Greetings players and future players,
Since release, we've spent time hanging out with players and watching streamers play. This has been an invaluable source of feedback! One common observation has been that, artistically speaking, the game seems to hark back to some retro era that didn't actually exist: This is a reality about Goldenheart that will never really change and was only somewhat intentional.
However, this update attempts to bring the style of the game together into a more cohesive package by altering the render pipeline at each step of the way:
- The textures have been reduced from 2k to 512, reducing the overall size of the game by about 1GB.
- Unreal Engine's cutting edge downsampling/upsampling pipeline with TSR antialiasing has been replaced with a more traditional pipeline which renders the game at full 3D resolution and applies good old Fast Approximate antialiasing at the end.
- In post process, the pixel resolution is then decreased, and colors are reduced all the way down to 16 before dithering, which creates the illusion of increasing the colors again - very old-school but also somewhat trendy at present.
- The UI has also been overhauled to match the new look, and each game level has been adjusted and tweaked as well.
- A gamma/brightness slider has been added to the graphics settings, allowing us to push the overall contrast and lighting effects per level to a more extreme degree, increasing ambiance and variety.
As the co-creator of the game, let me just say this: This is kind of what I always wanted for the game, but it's taken some research and development to make it happen in a way that we're happy with, so I'm glad we didn't rush it. Unfortunately, these changes run deep, making it impractical to toggle between versions at runtime.
I understand that some or perhaps many players will prefer the previous high-resolution graphics, which is why I've created a new branch called "Legacy" which will continue to host v1.1.2 permanently.
To access the Legacy branch: Select Goldenheart in your steam library, click the gear icon -> properties -> betas -> beta participation: select Legacy from the drop-down.
Please drop by our Discord and let us know what you think!
Thanks for all your support,
Kippercans
Millenniapede Audio Video Club
