Greetings shoppers. I realize it's been a bit since we had a status update, so let's catch up..
The Demo came out, and has had a fantastic welcoming. Many, many thanks to everyone who has downloaded it and given it a try. We're almost giddy with how much everyone has enjoyed playing it and experiencing the world we've put together. Thank you all for your feedback, patience with bugs, constructive criticism and kind words. We've strived to address as many of your issues as we can and have had amazing feedback that has changed the shape of the game. We've actually overhauled the difficulty system - the new system will be more like a "Lore and Explore" (Blessed) mode vs an "Advanced" (Nameless) mode that is as we intended. Blessed difficulty will still have deaths and hazards, but things like the murderousness of our store inhabitants will be decreased, and instead alternative punishments will occur. We're also adding a few features to make getting used to the store easier in Blessed difficulty based on your feedback, but expect you to be more capable for Nameless difficulty.
We hope that this gives people who want a little breathing room to experience the world, read the backs of items, and explore more of the lore to be able to do so, while those desiring to experience the full perils of Last Chance Market to have a worthy challenge. There will also be some slight differences in story and outcome, so we hope you'll give Nameless a try after experiencing Blessed.
Unfortunately, this update isn't all good news. At the end of October we took a week off because we'd been burning the candle at both ends nonstop, and shortly after we came back I made a hubris-inspired mistake.
For anyone who isn't interested in technical details, I recommend skipping ahead to the TL;DR.
Essentially, the new version of Unreal Engine, 5.5, has a new system of lighting, Megalights, that should've purportedly increased performance of our lighting. For anyone keeping score at home, all our lighting is done dynamically, no baking or Global Illumination, so performance has always been a bugaboo of ours. Thus, of course, it was with excitement that I downloaded and updated our project (after backing it up of course) and started fiddling. Surprisingly Megalights actually tanked performance, BUT improvements in the general lighting system in 5.5 actually gave us a 20-25% increase in fps in our heavy load situations, which is crazy and I was happy to take as a gain. Caveat emptor.
Because of the work we were doing on the game, it wasn't until a month later that I realized that 5.5 also introduced a bug that prevented us from editing something called Instanced meshes. Now, Instanced meshes are essentially a way of grouping and rendering similar objects so that they're more performant. And because of the sheer volume of products we offer in the store, almost all of them are some form of instanced mesh. Not being able to edit them is somewhere between disastrous and apocalyptic. However, after a lot of hemming and hawing, we decided that rather than lose invested dev time, we would continue working on other things tangentially while we waited for Epic to push a fix. Fast forward to last week, and the latest hotfix for UE has come out, and there's still no fix in sight. It's been two and a half months that this bug has been hindering us and we simply had to do something. So, with a heavy heart, we decided to revert to our UE5.4 backup and re-implement the work we've done since mid-November. It means doing some things over again tediously, but some things like source code updates should be minimal to fix. It was, however, the only real avenue in order to continue working on the game.
TL;DR Adopting new technology set us back ~2 months in dev time. Fortunately, it shouldn't be a 1:1 ratio to get back to where we were, but it still delays everything.
So looking forward, what this means is that we're hoping to prioritize the demo fixes and then updates this month, get those out, then continue pushing forward and finishing setting up the world and the story within. Being a two person team, and our first game, this whole project is a learning experience and unfortunately this lesson is a harsh one. But we appreciate everyone's patience and understanding, you have all been the greatest inspiration to stick with it and keep going, so we truly thank you.
Expect another message this month as updates get pushed.
See you all in the mist.
