Strife: The Expanse's development has been undergoing major progress recently. In the past week I've been bale to get the deathmatch gamemode stable and playable from start to finish! There are still some weird quirks such as players crashing when loading into the main game, or after playing several matches in a row, so things still need to be tightened up.

Game balance is another factor. I was finally able to get a good hands on experience with how the game actually played, and it was fun! But it was also a bit skewed some unit types **cough** ranger **cough**. Due to the low unit cost but high KO potential archers ended up reigning supreme despite a very low defence stat. Paladins were also extremely strong with their ability to repeatedly heal for a significant amount. Cooldowns have been added to some abilities and stat blocks have been tweaked. Hopefully I can rope my friends into another match in the coming week to try them out!

Additionally since the last devlog more units have been added! Most of these were also involved in my playtest and were great includes!

Assassin:

The assassin is a unit designed around flanking. Hitting an enemy and getting out! In her current implementation her special attack allows her to teleport to an enemy unit within range and attack. This attack does reduced damage against high defence troops, but scales extremely well against low defence foes, making her a great squishy killer!

Even better, after this attack she is able to move again! Run in, pop someone, run out, heal. 

Larvling:

Now this was an extremely fun troop, albeit  a bit underwhelming in our playtest with the stats he had at the time. The Larvling has lower than average stats, and an above average points/stat ratio. This is because his special attack lets him replicate! Get him to a water tile and activate it and he will spawn copies on all adjacent water tiles! The cooldown on this ability scales with map size so that it isn't underwhelming on lower sized maps, but also isn't totally overwhelming on larger ones. Hedging your bets and going all in on a meme strat with the Larvling is some of the most fun I had. At one point we had about 20 of these guys on the map at once!

Ignis:

Ignis is a very powerful (but expensive) unit. Currently costing 15 points our of the 25 default for your team, he is a truly powerful, awe inspiring creature. Able to fly, allowing him to ignore height movement costs, he is able to maneuver the battlefield quickly. He is extremely tanky, however he is lacking range. His special attack summons an AOE fireball that damages all units within two tiles of his position.

Currently I haven't had the chance to playtest him. But I am very excited for where to go from here.

More to come!

Capture the flag is still in the back of my mind. VR support from menu to game and back is also floating around in there. I'm hoping I can clear these seemingly random crashes and then resume adding more units while polishing out the finer points of the game. As often is said; the last 20% takes 80% of the work, but we are nearing release very quickly. I am hoping I'll be able to provide a full roster and mostly polished game at launch and expand from there.

Singleplayer is still on the backburner. I'm definitely mulling about how to make it work in a fun way, and also how to implement it on the server in a way that nicely integrates nicely. I have some ideas but for a game with so many avenues