It's been a busy two weeks. Read on to find out what happened recently during the development of Days of Defiance.

Achievements

We implemented Steam achievements! You can't see them yet, but there are 20 achievements total, including 6 hidden ones. They're a fun little challenge to help you explore everything the game has to offer. We might add more if the opportunity presents itself, but for now we're pretty happy with the amount that we already have.

Voice Acting

We also started working with voice actors to bring character barks into the game. Character what? In the video games industry, a bark is what we call those short sentences or exclamations that NPCs do to comment on the current situation or to react to player input. In your typical FPS, it's the "I've lost him!", "Throwing a grenade!", "Reloading!" that tell players what's going on with the enemy AI. In Days of Defiance, these happen when players select a character or instruct them to perform an action. They're also being played to let you know about important events, like a weapon that is jammed or needs reloading, or a new enemy that was spotted by one of your mercs. Each character has a distinct voice depending on their personality and where they come from. Barks also vary depending on a merc's mood. All barks that we've recorded so far will make it into the demo, but not all playable characters will be voced by the time the demo releases. There is also an option to tweak the frequency with which these barks occur, so if you find yourself annoyed by them or just want some quiet, you can always turn them off completely.

SAM Sites

There is a questline in Days of Defiance that unlocks air travel upon completion. Traveling by air is much faster than on ground and lets you avoid enemy troops who patrol the country. The problem with it is that it is also very dangerous. There are SAM (surface-to-air missile) sites all over Escalia, and the closer you fly to one of those, the higher the chance that they will shoot you down. If you want air travel to be safe, you have to take over those sites. They're very heavily guarded, though, so don't go in underprepared! Once a SAM site is under your control, you can deploy drones that observe the nearby area. You'll be able to see enemy troop movement from further away and even which way they're likely to be going next. If you have a skilled enough merc, that is. That's it for this time!