Introducing Wavefront: Vanguard

This is the first entry in the devlog for Wavefront: Vanguard, a low-poly, combined-arms real-time strategy game about seeing first, striking first, and holding the line on land, at sea and in the air.

The idea

Most RTS games treat vision as a circle around each unit. In Wavefront: Vanguard, an enemy only exists for you while one of your detectors actually holds it, whether that's a pair of eyes, a radar, a sonar, a magnetic sensor or a laser designator. Each of those has its own physics, range limits, blind spots and counters:

• Radar sees far, but it reveals itself and it can be jammed.
• Submarines hide from everything except sonar and magnetometers.
• Hills cast real radar shadows.
• At night, eyes go dark unless the unit carries thermal optics.

Every detector on your side and your allies' side feeds one shared, fused picture. Winning means building a better picture than the enemy, then hitting what it shows you.

Where it stands

The game is a playable prototype today. In place so far:

• Four game modes: Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Domination, and a Persistent World that saves between sessions.
• The full match flow, from a lone HQ and two engineers up to shipyards, airfields and SAM batteries.
• The unit roster across land, sea and air: tanks, bridge layers, ballistic launchers, frigates, submarines, carriers, fighters, gunships and drones.
• Sensor fusion, with coverage layers painted straight onto the terrain, including radar shadows and jammer cones.
• Vision modes: night vision, thermal and a radar scope.
• Procedural maps: islands, archipelagos and straits in temperate or desert biomes.
• AI commanders that only know what their own sensors detect.
• Multiplayer over Steam or LAN for up to 8 players.

Automated playtests run the major systems and capture screenshots of each one, which is where every image on this site comes from.

What's next

• Balance tuning
• Audio
• A real multi-account Steam test

Progress updates will land here as they happen. See The Game for a fuller tour, or the media page for more screenshots.