Behind the scenes: what's changing in Valmora

As promised, here's a closer look at some of the work happening behind the scenes for Valmora.

Better performance

A big focus lately has been optimization.

We've been reworking and testing several areas of the game, particularly lighting and shadows, looking for ways to reduce their performance cost without sacrificing the atmosphere and visual quality we want for Valmora.

And we're already seeing some good results.

To put these changes through a more realistic test, we've also been running Valmora on a laptop with considerably less power than our main development machines.

BEFORE

AFTER

There's still work to do, but these improvements are already being integrated and will be part of the next version.

The next step for our characters

We're also working on a new direction for Valmora's character system.

One of our goals is to give the Character Creator much more room to grow, with characters that support a wider range of customization and morphing.

Here's a small look at some of the testing we've been doing:

The new setup also gives us a better foundation for expanding Valmora's cast and introducing more NPCs as development continues.

This part is a much larger undertaking than the performance work.

Characters touch a lot of different systems, from models and morphs to clothing and animations, so we're taking our time with the transition rather than trying to push everything into the next release.

You probably won't see the full result immediately, but we wanted our supporters to get an early look at where we're heading.

For now, our priority is getting the next version into your hands with the performance improvements we've been working on.

More soon.

Thank you for being part of Valmora!

— Iron Leaf Games