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December 2022 – Changelog

Two weeks until Early Access begins on Steam! That is just 14 mornings!! Holy cow… Put the date – 13 Jan 2023 – on your calendar. The first Early Access version will feature 4 weeks of military service starting from the day 1 as you arrive to the army.

Game features many different military activities, such as

  • military drills,
  • rifle shooting practice,
  • grenade throwing practice,
  • cleaning service,
  • camping activities,
  • marching,
  • obstacle course,
  • Cooper test,
  • and even eating!

Not to mention the free time activities, such as

  • playing payazzo or slot machine in the canteen,
  • watching news on TV,
  • reading magazines,
  • exercising in the gym,
  • getting to know your platoonmates,
  • and exploring the open-world!
The 1st day arrival.
Pre-order Exclusive Items
Heading to the first lecture!

Things still missing in the Early Access:

  • Weeks 5-8 of the basic training period.
  • Different educational branches (i.e. signaller, scout).
  • Military leadership training.
  • Depth in some minigames.
  • Some unlockable Challenges.
  • Most of the storylines do not finish within the first 4 weeks so there will be sort of a “cliffhanger”.

We’ve put up a new wiki site: finnish-army-simulator.fandom.com

Feel free to add more information to the wiki as you learn more about the game while playing. A large knowledge base will most likely make the game easier to grasp for the new players. Please also use the Photo Mode in the game to capture those unforgettable moments in 3rd person mode!

Battle Equipment on!
Field lunch.
The forests can get pretty dark…

Here’s what we did in December:

  • [FEATURE] Added Challenges Menu and unlockable Challenges to the game to allow competitive replayability for some activities / minigames using Steam Leaderboards.
  • [FEATURE]: Thermometer UI is now available during Tent Watchkeeping (“Lähivartiovuoro”).
  • [FEATURE]: Player now gets sanity penalty for staying in the rain or for wearing dirty clothes.
  • [FEATURE]: Player can now change dirty clothes to clean ones in the Equipment Warehouse.
  • [FEATURE]: Player is no more allowed to leave the barracks without outdoor equipment.
  • [FEATURE]: Implemented 3rd Person Photo Mode to allow players to take beautiful screenshots!
  • [FEATURE]: Added 3 difficulty levels and implemented permadeath support.
  • [FEATURE]: Added effects when sanity is low.
  • [FEATURE]: Added a voice over dialogue for the day 1 bus trip.
  • [FEATURE]: Enlarged the player inventory and closet box size from 8 –> 10 slots.
  • [FEATURE]: NPCs may now go to the Sports Center or Canteen during free time.
  • [FEATURE]: Draftee Market in TV Room is now functional.
  • [FEATURE]: Input Mapping UI.
  • [FEATURE]: Dynamic (area-based) Gain, Gamma, Lift, Shadows, Midtones & Highlights controls. This allows us to create more immersive experience by changing these parameters depending on the time & place!
  • [FEATURE]: WIP: Sauna mechanics.
  • [FEATURE]: WIP: Log Splitting mechanics.
  • [FEATURE]: Flashlight support for the player.
  • [FEATURE]: Overall weeks 1-4 are now ready. Just some bug fixing to do for days 26 and 27.
  • [ART]: Band T-Shirt for Satanae Virgines (Lord Apollyon’s metal band).
  • [ART]: Story related items.
  • [ANIM]: Some new animations & improvements to the previous ones.
  • [LOCALIZATION]: Added some German translations.
  • [LOCALIZATION]: On-going English translations for weeks 1-4.
  • [VOICE]: A ton of new voice-over lines for weeks 1-4.
  • [WRITING]: New free time dialogues for NPCs.
  • [WRITING]: New story content for week 4+.
  • [CODE]: A lot of story specific implementation for weeks 3-4.
  • [CODE]: Implemented Game Over UI for permadeath.
  • [CODE]: Implemented the rest of the missing skills.
  • [CODE]: A lot of bug fixes here and there. QoL improvements.
  • [CODE]: Split navmesh into multiple smaller navmeshes for optimization.
  • [DEV]: Tool to detect missing voice-over lines.
Lord Apollyon “having a blast”!
To the holidays – March! Wait, what is Nönnönöö doing in those Smurfies?!
Something story related…

