Around a week ago I released the 1.0.1 update, and upon doing so many of you were probably disappointed by how little the update actually added in comparison to how long it took, so I thought I'd shed a little light on why it took so long, the rough history of the game, the development issues and what you can expect for future updates.
Pre-release History
I started making this game in September 2022, in this stage of development, I was not going for realism, but rather for simplicity, the game only had a total of 3 buttons, those being "Raise Control Rods", "Lower Control Rods" and "AZ-5", there were no pumps, no water, no temperature, just the thermal power and incredibly basic rods, even the flux and thermal power was more simplified than what we have today, in that it was either always decreasing, stable or always increasing.
At some point in early 2023, I begun to shift my focus from simplicity to slightly more realism, around this time I implemented an extremely basic pump and water system (Far more reminiscent of a BWR than an RBMK), along with more annunciators for you to observe, at this stage the game still had very little basis on reality in regards to the controls, layout or anything else.
Over the next year (2023 - 2024), I began to improve the game pretty regularly, by March of 2023 (Almost exactly 2 years ago at this point), I had created the basis of the control rod system that is still used today, this being the first system to be actually based on reality, by May I'd implemented the Narrow Profile Gauges and updated various models, making the game look closer to how it does today, by September of 2023 (1 year after I began), I laid out the foundation for moving the game from a singleplayer game to a multiplayer game and even did the first multiplayer test with 3 others, by November of 2023 I'd updated the physics of the reactor to behave far more closely to how it does today, no more of that either constantly increasing or decreasing system.
From January of 2024 through to the initial release in July, I updated the models of the buttons and switches, I updated the lighting, and most importantly I hired my first developer to flush out the control room into a decent recreation of Chernobyl Unit 4.
Development Struggles
Despite how much progress and success I experienced in the first year of development especially, by late 2023 and even moreso 2024, the cracks really started to show, it became more and more obvious that the game couldn't handle the amount of things being added to it, along with all the modifications of year old systems originally created when the goal was simplicity, however I tried to push through these issues.
By the time of June 2024, the project was near impossible to update easily, new features would break things untouched since 2022 and the performance was getting worse and worse, despite this I managed to get the FPS to a semi-stable 70, so I continued, but then came the control room update, this singular update managed to lower the FPS from 70, to 15, and at this point it was early July, 2 weeks until the already delayed release date, so I gutted several things graphically, along with doing my best to optimise the now 1 and a half year old codebase, due to this I managed to get the game up to around 30 FPS by the time of release, and I told everyone that I'd do my best to release some quality of life changes, bug fixes and performance updates in the coming weeks.
1.0.0a
At this point, I had begun work on the 1.0.0a update, I fixed several things from physics issues, to gameplay cheeses to obscure bugs, yet even a month later I couldn't seem to fix the spawning player bug, I searched and I searched to try and find any idea as to what could be causing it, and the only possible thing I found was that it was an issue with how much was being loaded at once, so I began to make some changes to the way things were loaded, and then Unreal Engine crashed, I tried to re-open the project and it gave me a vague and weird error, eventually though I managed to get back into the project a couple days later, and when I got in I found nearly the entire map completely corrupted, leading to the eventual abandonment of that update, as even the backups were screwed.
1.0.1
At this point I begun work on what would eventually be named the 1.0.1 update, this update was fully back to square one, using the original 1.0.0 source code as its base, and due to a combination of all of the previously mentioned development issues, I was able to fix nearly everything except for the spawning player bug, and eventually, after months of work I finally managed to modify the loading of the game and increase the optimization without breaking and corrupting half the game to the point multiplayer was working again and the game was running slightly better, I continued to try to optimise the project more, however this lead to a scare in which the project broke temporarily, however I managed to recover it this time as the corruption wasn't as severe.
And after nearly 6 months following the 1.0.0a update being corrupted, I finally released the 1.0.1 update publicly.
What comes next?
Due to all the aforementioned issues with the 2022 codebase, I've made the decision to move on from it, this does not mean that I am abandoning the project, it does mean however that I will be fully rebuilding the game from the ground up, this is not a new game, merely a massive update under the hood, this means that the next update will take several months, however this will allow me to not only put out future updates faster, but to better optimise the game, and to allow far more complex systems to be implemented.
Thank you all for taking the time to read this and I hope it's helped explain the struggles of making this game, along with the future plans for this project :)
(If you have any feedback, feel free to leave it in the discussion or community Discord server)