Hello everyone! I know it's been more than 7 months since 0.10 update and the fact that 0.11 haven't been finished yet after all that time is frankly unacceptable, I have been quite busy working on the game and managing a dozen other stuff at the same time but I can assure you that I am making progress, just slowly. Since 0.11 will need some more time to be finished I think I should make some kind of progress report on it to show what work has been done as well as what to expect from the update, so here are the early update notes:

Codebase overhaul

The game's whole codebase which was written in the GDScript programming language (the "native" language of the Godot game engine the game is powered by) has been converted to the C# language. The reason for this is I find GDScript to be extremely limiting, hard to work with and hard to maintain & expand, so much so that I'd rather go through the hassle of converting nearly 300 script files than to continue working with it, and this process is a major reason why 0.11 took so long, but I'm happy that from now on I can comfortably & productively do my programming without stupid random bugs & errors popping up every other minute.

The game's performance should stay the same although there are a lot of areas that can still be optimized.

Story Mode

A new story mode is in the works, the aim of this is to (1) intergrate some kind of progression into the game as there are currently no purpose whatsoever that it gives the player other than simple repetitive bot battles (and laggy local multiplayer) and (2) explore the worldbuilding of the game. Although writing & story telling is a rather new thing for me to learn I believe it will be beneficial for me in the long run if I can practice & do it well.

So far there is not much going on besides a few dialogs and characters concept art, I'm planning to reveal only a snippet of the first chapter for 0.11 and add the rest in further updates. As it currently stands, the release date of 0.11 depends almost entirely on the completion of that snippet which ideally should be in mid-May.

It has some visual novel inspired elements but of course I'm not gonna write whole novels but rather just multiple small chapters each with a different story.

A new map

Not yet named, not yet have a soundtrack, the design could use some finishing touches but it's pretty much completed. I want each map in the game to have something unique to them & be special in their own way so I gave this new one the ability to heal tanks and possibly give them some kind of buff, something no map in the game has done yet.

Some rebalancing

Some balancing changes are also on the way, mostly around tank stats configuration. I have figured since the stats are so freely provided, tanks becoming 'master of all trades' is inevitable and attempts to prevent that like in the previous updates just makes things so much more complicated unneccesarily, so I have decided to embrace that idea and try to balance the game in that direction, all tanks should strive to maximize all of the stats they want or need, all can be master of all trades, but I will try to implement different ways for them to achieve that, either by cranking the stats up to the capped value or keeping them low and depend solely on status buffs from abilities or a mix of both, and this difference in ways of gaining stats can hopefully help with variety. I think this way of balancing feels more natural to the configuration system of the game and more intuitive & easy to understand.

That's all for now, I know it seems like there's nothing much going on for an update with more than 7 months of work put into it, but I hope it would lay some ground work to ease future updates with a codebase that's easier to maintain and a solid story mode system  I can expand upon. I'll try to finish the update and if everything goes smoothly it should be released around mid-May. Thank you for your patience and sorry for taking so long to do what should've been done by this point in time.

See you all in May!