Weekly Changelog: v0.117
Everything is still on target for Early Access launch in Q1-2026! I hope to be able to share the release date shortly :)
Meanwhile, the development is progressing very well (and yeah... I work 7 days a week on the game haha). I've been focusing this week on improving the visuals and quests of three specific biomes. Also, I improved the game logo, as it really needed some love. Here is a teaser of some of the work that has been done this week on the upcoming Early Access:
I also uploaded a new version of the demo, with these upgrades:
-Improved the level design of the game start menu area
-Improved the start menu game logo and animated it
-Improved the colors of the intro animation numbers
-Reduced the opacity of the rain in the future era
-Made sure not to render the rain drops that are very close to the camera as they appeared too large
-Added wind force to the rain in the future era. After testing many approaches, having the wind go in a single direction, but change its horizontal force in bursts gave the best result. I'm also working on some low transparency fog for next week’s update. This still need some work but we're getting there!
-Save games now correctly save the player direction + view angle
-Tried to move all the shader/animation preloading to the black part of the fade out / fade in of the intro, so the animated number sequence doesn't lag on weaker computers. It will probably need a bit more work and testing.
-Increased the underwater blue grass movement and made sure each patch of grass moves independently (this took me way too much time haha, but at least it looks good)
-Added a headlamp icon to the headlamp on/off popup
-Added the improved game logo to the demo end screen
-Improved the performance of the future era and made sure to unload everything when the player goes back to the present era
-Improved the underwater lighting and ambient colors
-Improved some minor in-game sound effects
-Bug fix: Disabled volumetric clouds when opening/closing the pause menu, as they became visible for a few frames when going back in-game.