Hello again Survivors!
Well holy crap, this thing has officially been released for a year! I’d say it’s hard to describe with words but the wall of text below would disagree.
To kick things off; thank you. Thank you so freaking much. It is absolutely unreal to me how much DeadPoly has grown. The amount of community feedback, suggestions, fresh ideas, and honest opinions on things I’ve added, modified, or completely reworked is legit invaluable! It’s what keeps this wheel rolling.
A lot of stuff was worked in to the game over the last year, be sure to check out the patch notes archive if you aren’t up to date - https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1621070?updates=true
If all goes to plan, this will be a big year for DeadPoly. Progression systems such as leveling, perks, and skills are well underway. Questing and story development to finally start getting the brunt of the lore uncovered. Definitely continuing the never ending cycle of optimization and reworking system I built before learning newer and better ways to do things. And last but not least; just more of everything. More collectibles, more things to build, more areas to explore, new zombies to dispatch, events to conquer!
Initial work and trial runs with moving the game over to UE5 have gone well, but still quite a bit of bug fixing and general system correction before that’s ready for full release. Getting the game on to UE5 should add quite a bit of built in optimization along with a great increase in how the game looks overall, especially at larger distances because of Nanite, which I’m super stoked for.
They say imitation is the highest form of flattery, so I suppose I should feel flattered at how many games have released over the past few months that look like someone copied my homework.
One of the big roadblocks over the last year has been overcoming issues caused by the assets DeadPoly is built on top of. It has become painfully obvious that a lot of them were never intended to work with what we’ve built together. Reworking systems for the scale the game has grown to isn’t an easy task in general, but for me especially it has been a big learning experience. Obviously I’ve broken a lot of stuff along the way, but we’re definitely getting there!
To every single person who has played DeadPoly, even for a few minutes; you’ve literally changed my life. If it wasn’t for you, I would have only gotten a week off of work to enjoy the birth of our second child. Instead, I’m now fortunate enough to work from home and be around my family every single day. To say my mental health has improved would be a hilarious understatement.
DeadPoly’s organic growth appears like it might be starting to slow down, but I’m not going anywhere. This game is nowhere near complete, and I’m super stoked to keep on trudging forward at whatever pace is possible. Many, many more updates to come!
Sincerely,
Kamron