Monthly Update
This Month we have been working very hard on the beginning
of the game and now we are in the final art stage of the Level, we have some
images we would like to show you, this has been a lot of work as we have no
levels in the game that are set in the day time, so we had to create a new
skybox and then tweak with the lighting and the fog in order to get the right
feel, we are now in a place where we feel happy with it but some of this could change
later on so don’t take this as absolute.
Unexpectedly EPIC
have released an early version of their new engine (Unreal Engine 5), and we
also have an option to move our game over to Unreal engine 5, however this isn’t
going to be as straight forward as clicking a button then making the switch, we
need to ensure we can do this and the plugins we are using are also going to
work in the engine if they don’t then we will have to make a hard decision do
we re-write our plugins again and make the switch or do we stay in Unreal
engine 4. Hopefully in a month or two we will know if it’s worth the change as
Unreal engine 5 does have some amazing tech that we really could use for
optimization.
On a personal note I am currently in the process of moving
house so this will mean that development might be slow for the next 2-3 weeks
but once I am all fully moved in then we should be up and running and will
finally get this game finished and in your hands!
Monthly update 1st of May 2021
Hi guys another monthly update, we have made a lot of progress this month and are happy to share what we have got done and what is still in progress.
Beginning scenes: We have made a lot of progress on our beginning scene but we think this will take longer than expected mainly because we want to make sure we have the scenes perfect and fits in with the story. We are also debating whether the scenes should be set in the day/night/dusk so we are testing out a few things with lighting and fog.
Engine: We have now been able to upgrade to 4.26 we had a blocker with a plugin but this has now been fixed and we can now utilize the new version. This includes more realistic water and landscapes and also this will improve optimization and performance for the game.
Hopefully next month we will have something goo to show you please stay tuned!
Monthly update 1st of April 2021
Hi guys another monthly update, the monthly update will always take place on a Friday as usual. We have managed to get a lot of things done mainly finishing the cave system, the cave is now almost complete it just needs a little bit of polish, we will get round to this later on as polishing is the last and final phase for development, also we have no fully optimised the destruction system for the cave system and are very happy with it.
What’s next?
As we discussed last month we have begun the re-work on the beginning of the game we have had to make edits to the script to get this done which is almost complete and then we will enter grey box mode for the beginning of the game then it will enter white box mode and then final art.
We also want to keep on looking at lip syncing for our character to make them look realistic when the character is talking to the player but as we are such a small team we may have to cut back some time on this but will still do our best to give the player a good experience.
We also have some animation rework that needs doing such as climbing ladders and getting through tight space and also getting the AI to climb ladders, and also re work on the door animations need to be done too, (honestly doors are a huge problem for game developers).
That’s all for this month, we will try and show off some images and some gifs of our work going through the month. Stay safe everyone!
March 1, 2021
Hi guys sorry for not giving any updates for last
month, we have been mad busy!
We have managed to get a lot of things done mainly
level design, you have probably seen some images of a cave, we have finally
finished out the main layout of the cave and it is now in its final detail
phase then it will go into optimization, then polishing! We expect this to be
done in 1-2 weeks.
We take a lot of pride with our level design we
want every area to feel unique for the player and this takes time.
Destruction: That’s right! We have added some
destructible meshes for the cave, we don’t want to give away a spoiler but take
our word for it there is a really intense section in the cave level! A lot of
work was done to get this to work and be optimised but it does still need a
little more work in the optimization part.
What’s next?
We will start to work on the beginning of the game
this needs re doing as we have learnt so much and we know we could do better so
the whole beginning of the game will be getting a massive rework.
Facial animation: We will also be putting a focus
on facial animation so our NPC’s have good reactive facial expression and also
they we need to add in mouth syncing for the voice acting this could take a lot
of time and we have started doing research into this we expect this may take
some time as we need to create a system that can do this automatically as doing
it by hand will take too long.
Once the above has been done we will be working on
level tweaking we know we have two more levels to start and finish which will
bring the games total of levels to around 35, some are these levels are sub
levels for main levels for examples the sewers have 4 sub levels. Then we will
work on sub levels for other levels that need to be completed and then last we
just need to optimize everything and then do final polishing then all our
levels will be completed. We are hoping the game will take our developers
around 2 hours to run through which by our estimations will make the game be
around a 6-10 hour game depending on the player. Please stay tuned