Devlog 24/7/26

​We've had another bit of downtime since the last update. Now I must try to justify it...

Work was pushing ahead and I got to the point of starting to test the combat system fully, but a family issue cropped up and I spent most of a fortnight at the other end of the country. Then since I've been home, it's been a string of work stuff and catching up on things I was supposed to have done while I was away.

Things are nearly caught up, and I've done some combat testing, fixed a few of the bugs as well. Right now the main priority is getting the game out to our testing team. I'm hoping to do that within a couple of weeks, which will then mark the start of actual promotion for some elements of the game.

On the plus side, the time away gave me time to step back from the game and have a think about parts of it.

​Sex System

​This is still a phase away, but because of the complexity, I think I'm starting to get a good idea of what we're needing and how to achieve it. It's still going to be horrendous to do, but I think my ideas are getting more workable with time.

​Dungeons

​These need to change. I don't really like how they currently build and fit together. I've done some tests with new dungeon tiles but I'm thinking of just doing a whole rebuild that allows the dungeons to build within a limited area but over multiple levels. On top of that, I hate how the start and end of the dungeons are sci-fi ladders. 

As part of a level update, we're going to push up to Unreal Engine 5.8 as it adds much better terrain editing than what we currently have. This also means we can build dungeon entrances and exits as real holes in levels. So you'd start a level that has an actual entrance above ground and the end brings you back into fresh air.

​Levels

​This is the next thing I was thinking about. The new terrain generation feeds nicely into landscape partitioning. One possibility could be ditching the individual levels and the world map and having the whole world as a single open world. So Forest would be a world, Plains another world. We'd still build it with chokepoints, so there's only a specific entrance to reach Plains, and funnels players toward dungeons, but it would resolve a lot of issues with tracking which competitor wolves are tracking when they can just be doing hunting across the full world for victims.

The downside to this would be that we've got to properly build entire worlds which would take some time. That said, Unreal allows levels up to 8km x 8km, so depending on how much content/designing, we could potentially go as big as we want.

None of this is confirmed, it's a vague idea right now.​

So, apologies it's not much of an update, but work has restarted with a clearer goal now.