It's Friday once again and that means its time for another development digest.
This week was slightly less productive than we'd have liked for Kindred Games, but some progress is better than no progress, we always say.
We spent most of the week migrating the project to Unreal Engine 5.1 from 4.26. This process turned out to be more complicated than we imagined due to the size of the project and the complexity of our code architecture thanks to 3 years of development now in the same project file.
In fact, it was so tricky that we decided to throw in the towel and revert back to 4.26. It was a waste of time, but we learned more about the importance of keeping your project neat and tidy, specifically your dependency chains.
Anyway, enough of the technical mumbo jumbo. This week Michael also spent some time restructuring and ultimately redesigning the Mystic skill tree. He's finally happy with where its at and once the last few skills are implemented, he'll be moving on to the last magic skill tree for all you druids out there.
While I don't want to spoil too much, you'll be glad to know that one of the first druid skills reintroduces the mushroom circle everyone loved from the old mushroom staff.
Michael and I have also been putting a lot of thought into how to add more procedural content and replayability into dungeons and we've established a few design pillars we want the dungeon system to rest upon. With these in mind we have a few interesting ideas that should make not only dungeons, but the entire game more fun every time loot drops. What kind of loot would you expect from dungeons?
Steam recently announced that it will be discontinuing support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 as of January 1st 2024. Sometime before that, we will be updating our minimum specs to reflect this, but users on these versions can still play until Steam's date. As of right now, we are not doing anything on our end to prevent players from playing, it is entirely Steam's support.
I recently announced our next community event to take place on May 27th 11am PST on the official US server. My main goal on this playthrough is to complete the Windless Woods questline. I've been so busy working behind the scenes that I haven't completed it on my main character (plenty of times during testing though). So come join me and help me complete it!
One last thing - we are aiming for a June launch of this update. I don't have a specific date just yet, but we want to get this update out in spring. After this, we'll be aiming for smaller updates so that they can come out more frequently. I'm also in the process of updating our roadmap to reflect the current plans.
See you all next Friday!
-Janna & Michael