Project Haven - July Development Report

Henriquejr spotted the July development report for the strategy RPG Project Haven:

July Development Report

Hello Steel Dragons!
Welcome to another Project Haven development update!

This time we have quite a few gameplay additions to show you, some art updates and more, so let’s get straight into it.

Gameplay
One major task we’ve finished since the last update was reworking the whole action system backend. While it’s not particularly visual or exciting, it allows us to more easily add complex gameplay systems. It was also designed with modding in mind. In fact, every action in the game is done with the exact same tools and system modders will have available to them! We hope to see some really cool things from the community!

After finishing the system we quickly recreated all existing actions iterating and implementing a few new actions to help flesh out the gameplay:

MOVABLE OBJECTS:
Characters with enough Strength are now able to push some objects to gain access to otherwise unavailable paths, allowing for more interesting strategic decisions on your character selection and level up!

CARRY DOWNED TEAMMATES
There’s some situations where healing your downed merc in place is just not an option and moving while downed is a slow affair. You can now carry downed teammates to safety before reviving them.

CARRY DEAD ENEMIES
In the same vein as the previous system you can now carry dead enemies to prevent others from spotting the body. We’ve also included handy containers where you can dump them, though if all else fails a secluded corner will work just as well!

IMPROVED ACTION POP-UP
Along with all the backend system improvements we also improved the UI, the action popup (right click) now contains more information and is better organized, allowing for smoother interactions!

Art
Gameplay doesn’t get all the spotlight in this update though, as we’ve continued our upgrade of the character art.

Here’s just a couple of them:

Bubbles, everyone's favorite Steel Dragon’s hacker in service, sporting an updated look.

Iron Dogs mob, a brand new foe you’ll find in the streets of Haven. Don’t let his looks fool you though, they’re tough nuts to crack!

One of the main reasons for updating existing characters was to give them all new facial rigs to allow for higher fidelity facial animation, here’s a sneak peek at Daisy’s updated facial animation:

Level Design
We can’t really show much here as we’re mostly working on very late game content. But we did get back and did some updates to previous levels, fleshing out the gameplay and art.

You can see the different lighting styles in the image below representing different areas of the city.

Graphics
For those with supporting cards we’ve also added Raytracing. Make those rain puddles shine!
And to lighten all that GPU load or just to improve performance we’ve also added DLSS and FSR2 support!

With all the changes the game underwent we’d like to have you all test the game and give your feedback. Throughout Project Haven’s development it’s been extremely helpful reading everyone’s ideas and suggestions. As such, we’re planning on having a new Demo as soon as we have a stable build, stay tuned for details!

And finally we’d like to thank all the community for your support, we know you guys are eager to get your hands on the final product. We’re a small team doing our best, and we want to make sure your experience is as good as it can be. We’re not cutting any corners, so while things sometimes take a while to develop we believe it’s for the best in the end. We hope you guys understand.

Thank you! And see you next time!
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