Starting this post, I'm going to be making an effort to talk not only about features that are going to be released in the near future, but also about features that we're experimenting with. We used to do much more of the later, but somehow devblog posts slowly transformed into "feature announcement" posts, which I actually want to stay way from moving forward. Hope you enjoy this one!
If you have any questions about the features discussed here, join the live Q&A on official Foxhole developer stream, which starts at 2PM EDT on Tuesday.
Disclaimer: Any feature or piece of content shown here is a work in progress and subject to change in the future.
Storage Facility
We're currently deep in development on a bunch of new logistics focused features. One of our goals is to provide more options for logi players to organize and collaborate. For some cool background information, the concept behind this feature originally came from a community suggestion.
Our initial design of the Storage Facility
The Storage Facility is essentially a Stockpile for crates and will exist in Port Bases initially. Logi players will be able to store crates into this structure in an organized and secure manner. This will provide a staging point for produced items, instead of crates being forced into the Port Base Stockpile or dumped into Storage Boxes. This provides the option for players to decouple the production and supply line roles if they feel that would be more efficient.
The first concepts we did for the Storage Facility were designed around the idea that they existed only in the Port Bases. However, our long term plans is to have most logistics structures exist in front line towns as well. As a result, we redesigned it to look like it could exist inside a town environment.
The final design of the Storage Facility
UI Redesign Explorations
The UI is one of the very first things we designed for Foxhole. While we've done a bit of refinement here and there, it's largely been untouched for 2 years and it's design has been stretched very thin to support the expanding game. There's been a few devs on the team that have been very adamant about refreshing the UI design and style for awhile now. We've finally got the time to start experimenting with some ideas.
The goals for the UI redesign
We intend to maintain the original design philosophy for the UI, which means we're going for something highly utilitarian that fits the bleak mood of Foxhole. The UI must support a medium to high density of information on the screen since we have quite a bit going on (inventories, player lists, description widgets, etc). We also want to address specific problems with the current designs such as a lack of organization in the stockpile, messy overlapping elements, and lack of support for long item/vehicle/structure names and descriptions.
UI Design Experiments
Below are some visual mockups for the redesign. Please note that these have all been discarded and won't be what we'll see in the game eventually. However, there are ideas from some of them that we may forward to future design iterations.
One of our earlier ideas for a main menu flow. This ended up feeling too "sleek" for us.
An idea for how the main menu could look
Another possibility for the main menu