January 2022 development update and teasers

Hello all!

It's been some time since we last checked in, and we owe you an update on development progress.  If you're used to our usual pace (at least one update per month, often two), you've noticed that we didn't hit the same stride this time around.  There's an explanation for this, of course.  

Development in December 2021 and January 2022 has been unusually challenging, due to our small team encountering a "perfect storm" of implementing increasingly complex features, coordinating with more people than before, and planning toward the summer early access release.  As a result, we did not hit our estimate of early January for the next major update, and based on what we now know, it would be unrealistic to promise late January as well.  

That's the bad news.  The good news is that we have been making steady progress the whole time and can finally announce concrete plans.  The game will be updated after the next developer stream, on February 6.  This gives us two weeks to wrap things up, which will be enough time to complete and test the features and bug fixes we have in progress.  

The update will feature a patron-exclusive game mode: dynamically generated missions.  These missions will be created "on the fly", with briefings and layouts arranged via code rather than manually authored.  This system is intended for eventual use in campaign mode, where its parameters will be tied to the strategic situation in the campaign - but for now, we thought it would be fun to let supporters test it on a standalone basis as it's developed.  

As we continue to improve and expand the dynamic mission generator, patrons will have exclusive (for now) playtest access to the feature, and we will take your feedback into account for future work on it.

I've attached a few screenshots from early testing in dynamic missions on the new 8x8 km map.  We're excited to bring you this, as well as other improvements and fixes, in the next update!

Thanks again for supporting us and making GHPC possible.

- Josh