The visualizer plugin seems to be broken so we could not updated December 2022 Git commit count. However, it seems to be around 240! A new record for sure. 🙂

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November 2022 – Changelog

Let’s start with the announcements:

  1. Steam Early Access will not start in 2022. 😔
  2. Steam Early Access WILL START IN JANUARY 2023 – FRIDAY 13TH! 🤩🤩🤩
    (we’ll do our very best to make sure we’re ready to launch at this date 🙏)

Why not in 2022??? Because we still have things to polish and finalize. We wanted to enrich the story content, create more depth, ensure that most features will work as intended… This has required a lot more effort than what we thought. We’ve also had some sick leaves etc. that has affected our effective monthly hours. We would’ve loved to release the game on the independence day of Finland which is December 6th. Unfortunately we cannot reach it… But what could go wrong with Friday 13th?

Who would need that many monitors?

What will the Early Access release have? Four weeks of military training from the day one to day 28, including two forest exercises. There will also be plenty of story related content, optional dialogue and stuff to do on the free time etc.

Development status. Each block represents a specific game event, some shorter, some longer. Green (tested & playable), Blue (under testing), Yellow (in progress). Border colours are our internal metadata. 😉

What will still come? During H1/2023 we will extend the service to contain the full basic period (“P-kausi”, 8 weeks) and even more story related content. There’s also many things that we wish to polish but haven’t had time yet. We’re also already planning for extras that should come after the basic period, incl. other educational branches.

We want to include some media highlights here as well. Huge thanks for making videos, articles etc., it means a lot to us!

Ah shit, here we go again.

What did we do in November? Let’s see…

  • [MANAGEMENT]: Re-organize the project structure to better support adding more features & functionalities by multiple team members. This should result in faster development cycles.
  • [CODE]: Changed from Humanoid Avatar to a Generic Avatar to support animating facial bones. This required re-animating and re-importing many of our existing animations.
  • [CODE]: Fixes to grenade throwing and bazooka (“KVKES”) functionalities.
  • [CODE]: Fixes to morning comb UI. Player can now finally purchase the morning comb (“aamukampa”) from the canteen.
  • [CODE]: Fixes to tent watching (“lähivartiovuoro”) functionalities.
  • [CODE]: Ability to wear specific head items (i.e. hats) indoors. Useful for the Chef.
  • [CODE]: A new way to make the camera follow an NPC.
  • [CODE]: Added plenty of new story related items to the game.
  • [CODE]: Support to automatically start a dialogue when player gets near enough.
  • [CODE]: Implementation of service tasks and story tasks for service days 20-28. Everything is mostly done, some minor parts still missing. Should be done in a week or two.
  • [ART]: Updated FPS hands model to include both hands separately in order to create two-handed animations more easily. Because of this update we had to re-configure all FPS hand item positions etc.
  • [ART]: Created new assets for a chef and some other civilians.
  • [SCENE]: Trench is now part of the same world terrain instead of a separate terrain to fix navmesh issues.
  • [SCENE]: A lot of SECRET AREA DESIGN. Wait, should this be even mentioned here..?
  • [UI]: Game Over UI for permadeath mode.
  • [UI]: Challenges UI for in-game challenges.
  • [UI]: Steam Leaderboard support for Challenges.
  • [VOICE]: A lot of new voice overs for multiple characters.
  • [WRITING]: Shittons of new dialogue, story related content etc.
  • [TOOLS]: Fixes to our custom character model importer.
Let’s go orienteering!
Oh, what have we found..?
Challenges UI in progress.
ALERT!!!
Just a random butt pic.