With the release of 0.14, we're finally ready to devote our full development attention to some of the big features that have been sidelined over the last few months. These include new communication tools, a rework of logi, and a revamp of our town environments. We are also spending time to rearchitect certain core parts of our codebase so that we can have less bugs and develop faster in the future. These are big tasks that we want to get right at the fundamental level, so don't expect us to be rushing these out the door in the next update. It's important that we take the time to plant the development seeds to improve Foxhole in the long run.
Disclaimer: Any feature or piece of content shown here is a work in progress and subject to change in the future.
Town Revamp Explorations
We've been talking about revamping the town environments for awhile. One of the reasons why the existing towns haven't changed much visually or functionally for a long time is that we didn't want to waste time with incremental improvements when we knew that the day would come when we'd rework everything from the ground up. That day is now. A few months ago, we began putting together a plan for how to tackle this revamp and while we're still very early in the process, we thought it'd be cool to share some of our progress.
Explorations of a garrisoned town environment
There's a lot of features in Foxhole that we had to redesign from their first rough implementation. In the past, we went through a similar process for redesigning the characters and vehicles. We've found that it's always crucial to start with some clear goals that will dictate design decisions uniformly across the team. From there, we jump into the exploration phase, where we start figuring out the range of concepts that might work to fulfill the goals. We do this through concept art, references, mockups, and grey box prototypes.
Explorations of combat in a town environment
The concepts shown here are mood and architectural explorations of the town environments. We already know that some aspects of these concepts won't work (and some will), but it's all part of the development process we have. While it will take months before we see any of this come to fruition in an actual update, we hope to share more of our progress with you along the way.
While some of this may change, at a high level some of the features we have planned for the town revamp are:
Visually rich town environments
More interesting firefights & battles
Naturally defensible layouts
New content for builders in Towns
Explorations of a pre-war town in the world of Foxhole
Emotes
HB (our animator) has been itching to add emotes to Foxhole for awhile now. He's always been excited about the social and communication aspects of the game. With the rest of the team busy with other high priority features, we've had a lull in the animation pipeline. It was the perfect opportunity for HB to sneak in some development time for emotes.
The "Halt" emote
The goal for emotes is to allow players to communicate more effectively and to enable more options for role playing. To start, we're going to be adding some simple emotes that don't require props or complicated movements in the world. This include hand signals and some fun ones like surrender and salute.
The "Move Out" emote