Devlog: 25/8/26 - Nearly there...
Stuff thats been happening
The game is in testing at the moment, and we've had 3 rounds of it so far with progressively less bugs each time with less critical issues each round. The current batch is about 12 bugs with only a few of those being major problems. My own time has been a bit patchy the last week or two due to a coding project that has been ongoing for almost a year suddenly deciding that after constantly adding requirements, they were going to keep adding requirements but also a deadline then continued adding more requirements. Most people will have heard of "Scope Creep". Nothing about this scope is creeping. It's leaping joyfully off a cliff like lemmings do when movie producers chase them off a cliff.
The deadline is today. Another feature got added last night. Crunch has been happening. Driving up to their office and murdering them might also be happening.
The Game?
You just lost it, etc, etc. While I've not been coding and bugfixing, I've been actually tweaking the game. The two main lag locations were Pineridge and open levels. While investigating Pineridge, I noticed the lighting complexity was ridiculously high so I've stripped out all lighting and been rebuilding it.
The first issue there is if an area isn't in direct sunlight, adding multiple lights to it can up the complexity, so moving part of the cliff back so you immediately see out of the valley when coming out the starting tunnel helped there.
A quick fix would be upping the ambient lighting, but when we have tunnels and interiors that means they end up lit enough to see in even without lights which isn't very good looking. The lighting will be redone before release, and it should run better once various lighting is baked in.
Other optimisations in Pineridge are things like reducing drawcounts on some buildings, reducing polygons and so on. On my machine it's noticeable, so it'll be interesting to see how it runs on other peoples computers.
Other things in progress include preliminary Character work and some UI changes.
Character Builder
Once this phase is released, I'll be moving into a more basic one where the main focus is updating/upgrading characters and making a better character builder. I can't actually touch the models until I know I don't need to use them again for this current phase, but I can start building out their data structures.
Right now, a character is an enemy, player or NPC. They have stats built into their blueprints which we set. So for example, when I add Shart into the map, I can set Species, gender and a couple of high level settings. That still builds him with some variation when characters should be fixed. The biggest customisation we currently have is hair colour, eyes and flesh.
When we start the game, you have 4 choices. fixed gender against fixed species, so there's a bunch of potential customisations there which need to move from the characters into data assets. This also means that potentially once a character is an entry in a database, they can be shared as a code to other people.
This means that once built in the Character Builder, they are fully fixed. Shart is always Shart and is recognisable as Shart wherever Shart appears.
The other reasoning for this is that the game is plugging away slowly, but we need to be able to raise some funding to be able to do the push to get through it. For starters, one of our computers doesn't even have a GPU which makes blender a bit slow. So we want to add Supporter bonuses. This would be open in a shop we actually currently have, and would accessible from the character builder screen, probably by typing in the characters specific name or a code.
We'll have custom built the character along with custom skins, appearance and preset stats agreed with the supporter. We'd also be looking to do the same for NPCs as well up to and including custom quests/interactions with the players.
For now, the data structures and a few tweaks are being done. Specifically I've frameworked the new character builder and inputs, just to get this stuff ready for when I need to dig into it properly.
UI Changes
Another thing I decided to do was update some of the UI. The credits page needed some changes as socials, itch pages and socials needed more visibility. but also all the text is too large, the HUD elements overlap. So I've been remodelling a lot of stuff to try and bring it all into a set standard. Nothing fancy.
Open World
Finally, I've been playing with designing shit.
Right now we have 5 maps for Forest and 5 maps for Plains as well as procedural dungeons for both. These are connected by a map screen. I'm heavily considering getting rid of all of that.
Let's ignore that Open World seems to be popular right now. I don't want to chase game meta. There are good reasons for this.
First, this game should be based around running and hunting. The player and competitors run, the wolves chase and scent. This doesn't work so well when all the enemies and competitors are split between dozens of potential routes and levels they could take.
Second, with restricted maps, if a wolf is wandering, they probably will hit a scent trail to follow, but by the time they start chasing you're nearly at the exit already, so larger levels make more sense.
Third, adding on to the scent argument, the enemies need to have time to find scent trails and decide which way to follow them or if they should switch trails when they find another. The fear of being caught is lost when you just have to charge straight at an exit.
The idea would be something like a 4km x 4km open world for each World with a set between Safe Level. The map would be split into rough quarters with ways to block moving from one quarter to another except through some chokepoints. This means you have areas of high risk to pass through and ideal areas for wolves to pick up scents. On top of that, we'd have points of interest to attract players and competitors attention. After that, we'd have it so your standard enemies are grouped and patrol their own areas, so they don't go too far from a set location meaning they're unlikely to roam and chase you across the map.
Then once you hit the end of the final quarter, there's a boss area to pass through. The worlds would be set up the same as they are now. Up to the top of Pineridge to enter Forest, forest does an anti-clockwise loop to get to the river end of Pineridge where Plains are. The safezone between them allows you back into Pineridge for supplies, to sleep and so on.
Plains would loop around to another safezone and then Foothills and Mountains would be 2 levels without a safezone between them to ramp up difficulty towards the end.
The other reason is we'd be moving up to Unreal Engine 5.8. It has amazing landscape tools which allow us to poke holes in the landscape like a voxel mining game, so dungeons can be integrated directly into the landscape. It also allows overhangs and proper sculpting which the current landscapes can't do.
The open world stuff isn't going to be for a while, if we do decide to go ahead with it. First we need to do the end of this Release, then we've got the Character Phase followed by what is probably going to be a pretty hefty sex phase. Then this stuff can start getting looked at, though it's likely we'll be remodelling Pineridge with the new terrain tools soon.
Finally
Fingers crossed we're less than a few weeks from the Supporters Release of the game. Then public release will be a month or so after that. This depends on testing finishing up, but let's see how it goes.