- Full Release - 3 February 2020
We're still here. We've been working every day since our last development blog. The Iron Armada development team has been toiling away working towards the ultimate release of our game... and after many years of work, we're proud to unveil the final completed version of Iron Armada. What is included in the release version of the game? Single-player missions and autonomous drones. Players can now construct and fight against autonomous drones in offline single-player modes. These drones also work in multiplayer matches, meaning that cooperative and PVPVE modes are also entirely possible. Pressurization and airlock mechanics. Players now need to ensure that ships are airtight. Ships can be damaged and entire decks can be depressurized. Players can survive off of emergency oxygen reserves for limited amounts of time... but managing a ship's hull integrity is now of new importance. Advanced l…
- Patch Version 3.3.0 Released - 6 January 2018
Hotfix Patch 3.3.0 We just released patch 3.3.0 which fixes a few critical bugs, and also does some backend work to help us with future development! If you want to know the specifics, make sure you check our commit log here! The primary changelog highlights for this patch are: Fixed crash when respawning on non-existant core Rebuilt underlying systems to be more organized for future development Fixed issue with selected servers not highlighting properly For those of you who like to follow along with development, we also had our weekly review meeting on Discord today. You can view the meeting notes here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l445se2ZGuE&lc=Ugw-qVn_ja9J3bf--LJ4AaABAg If you would like to keep up with community meetings, event tests, and our daily changelog... you can join our Discord server by visiting the link below! Links for our community portals: https://forum.bluedrake42.c…
- Developer Meetings - 4 January 2018
Hello everyone! Today I wanted to go over our development meeting schedule, that is completely open to the public, so you can stay up to date (and even have an influence on) our weekly development cycle! Meeting Schedule For those of you who are interested in being a part of Iron Armada's development cycle, you can attend our weekly meeting sessions that we hold publicly in our Discord! Our current meeting schedule is: Monday - at 4PM EST Wednesday - at 4PM EST Friday - at 4PM EST You can join our public meeting channel here where we hold our weekly meetings! Currently only developers (or lead testers) are allowed to talk during the meetings, however everyone is still allowed to type in our public text channels... and of course listen in! We also keep public recordings of all our meetings in the past, so you can feel free to check our archives to catch up... so you never miss anything!…
- Oxygen & Airlocks (You Voted!) - 3 January 2018
Oxygen and airlocks Last development blog you all voted on which of the three upcoming features we should implement first! Oxygen & airlocks won by a huge margin! Now today, we're here to talk about how we're going to implement it! How will pressure will be implemented? Many people forget what Iron Armada looked like two years ago! For those of you who forgot... here is a little reminder (this is actually relevant =P) When we first started working on the Iron Armada engine framework... many things you take for granted now... weren't in the game at all (remember that Iron Armada isn't built on an engine like Unity! It is built from its entirely own custom codebase in Java... kindof like Minecraft) Every little detail of the game (bullets, destruction, player death, animations, moving, building, walking, and more!) had to be built from scratch. So... for example, when you used to break a…
- FAQ on Pricing - 31 December 2017
Hello everyone! Today I wanted to do an exclusive development blog about pricing (and the future versions of Iron Armada) answering many questions the community has asked. Keep in mind, before anything else, that Iron Armada is currently an early access game. I cannot stress enough... that if you do not enjoy Iron Armada in its current form, you are not obligated to purchase it what-so-ever. We totally support anyone watching and waiting, to wait until the game meets their expectations before they buy =) However for our loyal early supporters: the people who truly believe in our game... and want to help us succeed, your purchase will go directly towards helping this game develop. Drakeling Labs never did any Kickstarter, or any other crowdfunding project for this title... because we believe in letting players choose to support a game, based off of its current build... not off of vague p…
- Vote on the next feature for Iron Armada! (Tech Tree) - 31 December 2017
Hello everyone! We're constantly updating and building Iron Armada, and we like to incorporate our community into that process! Every few weeks we like to poll our players on what feature they would like to see next! In addition to our regular updates of fixes and upgrades of course =P What would you like to see in the next major build of Iron Armada! Help us choose our research and development tree
- Known Issues for 3.2.0 - 30 December 2017
Here is a current log of current known issues, these will hopefully be fixed in the next patch! However we still think its important to let you know about them. Improper closedown Currently (if exited improperly, such as ALT+F4) the game will not properly close down... and will be left hanging in your processes. Since Iron Armada is a Steam game, sometimes this will be seen as Iron Armada "still running" when it isn't really. In order to fix this (on Windows) all you need to do is press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC and (if you haven't already) press "more details." From there... simply find the process labeled "Iron Armada" and right click, then select "end task." This will be fixed in the next patch, when we include a secondary check to ensure the entire game is closed... even if exited improperly. Little things like this is why we like to test the game with our community, because we find little thi…
- Help Development - 29 December 2017
Iron Armada's development is open to the entire community! If you want to see something in the game, we give our entire community the tools they need to help. Here is how you can... Contribute to our source code! Iron Armada is a game built by what was originally a gaming community. Our group started humbly, with only a handful of gamers that decided to take matters into our own hands... and learn how to make a game. That spirit never changed, and we keep our entire development infrastructure open to our community... so that anyone can help us make Iron Armada better. If you are interested in helping us with Iron Armada... either by creating a mod, reporting a bug, or even contributing to the core codebase... then we make that possible by visiting our public source code repository: https://gitlab.bluedrake42.com/drakelinglabs/ironarmada This is where all the work on our game is done. So…
- How to Play... Iron Armada - 29 December 2017
Hello! This is a quick walkthrough of how to play Iron Armada! Preface Keep in mind that Iron Armada is still in an early state of development, and there are many things that are still being developed. One of those things currently, is our control scheme. In the future, we are planning to implement flexible (and more standard) customizeable control mapping, in-game tutorials, and more intuitive default control schemes. Our overall goal is to keep Iron Armada's control scheme as simple as possible... but allow the mechanics they control allow for the deep gameplay depth we're all expecting. This means that many of the current controls are placeholder, and will likely be phased out (or changed) as development progresses. Basic controls Iron Armada has a centralized control scheme for movement, both when piloting a ship... and when walking as a crewman (or infantryman.) Basic controls for…
- Now & The Future (Roadmap) - 21 November 2017
Today we discuss where we are now, and what we want to do next! Where are we now? Iron Armada has come a long way since our first Greenlight campaign. We had a roadmap to build ourselves a solid simple platform, for us to grow from... and to expand upon forever. After nearly a year of work, we feel we have met that goal. As we continue to improve that upon bedrock we've built, the speed of development will start accelerating as well... like an oiled machine. Getting us where we are now has been a long path of hard work, but also with a clear and direct goal. To build a pyramid... we needed a foundation. That foundation consisted of the following: Competitive-Grade Networked Physics In the event of high latency, or resource overload... we needed to build a system which resolved networked physics issues in a non-game-breaking way. This means instead of glitching ships, or exploding blocks…
- Thank you Greenlight - 21 November 2017
Welcome everyone to a new Iron Armada development update! Successfully Greenlit After being successfully Greenlit, we're proud to finally be in the final stages of our official Steam early access release! Iron Armada was one of the last titles to be Greenlit before Valve shut down the program, and as sad as we are to see the Greenlight program desist... we were honored to become one of the last Greenlit development studios on Steam. Thank you everyone who helped us get our first game on Steam, and we're excited to show you how far we can take our first official game "Iron Armada" with your support. If you would like to visit our Steam Greenlight page one last time (for nostalgia purposes) you can visit it here! Along with our first official trailer, and older footage of our original builds! https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=814094246 What comes next? Now is time to…
