Posted on by haapavuo

September 2022 – Changelog

Helloooo!!! It’s autumn now. The summer is over. This is the time when Finland is starting to get too cold once again. We’ve already got some nights below zero degrees Celsius.

By the way, we recently released a demo on Steam, containing 3 short episodes:
> Cleaning Service
> Shooting Practice (RK1)
> Tent Building

The demo is downloadable for free on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1184250/Finnish_Army_Simulator/

We have two Finnish streamers streaming FAS Demo over Twitch and Steam with Rally English at the following dates and times:
> Paulin Pelivideot @ October 4th 20:00 (GMT+3): https://www.twitch.tv/paulinpelivideot
> Azaa4 @ October 5th 20:00 (GMT+3): https://www.twitch.tv/azaa4

You can subscribe to the calendar events on Steam:
> Pauli: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1184250/view/3314109736295215175
> Azaa4: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1184250/view/3300599570675116754

We also participated in Pocket Gamer Connects (PGC) 2022 @ Helsinki. Here’s a proof, look:

People were eager to get their hands on FAS. They even formed a pretty neat queue! Some tried to purchase the T-Shirt right off from Niko! Would you like to get one as well?
We did some memory optimization…

Unfortunately, most of the time was spent making various optimizations, gameplay feel improvements and bug fixes. This will continue in October as well but we’ll do our best to create new content as well in the meantime.

The current alpha version now seems to run 20 FPS on Steam Deck! 😅

Our current target is to get at least 4 weeks of content ready for the Steam Early Access version which we will hopefully be able to put on sale during December 2022 for around 30 euros! Development will continue after this of course and the major goal is to create the full 6 month experience for the full game release.

Here’s what we’ve done in September:

  • [FEATURE]: Implemented all the capabilities for the free three event demo.
  • [FEATURE]: Ability to climb ladders. Obstacle course is now mostly functional.
  • [FEATURE]: Added ducking for music when a voice-over is playing.
  • [FEATURE]: Added a lowpass filter that is affected by wearing earmuffs.
  • [CODE]: Changed navigation system to a “better one” which caused a lot of new issues.
  • [CODE]: Did a lot of performance optimization. The game world is now loaded and unloaded mostly dynamically based on the player’s current location. Still some players with 16 GB RAM experience the game crashing on load. We are investigating this issue.
  • [CODE]: Improvements to save game file handling.
  • [CODE]: Added support for Korean localization (fallback font).
  • [UX]: Some gameplay improvements, player feel improvements, more tutorials, etc.
  • [BUG]: A lot more bug fixes than ever before.
  • [TOOLS]: Dev tool improvements.