The year 2013 is coming to an end and we are really happy with the progress that we have made lately.As a consequence I decided it would be a perfect moment to write another devblog post to wrap up this year.

Orbits
As stated in the last update, it was always our dream for Barrage to have truly flexible planet orbits. This might not sound interesting nor important in theory but implementing this feature would allow us to change the orbit of a planet during a match. This would open up possibilities from manipulating small asteroids to altering your own planets’ orbit to finally crash planets into each other. We put a lot of research into this topic and tried out several algorithms to achieve a stable system. After various approaches simulated in Matlab (computational simulation software) it seems like we finally came to a really good result and are about to implement that into Barrage. If you would like to know more about it, feel free to send us a message and we would happily write a more detailled post.

Server Browser
As we don’t plan to have Steam support from day 1, we had to come up with our own solution for the server browser. In the past days we programmed our own master server that will register all matches and let you connect to them. Already having a master server with a database in place could also pave the way for some other interesting features such as pulling statistics from matches.
SoundsAnother circumstance we are really happy about is the fact that we have a new addition to our humble dev team! Morkh aka Marc joined us as a sound designer and is already eagerly working on adding sound effects and music to Barrage. We implemented the first sound effects a few days ago and it is really impressive how much more intense and fun the game experience becomes when you add a loud “BOOM” to shooting the turrets. With more sound effects and a soundtrack added to the game, we are really looking forward to work on the first video trailer of Barrage very soon.

More content and polish
Besides those major points, as well as we polished up several parts of the game we added a great deal of new content. Few examples are that it is now possible to build powerful orbital buildings, missile silos open their hatches if they are ready to fire and players are able to activate few helpers to get a better overview.

What’s up next?
We asked the same question ourselves a few weeks ago. What would be in our way to release a playable alpha version?The plan for the last days of 2013 and the upcoming year is to hook up all main menu pages, add some missing visual effects for the advanced turrets, implement more sound effects and fix all kinds of gamebreaking errors. Therefore we hope to keep up the momentum in 2014 and we are really looking forward to show you more video footage, more screenshots, more development details and hopefully a playable version of Barrage.

Many thanks to everyone who is following our project and if you have any question don’t hesitate and get in contact with us and ask away!