As the dust continues to settle after the 1.0 launch, we’ve solidified our plans for the short and long term goals for Empires of the Undergrowth. This newsletter will be a bit briefer than usual, as we try to return to some form of normality after the huge upheaval brought by the game’s release!
The ereptor colony languishes in its cupboard purgatory, from Zvistic on our Discord
We’ll go over what the team are working on right now, but for a more comprehensive look at the future of the project I’d highly recommend taking a peek at the previous newsletter or vlog - there’s an in-depth breakdown of the intended roadmap in both of those, and there’s not much point in repeating that completely here.
Tier 5 achievements
One of our main priorities, as mentioned in the previous vlog, is tier 5 / final formicarium achievements - they didn’t make it in quite in time for release. These are currently in the process of being implemented - there will be 45 of them in total, and as a little treat the devs have let me show you a preview of 3 of these (I had to twist a dev’s arm up his back to get them):
No Mound Left Behind - Beat “Drive Them Back” on medium difficulty without losing a termite mound.
Shoot Yourself In The Foot - Beat “Triage” on hard difficulty with no termite queens left alive.
Finish Your Vegetables - Beat “Last Mound Standing’” on impossible difficulty after harvesting 10,000 llignocelluose.
Rainforest Art Refresh
Our environment artist is getting on with his refresh of the Ecuador level artwork, to bring them in line with the style and fidelity of the rest of the game. Below are 3 previews of this work - please note, this is very much a work in progress and will change a lot before it reaches its final look (for example, no changes have yet been made to the leafcutter sapling).
Engine Upgrade & Graphics
We’re currently in the process of upgrading the version of Unreal Engine 4 that the game uses. We’ll be taking it to version 4.27, which is the final stable build of this engine. This is a pretty significant undertaking - we’ve done it before earlier on in the project, but this will be the final time that we do this. In theory, upgrading the engine leads to improved efficiency of the underlying UE systems - but there is always fallout and breakages when undergoing such a fundamental change, so it will take us a while to work through those.
While we’re in the throes of this, it’s worth mentioning that some people have been mentioning graphical issues that only arose with the release of 1.0 - they report overly smooth-looking surfaces on some models. We’ve yet to entirely nail down commonality between them - it appears to be people using some older graphics cards (the 10x GTX series crops up regularly here, although we don’t see the issue on our own 10x laptops).
It is entirely possible that this engine upgrade fixes the issues, and before we release the version of the game with the engine upgrade it’s entirely possible that we’ll run an optional beta - more details on that if/when it happens, but it would be greatly appreciated if people experiencing this issue can do some testing when the time comes.
If the engine upgrade doesn’t address these issues, then of course we’ll go engine diving a lot deeper again to uncover the cause.
Balance
We’ve been continuing to collect feedback based on player discussion on both Steam and our other official channels (forum, Discord, etc) and condensing those down into bullet points for our devs to ingest and ponder on. Please keep this coming - overall consensus is really important here for us to identify these areas where things could use tightening up a little.
We’ve also been gathering feedback on how best to tune the systems we have for custom game AI, and over the past several weeks a lot of careful thought has gone into it. We hope to have some of these tweaks ready to go along with the engine update patch.
Official Wiki
While an unofficial wiki has existed for some time now, we have recently launched an official wiki hosted by our publishing partners Hooded Horse! The Empires of the Undergrowth wiki is the best source of up-to-date information on the game. It contains information on all of the maps and creatures, including stats and abilities for the creatures. It also contains trivia and behind-the scenes info from the game’s development.
Click here to visit the new official Empires of the Undergrowth wiki!
Our thanks to community member AntBZK for his work (or “hobby”, as he calls it) in creating the vast majority of the content on the official wiki (and its unofficial predecessor). There’s room in the future to bring on other official contributors - if you fancy a go at that and have a decent writing style, come and join us on the Discord where the wiki has its own channel for debate.
ANTCON 2024
Back in May, community manager Mike and marketing content creator Hei Man went to Carmarthen in Wales, to attent ANTCON 2024. This is the event for UK-based ant fans and keepers, and people come from much further afield as well. Mike had his camera with him and recorded some of the day, as well as taking some pretty darn great macro shots of some of the ants on display, even if he does say so himself.
A macro photo of Formica fusca ants taken at ANTCON. By Mike Connor
Mike also gave a short presentation about the creatures of the savannah, and talked a bit of what was to come in tier 5 (the event was roughly a month before full release of the game). A short travelog is in the works to document some of the day - expect to see that on our YouTube channel soon.
As always, it was a fantastic event and it was great to be able to attent. Thanks very much to Richard and the rest of the team from Ant Antics for organising it, and for inviting us and making it so memorable.
Screenshot Central
Ever my favourite part of the newsletter, here I gather some of my favourite screenshots from our Discord and the Steam community tab. If you’d like to submit a screenshot for this section in the future, then the Discord is the easiest way to do that. To get really great angles on your screenies, hold down shift while you enter photo mode to uncouple the camera from the ground plane.
Fire ants raft to safety from Thuneral on Steam Community
A bullfrog tries to brush off stinging ants from Alex_O on Steam Community
A whip spider traps a Matabele ant in a diamond prison from 桶上默语(TSMYAFL) on Steam Community