Hello everyone, it's been a long time.

Where have we been? For a while, the game went on hiatus, but we are back now. We've brought a project manager on board and expanded the role of game designer. As of roughly three months ago, the game has resumed active development. A new programmer was brought in and with his help we have started to set up sprints and meet daily goals.

Trello, our team's management platform showcasing the active cards.

What has been done? Extensive bug fixing to make multiplayer stable and implemented tons of missing features to make game play closer to the vision, the map format has been overhauled to support a more user friendly format. The terrain atlas has been restructured and expanded from 512x512 to 1024x1024. The HUD was tossed out in favor of a new style. Collision maps have been added for the multitude of terrain types. We expanded and clarified the roles of game designer and project manager; who developed a more disciplined development methodology based on sprint and agile techniques.

Where are we going? The current goals are:

• Internal Alpha - Internally we've been working hard to make sure the game runs smoothly and patching anything that prevents this such as multiplayer desynchonization issues.

• Closed Alpha - Once the game runs cleanly internally, testing with a broader audience will begin initially only open to close friends to gather feedback.

• Open Alpha - With the changes brought on by external feedback in place, we plan to release a demo version that, while far from feature complete, should have all existing systems fully functional including online matchmaking. 

Most recent screenshot of the game running, featuring an entirely new UI.

Update # 4: Match Lobby UI.

First sketch of the pre-match lobby. I have a few concerns with this first initial design.

Design cues were inspired by games like Dota, League, and Fighting games like Street Fighter. I do wish we could fit the 'Huge central CO portrait that scrolls left and right to other COs' like how Dota uses, there's just too much other important information to show at the same time to have your single player portrait take up the center stage.

Not a whole lot of room for Team Chat, as you can see in the bottom left. This stems from the problem that CO. portraits cannot be smaller than those squares, so they take up a large amount of space. While we may only have 4 CO.'s at the moment, I plan on expanding this roster a great deal to the point that if the images are that large, some kind of alternative solution may be necessary as I'm not a huge fan of the scroll-bar. Search is nice to help alleviate that, but only works if you know exactly which CO you plan on being.

Super Combat Squadron will feature a map editor and custom user maps, so knowing the layout of the map you are about to enter is important, so the map preview takes front and center stage. Were this a 1v1 match, the banners on the sides with your teammate's CO portraits would not exist, and it would show you only you and your enemy. Right now the teammate banner colors should reflect their team color, and could use a bit more contrast.

CO powers are snug in the center of the screen. They change to reflect whichever CO you have chosen, and mousing over them/selecting them will bring up a tooltip that will explain precisely what they do.

My biggest concern right now is I don't like windows-looking scroll-bars, but I don't want to split the CO selection menu into another screen or something, so more room for CO's will have to figured out somewhere.