BattleTech Post-funding Update #32

The latest post-funding Kickstarter update for BattleTech includes a development update that focuses on the progress done on the project since its latest showing, and a “Meet the Guest star” segment with artist Duane Loose, who first worked on the property in 1984. An excerpt:

So, what’s the team been up to since GenCon? In a word, EVERYTHING. Seriously. Not only did we get right back to work on the combat experience – finishing up features like melee, MechWarrior abilities, airstrikes, and more – but we’ve been busy spinning up on ‘Mech production, environment art production, map design, multiplayer, story development, and last but not least, breaking ground on development on the “simulation game” (which is our internal term to describe all the fun aspects of managing your Mercenary outfit in-between combat missions).

Whew!

Our spring and summer summer were all about two things: 1) Turning our early combat prototype into a complete, fun, and robust combat experience, and 2) Getting all of our systems, pipelines and architecture in place for full content production on the game. Objective #1 was proven out by the #SuperPreAlpha (thanks again to everyone who watched the Backer video or was able to play it at GenCon and PAX!) Objective #2 has taken a little bit longer to solidify, but I’m pleased to report that we’re also turning that corner this month into content production in all areas of the game. This is one of the great challenges of game development – sometimes one team is furiously trying to finish building the car while other teams are simultaneously trying to paint and test drive it.

To continue with the weird car analogy, I really couldn’t be more proud of this team and feel like everyone is really firing on all cylinders. Jordan and Mitch and I would like to give a particular shoutout here to our engineering team though, they have been absolutely crushing it in their efforts to get a huge amount of features into the game quickly while maintaining a quality, scalable codebase.

We expect to be back with one more Kickstarter update towards the end of 2016 including another progress update and some Kickstarter Beta details. After that, expect our KS updates to slow down a bit as production ramps WAY up.