Hello!
Thank you all for quite a handful of wishlists! I never thought Cloudome would pass 0!
The release of Prototype will definitely be before the end of August: cannot give the exact date yet, but I can almost guarantee that it won’t take longer than 2 more months (if nothing dramatic happens in my life, of course).
The price of Prototype will be $5. For another $5 — effectively as a form of tipping — there will be available a combo package of hi-res masters for both the Demo OST (which is currently out everywhere) and the Prototype OST (on which I am currently working)*. For those interested in the uncompressed masters of the OSTs (and not the rest of my music), Steam will be the cheapest way to acquire them. The only other place with original masters of my music I cannot name here because Valve doesn’t allow artists to self-promote on Steam.
* OST is the reason Prototype isn’t out yet: I am working as fast as I can, which admittedly isn’t very fast for I think I have fried my brain in the recent heat wave.
Since on Steam I never explained "why prototype and not just early access?", allow me to quickly go over the main points of the future "non-Prototype" version of Cloudome (for which I am currently looking for a publisher):
- It will be on Unreal Engine 5 instead of Unity. I started working on Cloudome in Unity a while ago, but for ethical reasons I probably don’t have to explain I cannot continue. In addition, now that I have pushed Cloudome by myself pretty much as far as I can and require funding to continue one way or the other, I have made the executive decision to stop investing my time into the current Unity build. It will either make the game better for everyone, or (if I never get supported by an investor) at the very worst it will make no difference at all: makes little sense to not do it;
- To start with, the switch to UE will come with an upgraded level of graphical fidelity:
- the low-poly style will be less aggressive;
- use of actual textures rather than materials made out of single color;
- much better lighting and shaders since Prototype is currently using the Unity’s standard rendering pipeline which hardly knows what to do with light sources (example), and switching to a different pipeline would break all the light sources and shaders anyway — might as well not bother and go straight to UE;
- UE provides more stable performance for open world games as well as it generally runs intense graphics faster than Unity.
- Weather that affects both the ship and the environment (rains, thunderstorms, intense
winds); - Interactive clouds that respond to both the player ship flying through them and the weather
conditions (being lit up by lightning, swirled into storms, blown by winds); - Cockpit view and new controls for it, as well as general controller support;
- Much better sound design;
- Music from Prototype remixed, plus about the same amount of new music;
- Completely different HUD;
- Savestate kind of save system instead of checkpoints;
- Opening and closing cutscenes;
- A more obvious while simultaneously more organic indication of the areas’ boundaries (right now I am limited by a rather basic particle system, so the clouds at the edges of areas are not volumetric, which makes them behave not-as-envisioned up close, especially in cloud tunnels);
- And of course, the entire second part of the game.
The 1.0 version will be approximately twice as big as the first Early Access build. The Early Access build will effectively be the Unreal Engine remake of Prototype. If I were allowed to work on it full-time, it wouldn't take longer than 6 months to make.
EA/1.0 versions will have no effective language: even in the menu words will be replaced with
icons.
Thank you for your interest in Cloudome! I apologize for taking so long to release it. Here are some links I may be allowed to share on Steam:
twitters: @johnhalpart (most of my stuff is strategically linked in the bio of this one) & @CloudomeGame (news and updates)
dev blog: https://www.indiedb.com/games/cloudome