Hi everyone!
As we move close to the end of the 2nd week of Lumberjacked’s release (I was going to say a month, because it sure feels like it!), we’re wrapping it up with a huge update.
With version 1.1 we address 2 major issues, one more common than the other, but both very important, as well some balancing and various bug fixes.
Since this is such a large update, and even though we’ve done our best to test it thoroughly, any number of strange things or oversights can happen so please come let us know and we’ll get to it immediately!
Saving & Loading
First, is the saving bug that would occasionally bug out a save and corrupt it. While it’s tough to know 100% what would cause it to happen, we have a pretty good idea it had to do with the fact that the game would save WHILE closing.
This seems such an obvious oversight, and apologies to those who were affected by it. We hope this fix eliminates this issue entirely.
There is now a buffer time between the game saving and closing, and this same sequence is triggered with closing the “close/x” button while in windowed mode.
Save Backups
On top of a safer saving system, we’ve added in save backups that are created during gameplay every time a game is successfully saved, so should your save become corrupt for whatever reason, it will automatically be recovered the next time you load, and you will be given a prompt to inform you that this took place.
Autosave
We’ve also included an autosave that triggers every 10 minutes. When the save happens your game will hang for just a split second, we’re looking into way to improve this, but it shouldn’t affect the flow of gameplay and will provide a safer saving experience.
Performance
The game has gone through a massive round of optimization. This is one of the biggest reasons this update took this long.
Trees have been trimmed down to less game objects per tree, improving the streaming and decreasing their overhead. On top of this trees have all been fitted with an impostor system, which is like advanced 3D sprites, thus significantly reducing polygon count, while still looking amazing and preserving draw distance.
These two things combined with a more unified shader throughout the game, we’ve managed to double performance in some cases, and hopefully it will run a lot better for those of you who struggled with performance issues.
We still intend to bring more power to customize your experience in the settings menu very soon, and we wanted to work it in with this update, but it was already filled to the brim and we needed to get the core update out for everyone to mitigate the saving/loading and improve base performance.
Going Forward
Thanks everyone for playing Lumberjacked and encouraging us to breathe even more life into what we thought was just going to be a fun little game for a handful of people to play, although hoping it would catch on – and it did.
We will be awaiting feedback on this new update eagerly for the next few days, while we begin to shift into the next big update, and with this one we hope to bring more lumberjacking to everyone and enhance the overall experience.
Ideally, we’ll hit our goal and have the next update out in 2 weeks’ time, but we of course want to make sure it’s perfect.
So stay tuned, Lumberjacked 2.0 is on its way!