Drydock Dreams Games Task Force Admiral demo has been available since mid February and is now on update three as people have been testing out the Pacific WWII focused strategy game. The latest developer diary gives us some new screenshots, a changelog of the latest update, and insights into some interesting goals that the developers are pursuing. Let’s have a look!

Demo changelog

Rolled out earlier this past week, Task Force Admiral’s demo and beta has been updated with a new update. The WWII Pacific strategy game, focused heavily on aerial combat, has been available in demo form for the public to test since February 18 on Steam and clearly the public test has helped the developers pin down some challenges with the game and with its stability.

The latest update has adjusted gameplay and user interface features while also working on stability issues. Here’s the changelog they’ve shared with us:

STABILITY

A few more crashes identified & fixed

USER INTERFACE

Fixed inputs issue on the UI in 4K resolutions

GAMEPLAY

Fighters are now firing more often (and missing more often too)
Improved TBD’s flight model (issue of TBDs ditching on approach)
Fixed a bug corrupting a strike setup when planning is done while aircraft are landing
Fixed blocking issues with deck-management
Carriers can no longer receive aircraft if damage caused it to pitch or roll too much
Carriers are now accelerating faster before takeoffs
Fixed deprecated search flightplans being shown in Search Planner
Fixed duplicated payloads on aircraft after a strike has been canceled
Fixed Yorktown barrier animation
Fixed near misses being logged as torpedo hits in missions reports

Win a free copy of the game competition

Want to win a free digital copy of the final game? Task Force Admiral is asking for people to participate in a screenshot taking contest. The best screenshots, as determined by the selecting committee, will have the shot of winning one of four digital copies of the game. More details on the competition are here.

Stretching towards …. a flight sim?

Meanwhile, Task Force Admiral are extending new stretch goals as part of their Kickstarter campaign. They intend to set a new stretch goal that will aim to offer two battle stations: a gun director for naval ships and a cockpit for the F4F Wildcat.

TFA looks to be stretching ever closer to a flight sim experience as they intend to offer a basic cockpit of the F4F Wildcat with inspiration drawn from games of yesteryear such as Pacific Air War, Aces of the Pacific, and Pacific Strike.

Meanwhile, the gun director position also draws similar inspiration from Great Naval Battles, Task Force 1942, Destroyer Command and others.

The developers are keen to point out that these stretch goals are beyond the core experience of the strategy game and that they might or might not happen depending on the Kickstarter results. Here’s a little more of what they had to say:

Because this endeavor is notably more ambitious, as so as not to downplay its cost, we will set this stretch goal at the AUD $375k instead. We might get there. We might not. But we’ll work hard to achieve it, and we’re counting on you if you like what you see! Just bear in mind that like any other stretch goal (save perhaps for Tacview), the implementation is not a priority & will be done in due time when core mechanics will be safe and sound – see it more as an ornament to the original game than its main meat, even though it will certainly impact greatly your fun factor. As such expect this function to possibly be released after the 1.0. At any rate, this is a natural direction for us to head towards, but what this stretch goal ensures though is that it will not be behind a paywall as a DLC.

Sounds interesting and as a flight simmer I think this sounds particularly exciting to get into the cockpit of an aircraft that you may have earlier been planning to send out on a mission. Neat!

Read the full developer update right over here!