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How ya doing? It’s been a while since we’ve put together an update, so let’s just get right to it.
It’s been three years since Project Wingman was released, and we are by no means done with it. So here’s what’s been going on:
After a work sabbatical to far-off skies, the dev team is now back home to roost. We’re returning to Project Wingman and its base experience, as available broadly to everyone who enjoys Project Wingman. We’re releasing an opt-in Beta update today on Steam for PC with a lot of underlying changes we’ve learned in the time since release, as well as general fixes and improvements that we’ve stored up for a while, perhaps the most notable of this is our new cloud system, which fixes some complaints that we’ve had with our original implementation that caused graphic artifacting and bugs, while also adding a certain amount of reactivity to certain… calamitous events. As of now then, Project Wingman is now in what we consider a 2.0 state; we’ve passed some internal milestones that have put us past what we would consider other, incremental versions like 1.5 (we add a .1 after adding a major feature under the hood or something tangible to the player), and this is just where we’ve landed:
The game’s rendering system has been totally redone, with new lighting effects and new VFX across the board such as new flares and smoke trails. These changes and fixes are gonna let us start working on Project Wingman as a continuing effort, while also allowing us to experiment, either under the hood or behind the scenes, for other projects. The game is going to look and run better and smoother than it has before.
As for why we’re opting for a beta test first, we’d like to test it out with a larger testing base than our internal roster before pushing it out generally to make sure we’re not taking steps backward or blocking out people who could previously play the game. In an upcoming beta update soon after this initial one, we’ll also be adding XeSS, FSR, and DLSS options as well.
As far as what this continuing effort will look like content-wise for PW:
We will be revamping the Conquest Gamemode and the Mercenary difficulty mode to what we consider a 2.0 state. For Conquest we will be investigating and taking time to fully form it from less of a horde mode island hopping slog to something more thought out; the introduction of a meaningful “perk” or part system allowing for more arcadey or powerful gameplay and making it less about unit spam and instead higher difficulty enemies at higher levels, along with balance changes. We believe that within Conquest is a rather interesting take on a rougelite or bullet heaven, and we hope to give it some time for it to bear fruit and come into its own.
As for Mercenary mode’s 2.0. It’s inherently going to be a completely ridiculous difficulty. As of now, the Merc mode is, for most missions, a flat difficulty increase with the AI and not much else unless you manually apply modifiers. We intend to complete a Merc mode version of every mission to create a true Mercenary playthrough, based on the assumption that the player is in the Project Wingman Mark I (otherwise good luck). New units spawning, harder AI, and some surprises that we hope will bring you to the very limits of this anime-esque action that Project Wingman sometimes dips into. Add on top of this the integration of some more difficulty and gameplay modifiers and I’m sure you’ll find a new way to throw back into the game (and subsequently have the game throw stuff back at you).
Another element of our renewed focus is going to be a return to the stars of the show: The planes.
We’re overdue some new inclusions to the lineup, and I’m sure Prez will be happy to get some new metal in the hanger and perhaps a second seat to fill in, so expect some new planes from time to time.
Along the way, we intend to open up Project Wingman to a more streamlined, accessible pathway to integrating UGC, user-generated content, if the player wishes to do so, with our attention falling first on user-made skins and paintjobs for aircraft, and then open slots for entirely custom aircraft instead of replacements as it is now for some pre-existing mods. UGC and our accommodation of them will be highly variable based on what we can actually do, but we are making efforts to fulfill our internal wishlist of things in regards to UGC such as Steam Workshop integration and having early prototypes of a mission editor running. No promises, but we’d like to state these things just because we too are still gamers and that UGC is always neat to see worked on.
Project Wingman is continuing, but I’d like to make a few things clear to that effect. Project Wingman is not a game as a service or a living thing; when the dev team set out to create Project Wingman in the mid-2010s, we had a pretty concrete vision of its scope, and that was as a game like in yesteryear and the expectations thereof. We wanted to make a game that could be released, that did not need any particular tweaking or further development because in itself was a simple, Point A to Point B experience that grew out of our love of a genre that, at the time, seemed unattended. Me (FlyAwayNow), and RB-D2, and Jose could leave Project Wingman at any time forever, and if it lay there as it is, it would still be a game we’d be proud of. Not a perfect game, of course, but one that we know is fun and dramatic and cheesy and all the things that are the bread and butter of its genre.
Now obviously we’re not gonna leave it as it lay, because we do live in a time where we are able to keep working on Project Wingman, a great base that we are familiar with and people still very much enjoy and would love to see expanded on, but we just ask for some patience in return, and we apologize for the last few years of silence on our end as we were concentrated on other efforts and the results of the original release.
Within PW, work is being done, and we’ll let you in on the Deal as soon as we can.
We’re glad you’re with us on this project, wingman!
Full Patchnotes;
