Greetings Commanders, 

Fusion Guards came a long way in the last years, however this year is special.
Aside from 2020 being a date that feels particularly sci-fi (Edge of tomorrow, Real Steel and the Perfect Dark video game all take place in 2020);
It’s also going to be the year that Fusion Guards will see the biggest changes yet.

In this blog post I’ll share our priorities for the rest of the year and give you a first look at some of the upcoming changes.

Janeious Team

When we initially started Janeious we were less than a handful of people (Sven our tech lead, Romain the founder and myself).
Throughout the years we were able to welcome a lot of new members on the team.
In our first call with the entire team this year we had 14 full time team members.

With external partners Fusion Guards is being worked on by around 20 people!
At the same time last year, that number was a lot lower.

A team size like that means new challenges but also new opportunities.
For this year our big company goal is:

  • More releases with meaningful changes
  • Establishing workflows for managing growing teams

And while we will share more about the team in the coming months, that’s really not what you’re here for is it?
So let’s get to the good stuff:

Fusion Guards

Disclaimer: We’re still a small team, even one person being unexpectedly sick for a week has a huge influence on development.
So expect the order and any noted timings to change as we move forward.

Technology

At the end of 2019 and all throughout January we’ve been making a lot of under-the-hood changes to both the game and the underlying tech stack.
The biggest change was undoubtedly the updating of the games engine (Unity) to a newer version.
Aside from a whole barrage of bug fixes this also allowed us some nifty upgrades for things like performance and visual quality.
This is not yet fully completed.
While the upgrade went well it will take some time until all the parts of the game make use of this.
So for the next few updates expect issues in certain areas, these will be fixed ASAP!
We’ll share some actual technical details in a future tech deep dive post from our development team.

Visuals

Oh boy do we have exciting news to share here. Too much for a single blog post so this will be spread out through multiple posts.
First things first:
For the last few months we’ve been working with Huy Dinh to help supercharge our art team.
Among many other things he’s been the art director on Marvel Strike Force and worked as an artist on games like Command and Conquer, Bastion and Medal of Honor.

The fruits of that labor will slowly make their way into the game over the coming months in the way of:

  • New Pilots
  • New Guards
  • Updated and new battlegrounds
  • New visual effects

We’ll share more about this in a separate post but here’s a little sneak preview of the final concept art for our updated snow environment.
A version with reduced effects is already on the way to the live version of the game and will be updated with the full visual effects soon.

Gameplay

We’ll be talking A LOT more about this very soon so I’ll leave you with the following teasers of features coming this year (the order of this list is not! the release order):

  • Daily Login Rewards
    • About to go into internal testing before moving to the TESTING branch in a few weeks
  •  Teams
    • Server based functionality is currently being tested
    • UI Design is done
    • Client implementation is upcoming
  • Questline Difficulties
    • Design is finished
    • UI Design is in progress
    • Server side implementation is in progress
    • Client implementation is upcoming
  • Player Power Progression
    • Higher maximum player level
    • More Guard and Pilot star levels
  • Crafting!

And so much more!

User Interface / Experience

One of the primary reasons why we haven’t released new features in a while is that we are currently working with a company called UXisFine! .
Their recent clients include Epic, Jam City, Infinity Plus Two and many more.
These guys are absolute rock stars when it comes to designing interfaces and general user experiences.
With their help we’re currently redesigning all interfaces of the game to facilitate all of those upcoming features.
We’re not quite ready to show the final designs for all of them but here’s a sneaky teaser 😉

 

And that’s it!

We’ll have plenty more to share in the coming weeks and as always:
Come join our Discord!
We’re there every day trolling interacting with all of you.

Cheers!

Mark
Design Director