We want to focus this backer update not on individual pieces of content, but on the studio, our teams, and what each of our teams is working on. Our hope is that this will give backers deeper insight into where we are in terms of progress on our development goals. First, we need to break down a bit of how our dev team is structured.

The Phoenix Point overall development team is split into 6 main sub-teams:

The Game Design Team: responsible for the overall workings of the game. Building the core loops, making sure they’re fun, deciding how in-game mechanics work and how the game functions as a whole, right down to individual skills and items.

The Level Design Team: works on all of the different tactical maps in Phoenix Point, as well as optimizing the procedural generation of map elements, to ensure they’re fun and fair while still providing a challenge.

The User Interface Team: designs and implements all of the icons, buttons, text boxes, menus and generally all of the on-screen player feedback across the entire game. UI designers’ skills go across art, programming, and design.

The Tactical Team: works on the tactical combat side of Phoenix Point. This includes the artists working on the aesthetic look of the maps and of the soldiers, as well as a team of programmers putting it all together.

The Geoscape Team: much like the tactical team, the Geoscape team works on the strategic element of the game. This includes designing all of the encounters between factions, world generation, mission generation and base management.

The Quality Assurance Team: plays a lot of Phoenix Point, helps track down and squish bugs, ensures the game is optimized properly, and generally represents the consumer experience to the design team as best as possible.

What have we been working on?

Game Design

Lately, the game design team has been working on balancing the tactical game. This includes adjusting the numbers for damage and hit points on both player and enemy characters. In general, health pools will be much larger but damage will also be much greater. This gives a more nuanced approach to receiving small amounts of damage multiple times, or one large blast, which dovetails well with Phoenix Point’s ballistics system involving multiple shots each time a player fires.