Greetings, adventurers!
It's been a while since the last Gorgon Shield update. With the game now fully feature complete, the only planned updates were performance related. I'd been waiting for the new update of the Godot Engine to drop, and today version 4.4 went live.
Why is this important to Gorgon Shield? Godot 4.4 included a powerful new feature, the ubershader which dramatically improves shader caching in games, and by extension, in-game performance.
What this means is that there will be no more frame stutters at the start of levels or during certain particle effects. The game will now run much smoother and the play experience should be improved.
The tradeoff of this new ubershader is that there are noticably longer loading times the first time the game is loaded while the game caches all shaders and particles to memory. On repeat plays you will find load times are a lot faster.
I have had to temporarily disable in-game leaderboards just while I sort out a bug with Godot's Steam leaderboards API - I didn't want to delay this update just for that. They will return when I find a fix!
I just wanted to send out a heartfelt thanks to everyone who played and reviewed this game. It's pretty clear the game was not , unfortunately, a big hit. That's okay though. Not every game can be , it's an ultra competitive field out there! I set out to make a unique game that was dear to me, to recreate the arcade RPGs of my youth , and playing the game many months later, I think I succeeded for the most part.
There's always stuff that could be improved and expanded upon, and if the game had sold well, I definitely had plans for it. At some point though, there's the sunk cost, and also the feeling of 'This game's story is complete, and I'm okay with that.'
I'm very proud of what I was able to accomplish with Gorgon Shield in what was personally the most difficulty year of my life, and I want to thank you again for being part of the journey to ancient myth and legend!
Cheers, Oliver Joyce
Whiskeybarrel Studios