Edit : We did make few changes to clarify certain things. Make sure you check “the state of the team” again if you read that early !
Hello everyone !
We are aware the lack of informations and in-game content since the last announcement can be frustrating, so today, we are doing a monthly update of what’s going on, through this Dev update #3.
As we already mentioned, we are operating big changes to the game's internal structure, and the goal of this post is to give more details about what it involves, and the progress we made so far.
THE STATE OF THE TEAM
Before talking about the game, we want to talk about our team. The “Dev” role on our Discord can confuse you into overestimating the number of people working on the game. So far, only two of us have actively worked on the game, and only one has the skills to work on internal game structure rework, mentioned above. In short, this means one person is doing all the work we will mention below.
Regarding our recent recruits, we want to clarify something very important.
In general, you can expect hiring to be based on pre-existing skills, but this is not what we did.
Our end goal is to have a cohesive team that can evolve with our projects, and for this we hired long time friends based on their deep interest in the field and estimated learning potential, rather than their pre-existing skills. All of them have useful experience in different fields that will be useful for our projects (animation, other fields of programming, etc). Two of them went to a video game school, one has worked as a programmer for 6 years, so they all could be working in the industry right now in their dedicated field, but this is not enough to efficiently contribute in our current workflow, which would be equally problematic with any “experienced” profile we could find for the post.
While we are confident in their learning potential and the resulting team after these efforts, it means all of this training takes a lot more time than if we hired already experienced people. Managing their training is, and will remain our #1 priority until they have the skills to actively contribute to our projects, and it’s a lot of work that inevitably slows down our progress on LOCKDOWN Protocol.
All of that being said, let’s talk about the game related stuff.
THE STATE OF THE GAME
The idea of the game's internal structure being rebuilt has been briefly mentioned in the past, but we want to break down what we are doing, and why, to let you better grasp what is happening.
First of all, we managed to confirm the jump from Unreal Engine 5.2 to 5.5 is technically possible. In the current state, LOCKDOWN Protocol relies heavily on features that were interesting but experimental which changed a lot between the two versions of the engine and broke a lot of things in the game (which will be detailed below).
While a lot broke with the version switch, once repaired, the game should be a lot more stable, which will most likely fix a lot of crashes and bugs currently present in the game, and let us work with newer tools that will enhance our workflow.
Just below, I will break down the mains aspects that need work, and the goal associated :
- Interface : This one was already mentioned, the goal here is to rethink the entire system to be modular for future content, and redesign the entire thing to be more user friendly and introduce as much of the requested features as we can, such as translations, non-Steam in-game alias, session name/password, better kick/ban management, etc.
- Render pipeline : The render pipeline in Unreal Engine slightly changed between the two versions, and needs our game render to be updated. We will take this as an opportunity to do some optimisation while we are rebuilding it.
- Sound system : Many of the sound features we used became obsolete and got replaced with different stuff in the newer version of Unreal, which broke our system and now requires an entire rework.
- General code : Similarly to the interface changes, our plan is to review a large portion of the game code to make it more modular for future content. That future content includes big things like new items, tasks, maps and gameplay features, but it’s also about smaller but important stuff such as more reliable lobbies, more advanced session customisation, and optimisation that could reduce crashes and fix bugs.
That part is by far the most complicated and time consuming.
Again, we are aware the lack of game updates can be frustrating for players, and it is for us too, but all that work is necessary to ensure this early access can turn into a fleshed out game with a healthy future, and we hope we can achieve all these changes as soon as possible !
As shrimple as that 🦞