📢 Attention Thunder Run, Days of Valor, Mars Frontier, War Star Empire, Battlefront Mars, and Firestrike Commanders:

Welcome to the 10th installment of the Battlehouse Dev Blog, a place where fans of all Battlehouse games can enjoy regular behind the scenes peaks into the minds of Battlehouse Developers. Without further adieu, here’s bh-nirgal to talk about some in-game chat improvements, and development updates for all games:

Chat Improvements

This past week has mostly been dealing with quality of life improvements and patching UI errors.

The biggest change was enabling mouse wheel scrolling in chat. All games benefited from this change.

We’re going to pause on UI improvements for a short period to get a few content patches out for Firestrike, Mars Frontier, Battlefront Mars, and War Star Empire. These are smaller games that represent a smaller portion of the income that keeps the whole ship afloat, but they deserve new content too! We’ll return to UI improvements for all games shortly afterwards.

When we return to the UI, the next step is to expand the player options menu to allow scrolling. There’s no room left right now to add options, and a lot of upcoming UI improvements need to be something the user can toggle. Sadly, this is not something we can just flip a switch on, but once scrolling is added to a UI element it can be expanded easily in the future. While we’re at it, we’ll make sure mouse wheel scrolling works in this UI element.

Once player options can scroll and we have more room to give you options to choose from, here’s the new options we’ll be adding:

  • Turn off screen shake when explosion effects happen.
  • Reverse chat window vertical orientation. New messages and the input window on the top, or new messages and the input window on the bottom. Your choice.
  • Reverse mouse wheel scroll direction. Scroll down to go down, or scroll up to go down, your choice.

Game Development Status Updates

Firestrike players: You’ve been asking for it, and it’s in the works. Tier 16. You’re getting new levels to all units, new levels to all tech, new levels to all buildings, the addition of barriers, and one new unit. This is a big patch, so it might get broken into stages.

Mars Frontier: You’re getting a new Central Computer level, reduced build times for existing building levels, and a new level for all units. Most of the work on this was already done, so expect it very quickly.

Battlefront Mars: You’re getting a new level for all units, and one elite unit. A lot of the work on this is already done, but it needs some polish. It shouldn’t take too long.

War Star Empire: You’re getting a new level for all units and some additional turret levels. About half of the work on this was done between other patches, so it won’t take too long.

There’s not much else to discuss this week. To our American friends, enjoy gorging yourselves tomorrow. To the rest of you, have a great week.

Stay up to date every day on what’s being developed on the dev-tracker channel here.

Looking for an update on where the Dev Team currently stands regarding various recent community suggestions? Check out our “Voice of the Commander” trackers here:

Like what you see in this Dev Blog, or have suggestions on things you’d like to see addressed in our “Voice of the Commander” trackers? Let us know over on our Thunder Run Discord Server!


Battlehouse Dev Blog, Issue #10: Chat Improvements, and more