Welcome to "rewrite End of Days from scratch #7". I'm your host, Starkium.
Jokes aside, this is actually rewrite #7. So so so much has been going on since my last post about updating. I became a full time game developer, if I didn't mention that before, and I've mostly been busy with contract work and what not. End of Days got put on the sideline while I did that and I worked on a smaller side project called "Ryft Raiders". Ryft Raiders is now going to be the sideline project as I've basically hit a wall due an engine bug with UE4.
It's been bugging me for a long time that I haven't posted an update for End of Days in like 2 years. There's has been a chunk of beta branch updates for those who participated from our Discord, but ultimately they never got to the public release side of things. During the time of those beta updates I was struggling with a lot of issues with Unreal Engine 4 and also with VR development being uncharted territory for most people. There was next to no information when I needed to search for answers. Pile on top of all this that I had a lot of junk code and practices in place from the time I didn't know much as a dev... and really it just came out to a mess.
Well, I'd like to state that I'm way more confident as a developer at this point. There's a lot more sources for information for VR development too. I have pretty much all VR platforms at my disposal now as well. All in all it's a good time to get back on this project.
That being said, I'm changing my approach to this. As soon as I get a basis established within the following week or so I'm going to purge the current repositories for End of Days. In other words I'm getting rid of everything that is currently in the public, alpha, and beta branches.
There's several reasons for this decision. The major one being that I don't think you can even launch EoD if you bought it from the store and don't have beta access. There's been some issue with file paths from the old source and beta source. The only way to fix it is to pick one and move forward. Since I'm not using either, I'm just going to junk them and start fresh. The other major reason is that the art from the early version, beta version, and now what I'm currently working on are so vastly different that I don't want to confuse people. I still need to adjust the skybox of my current version to get that same kind of spooky feel from beta branch before I drop any screenies. It's pretty meme worthy how different they all are.
Next up, scope change. I'm not exactly sure how far I will take this project end goal wise, but I'm dialing back my short term goals. I've already gone ahead and revised the store page descriptions and early access info to match this. I'm going to need to change the art work AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, but I felt it important to at least show that there's still stuff going on here.
I'd like to hit as many vr platforms as possible, but for the time being I'm sticking with Steam. I'll put an Oculus store version out as well, but both game versions won't be able to cross play online UNTIL I set up my own system for that. I REALLY want to do that. I think it's majorly important. On the steam side of things I aim to hit SteamVR, Oculus, and WMR. I need a dedicated tester for WMR or I'll get a WMR headset at some point to work it out. I can get access to PSVR, but it's tricky to work with, so we'll see. I have a quest and will also get a quest 2, but at current I don't really know if it will be able to handle all the AI and stuff. So quest may get a standalone version, but users will be able to play through Oculus link still.
Lastly, the major change to my current approach is working on VR, first person, and multiplayer at the same time to keep things consistent. With that being the case, the update won't have all the features the public and beta versions had. An example of this is melee as I have to make decisions on how that is going to work. I'd like to do AI physics interactions like most VR gamers have come to expect in other popular titles, but the number of AI and multiplayer make that a BIG challenge. So for now it will be projectiles only.
I'll make another post in the coming days on what features we do have and what to expect in the coming "update". If you'd like to follow the progress join our Discord and or check out the End of Days Trello page
- Starkium
