Hey Everybody,
So I'll try to be brief, which is not my strong suit, at all..
Apologies:
First of all, my apologies about the Trash state of the previous update. Our Internal tests went way better than the actual release. Which is always tricky and something we try to avoid..
With that said, I am so proud to announce that we now have worked out A LOT of things and this version is going to run WAY better. And for the people that weren't able to load the game before, you will very likely be able to do so now!
Explanation (What happened, why it take so long?):
What happened?
So what happened was, when we released the previous version we did a lot testing before releasing, however we were and still are with only a very small group of Playtesters.. Like only 3 or 4 of us, and one of us was on a long vacation.
You can imagine it is hard to test everything with so little people especially Hardware-wise, since we all have pretty beafy PCs.
Okay, so what was the issue than?
So what happened is one of our template assets were designed quite badly for memory optimization as well as I made a crucial design mistake, which resulted in the players needing to have at least 32GBs or RAM memory. We got reports of people with 16GB they couldn't load the game, which is ofcourse insane.
All playtesters are pretty die hard Gamers so we have 32 or 64GBs of RAM, my PC even has 128GBs of RAM. So we never ran into these issues.
Yeah but how? And what now?
So why this happened is a few different reasons, one of them being the Template not being optimized for memory. Second is I wanted the Game to look really good and utilize the New cool features of the Unreal Engine 5, Lumen, Nanite and Virtual Shadows etc. However Nanite is really cool but I found out that it's not very generous on older systems, meaning you need pretty beafy systems to run that at a good quality.
Which lead me to another problem.
So Decision time..
So this was a very hard time for me, I basically had 2 options. Cut out Nanite at least on the Foliage and use the old skool methods of LODs, which boosts Performance A LOT (Which I found out later), but comes with a Visual Downgrade.. Or basically just cut off some people with older machines and try to get it to work well enough on current day Hardware..
So obviously I went with the first option, but it did hurt a lot to make that decision, since I was aiming so much for realism and immersion.
In the meantime my mother died as well, quite unexpectedly, which left me and my sister to take care of everything around the funeral as well as clearing and selling her house.
So that cut in my Devtime heavily.
Anyway, this is already a SUPER long post..
What do we got now?
So what we have now is:
The game is playable on older hardware and rusn a helluva lot better than it ever did, this again comes with a visual cost. But we'll just have to accept that. We can look into Nanite and more pretty environments once the Unreal Engine gets developed more, and newer versions come out, from what I've seen the newly released version 5.4 has already increased performance with Nanite and VSMs alot so we'll look into that as well.
This release runs >200% better than the one before. Normally I would upload an update this big to an Experimental channel, however given that the current available version does not run at all, I decided to just take a leap.
I would like to ask you to report any bugs you find in the Discord Server in the designated Bug reports or in the Steam Forums.
I'll try to highlight some features here:
- Large Explorable Open World Map
- Dynamic Weather and Seasons (Dynamic Puddles, Snow Trails and more)
- Some forageables are only available in certain Seasons
- Each turn of the Season you will get a Paycheck
- Building your own Cabin
- 2 types of Wildlife with more to come
- Skill/Leveling system to get a chance to get more resources or learn new recipes
- Interactive World Map
- 1 Driveable Vehicle with a realistic Fuel system (more to come)
- Farming System, You can farm your own Veggies and fruit to use with cooking or earn money
- Controller Support
- Way more!
These are some notes on some features just to set realistic expectations:
- Farming System needs a lot of Balancing
- Vehicle needs to be more fine-tuned, or rather the driving mechanics
- Controller Support is had limited testing, please let me know any issues.
- There are still some things that are not as pretty as I want it to be, which we can work on next!
What can we expect for the next Content Update?
Of course any Bugs and issues found will be addressed where we can.
For Content we have several Options that I want to look into!
- New Cinematic Trailer to introduce the Story! (Already Storyboarded in my head)
- Add some basic Voice Acting
- Reintroduce Story Items
- Reintroduce Steam Achievements
- Add more Wildlife (including Predators)
- Add a new Vehicle
- Reintroduce the Letters and Keys etc. for Cabins
- Rebuild a better and Newer version of Grandfathers Cabin
- Add Radio Station "Mission"/Plot.
- Add more Life to the Valley
- Add Fishing Mechanics
- Add Trapping
- And WAY more that I'm forgetting right now..
So again my apologies for taking so long with this update, I hope you guys understand, and I hope future Updates will come more frequently again! <3
And remember PLEASE report any bugs or issues you find so I can try and fix them! <3
