

After finishing the system we quickly recreated all existing actions iterating and implementing a few new actions to help flesh out the gameplay:

MOVABLE OBJECTS:
Characters with enough Strength are now able to push some objects to gain access to otherwise unavailable paths, allowing for more interesting strategic decisions on your character selection and level up!


CARRY DOWNED TEAMMATES
There’s some situations where healing your downed merc in place is just not an option and moving while downed is a slow affair. You can now carry downed teammates to safety before reviving them.


CARRY DEAD ENEMIES
In the same vein as the previous system you can now carry dead enemies to prevent others from spotting the body. We’ve also included handy containers where you can dump them, though if all else fails a secluded corner will work just as well!


IMPROVED ACTION POP-UP
Along with all the backend system improvements we also improved the UI, the action popup (right click) now contains more information and is better organized, allowing for smoother interactions!


[h3]Art[/h3]
Gameplay doesn’t get all the spotlight in this update though, as we’ve continued our upgrade of the character art.

Here’s just a couple of them:

Bubbles, everyone's favorite Steel Dragon’s hacker in service, sporting an updated look.


Iron Dogs mob, a brand new foe you’ll find in the streets of Haven. Don’t let his looks fool you though, they’re tough nuts to crack!


One of the main reasons for updating existing characters was to give them all new facial rigs to allow for higher fidelity facial animation, here’s a sneak peek at Daisy’s updated facial animation:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]Level Design[/h3]
We can’t really show much here as we’re mostly working on very late game content. But we did get back and did some updates to previous levels, fleshing out the gameplay and art.

You can see the different lighting styles in the image below representing different areas of the city.


[h3]Graphics[/h3]
For those with supporting cards we’ve also added Raytracing. Make those rain puddles shine!
And to lighten all that GPU load or just to improve performance we’ve also added DLSS and FSR2 support!


With all the changes the game underwent we’d like to have you all test the game and give your feedback. Throughout Project Haven’s development it’s been extremely helpful reading everyone’s ideas and suggestions. As such, we’re planning on having a new Demo as soon as we have a stable build, stay tuned for details!

And finally we’d like to thank all the community for your support, we know you guys are eager to get your hands on the final product. We’re a small team doing our best, and we want to make sure your experience is as good as it can be. We’re not cutting any corners, so while things sometimes take a while to develop we believe it’s for the best in the end. We hope you guys understand.

Thank you! And see you next time!
Code Three Fifty One

https://store.steampowered.com/app/443190/Project_Haven/

[h3]Hello Steel Dragons![/h3]

We’re alive!

Yeah, it’s been a bit since our last dev update. Months, even, but don’t mistake the radio silence for inactivity. We’ve just been down in the code-mines, working intently on Project Haven to the exclusion of everything else. We probably should have come up for air a few times, but we’ve got SO much we want to show you now.

A lot of our work has been on finalizing late-game content that we want to keep under wraps until launch, but there’s still plenty more we can show you. Let’s dive in!

[h3]Level Design[/h3]
Game design is an iterative, experimental process, and we’re constantly learning new tricks and skills along the way. So that we’re not saving all the best for last, we’ve been revisiting some of our earlier missions, making visual and mechanical improvements to better match the quality of the later maps.

Check out the before/after comparison below! If you’ve played the Project Haven demo previously, you should recognize the environment, and just how much it has improved.



[h3]Characters[/h3]
Another field we’ve made major leaps forward in is our character art pipeline. Previously, our character models were a bit of a compromise, trying to squeeze out the best designs we could from a relatively limited system.

Since our last update, we’ve completely overhauled how we handle character art, and the result is more distinct designs with more personality but produced in a fraction of the time - given that we’re a tiny independent studio, that’s an enormous boost in productivity for us.

You’re sure to see the improvements made across the campaign, and especially in our cinematic cutscenes, but also in the increased variety and quality of background characters like civilians. Still, the most striking improvements will be seen on our main cast. Here’s Fang after his makeover:



Everyone’s favorite (or most loathed) cyber-meathead hasn’t changed fundamentally, but we feel his updated face has a lot more character, better fitting his voice. The 3D mesh of his clothing has been updated as well to be cleaner and more efficient. This rework was done much quicker than the original character modeling process, thanks to our new art workflow.

For those wanting a deeper peek at what’s changed, take a look at the wireframe comparison below:



One of the biggest improvements we’ve made is a modular character art system, allowing us to create more varied minor NPCs by mixing and matching heads, bodies, clothes and more. You can see the improvement immediately in the nightclub scene below, now with a much less strict dress code:



[h3]UI[/h3]
Whew, that’s a lot of art improvements! Our improvements are more than just skin deep, of course, so let’s talk gameplay next.

As with any squad tactics game, a good, clean user interface is essential. After several rounds of iterations (taking all our user feedback into account), we’ve overhauled the UI. It’s now cleaner, sleeker and more functions are easily usable without having to memorize hotkeys.

Before:

After:


A key focus of our redesign has been accessibility. Useful for many, but especially those who play turn-based tactics games due to their more mouse-friendly interfaces. We’re proud to announce that every feature, mode and toggle is now fully accessible using just the mouse.

[h3]Combat Gameplay[/h3]
As well as making all the basic functionality easier to access, we’ve added a few highly requested features to your tactical options.

Now you can manually control the power of grenade throws (for when you want to land the perfect trick shot), and use open doors as cover. Just remember that thin wood isn’t going to stop a bullet.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

And that’s it for now, but by no means all the improvements we’ve made to Project Haven over the past few months. We’ve plenty more to share over the next couple updates, so make sure you wishlist and follow the game on Steam!

If you’re still hungry for content and are still catching up on all things Project Haven, check out this narrated gameplay video over on IGN from December, featuring some of the changes and improvements we’ve talked about here.

[previewyoutube][LINK][/previewyoutube]

We also made the cut for Kotaku’s ‘25 Exciting Indie Games To Wishlist Right Now’ list - a great-looking crop of games that we're happy to share the spotlight with!

And we talked with the prestigious art-focused industry site 80.lv about Project Haven’s development where we show some previously unseen behind the scenes! There’s even a French translation for any francophones reading this!



And of course, if you want up-to-the-minute updates on Project Haven and all things Code Three Fifty One, give our social media accounts a follow. In-between big dev-logs like this, we post regular small updates to Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. And if you want to really get down in the trenches with us and the rest of the Project Haven community, join our Discord server.

Until next time!
Code Three Fifty One


https://store.steampowered.com/app/443190/Project_Haven/