Update News
A new Update for Revenge: Rhobar's myth is now live and brings a lot of great new additions to the game. The most improvements are technical aspects of the game. The mayor part of this update is the new level loading and hotreload system for the story. That means, that there is no more need to reload the entire world to switch from a day to a night version of the map or loading another mission. It's now done on the fly without the need of waiting on a loading screen.
This also allowed me to remove a lot of now unused assets and maps to save ~1GB of filesize. This also reduced the required amount of RAM, I was able to run the game the most time with the use of <2GB RAM, even with ne new and improved environmental lights and shadows.
Furthermore I reworked the start of the Story, I removed the very long intro sequence and rescripted the start of chapter 1. So it doesn't take that much time until you get into real gameplay. It is now also possible to change the time of day in the freeroam mode just by going to sleep. This will just take a few secondes and doen't require to reload the entire map.
>>> Changelog v30259 [30.03.2016]
|--- new Features ---|
+ new story start (get faster to real gameplay)
+ new story loading system (doesn't require to reload the entire world anymore)
+ ability to instantly change time of day (day / night) in freeroam by going to sleep
|--- Bugfixes ---|
- fixed navigation mesh
|--- additional changes ---|
- added new level streaming / loading mechanics
- enhanced environmental lights & shadow quality/distance
- removed unused assets & maps (reduced filesize by ~1GB)
Future of Revenge: Rhobar's myth
Right now I'm working with full power on a new game, bit this won't mean Revenge is dead. There are still some planned updates and features that will be released later this year. There is also a working prototype of Revenge 2 in Unreal Engine 4, but maybe 2017 is the year for a new Revenge … ;-)
Post Mortem
How it startet:
The Project started very simple, I dreamed about developing my own game – like almost every gamer tought about how great a own game would be. So I first started developing Mods for Half-Life 1 and then moved to learn Unreal Development Kit. The first steps was just modeling a small world to get used to the Editor – I recreated a very basic version of Hogwarts - Hogwarts 3D
Unit then I had absolutly no idea how to programm or develop a real game, I realized that developing a Shooter would be to much – so I started developing a First-Person Platformer → Revenge of the Fallen
After ~4-5 month of development I noticed the game isn't working greate, the game itself wasn't fun to play, the development wasn't that great. So I decided to rethink everything and came to the conclusion that First-Person Platformer combinded with magic spells could be great. At this point, I knew a boit about programming and how the development worked and so Revenge: Rhobar's myth was born … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV4o3GeL8WQ
What went right?:
I learned how to develop a game, to plan the work and learned to have a better view for importent things. It was a real great challenge to develop a open world game (even if the world is not that big) with absolutly no knowledge on how to start. Form the start of developing Revenge: Rhobar's myth I learned so much on how to use programs (Blender, Gimp, Unreal Editor, …), learned how to write working code and hardly learned what a missing design document and clear concept means…
What went wrong?:
A lot :D The biggest problem was the missing design document and clear concept. I just didn't know what I was able to develop so the concept and design changed each weak that I learned more. At first it was just a linear jump 'n run with some magic spell elements that fast developed into and open world game with some small side quests and mini games. The feature list on the environment was growing and growing while the gameplay features haven't changed a lot over the time. I even added a full story with voiceover to cover the lack of gameplay – even if I knew I was terribly bad at writing.
The combination of enthusiasm, idealism and ignorance of mayor problems became a good but deadly friend. The scope of this project was just to big for a single person without experience and only 500$ of budget.
Conclusion:
Revenge: Rhobar's myth was a great experience to learn how to develop a game. Now I know how to avoid chaos and how to organice the development. Now I know that less can sometimes be more. Revenge would have benefit from a more compressed content, shorter time to action and shorter idle times with just walking around. I still think Revenge is a great game and there are games that are a lot worse, even if some reviewers mentions the graphics of my game are very bad, I don't think so. I tink it's looking very great for 500$ budget and a singe person developing the game in 3D and not pixel look. But this is maybe like in real live. You love your child, no matter how ugly and annoying it is.
Revenge: Rhobar's myth is my baby and some words and reviews about scum really hurts for so much effort I put into this game...
I learned a lot out of my mistakes and I won't stop! None is born as a master in game development and I'm still learning :)
I moved to Unreal Engine 4 and we will see us soon again with a new, better and a lot different game … ;-)
