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The Road to HammerHelm 1.0



I wanted to take some time and update you all regarding where HammerHelm is heading and how we get to the 1.0 release.

I’m very happy with the state of HammerHelm right now. Since launching in Early Access there have been over 550 updates to the game including new art, new music, more buildings, more quests, and a host of new features and content. I’m very excited to be at this point and feel like HammerHelm is very close to being launch ready!

That said, there are some things I want to update before going to 1.0, including…

Finish the new story content and associated features
This includes the new trading system, new character outfit, and some more buildings – plus the new stronghold level. I’ll likely be adding more quests that use the stronghold after the 1.0 release as well. This is about 85% complete as of this posting with most of the work left mostly testing and refining related.



Update Combat, Monster AI, and the Skill System
The core combat system of attacking, blocking, and dodging is solid now, so I’ll be focusing on adding to it and refining it. This includes:
  • Officially making auto-facing during combat a toggle. Right now, there is a key command to toggle this, but I want to add it to the options menu.
  • Update the skills system to something similar to skill tiers. In this model, the current power attacks and the kick attack would become part of the skill system and I’d add a couple more active attack skills and some more passive skills too.
  • Update monster AI to add some more special attacks
  • Add defensive actions for monsters such as allowing them to block with a shield.
  • Make stamina a bigger part of combat. But without creating a system where you are constantly running out of stamina mid-fight.
  • Add some more visuals and audio cues to combat.


Refine the User Interface
I plan on auditing the user interface to make it more intuitive and accessible.

A good example of this is the current way you interact with buildings in build mode. Most of this is tied to a variety of different key and mouse combinations which is clunky and not very intuitive. My plan with this is to create a new UI window that has all of the options for buildings. This would mean only one click to open the window and then you could pick what you wanted to do – move the building, change the roof color, upgrade a house, etc. I’ll probably make the “enter road paint mode” a button rather than a key command as well.

There are also a lot of UI elements that use very small text (like the pop-up text for mousing over items) so I’ll be updating those to make the text larger and easier to read.



Optimization
I have a couple of things I want to do to optimize HammerHelm a bit more, specifically regarding memory use. This is mostly related to clothing hues. The update will not only save memory, but it might allow me to add some more color options in the future as well. I’ll also be doing some smaller updates to improve framerate even more.



Other Smaller Changes
These are mostly visual changes to make some aspects of the game more interesting. There are also some community suggestions that I want to get in before launch as well.

My plan is to finish all of this and then release it as the 1.0 update. The main reason for this is because many of these new features will require a new character. If I released each of them as they were completed, the new story content, skill system, and clothing hueing would each be incompatible with previous saves. The 1.0 update should be the last time you need to start over.

As always, anything in the above could change or get cut if I’m not happy with the progress. I’ll be posting more details on these updates in the coming weeks while they are being implemented and will continue to update the test branch for those that want to check out the new stuff early.

I don’t have a specific date for when we will leave early access that I can share just yet. But we’re getting close! I want to thank everyone who has supported HammerHelm. Your feedback, suggestions, and reviews have all contributed a great deal to getting HammerHelm to this point.

I will forever be grateful for your support and I can’t wait to get to 1.0 and beyond!

-Jonathan "Calandryll" Hanna
[email protected]
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