[News] Progress + About next release

Hello everyone, this picture might not mean much to people who aren't devs, but this is what we've been working on in the programming side of this:

We are reworking the Animation Blueprints to turn all the logic that used to happen in real time into something called Thread Safe. We are also performing other optimizations you can find out more about in this article here.

To you, that means that the number of NPCs on the screen won't affect your CPU as much as it used to, this is a continuation of a series of updates we've been doing to bring the game to Unreal 5 with the best performance we can.

Here are some general updates:

• We’ve just received new scripts from Ilreth's voice actress for her introduction in the Garden of Delights.

• We’ve also recast Brooke with someone who can deliver both zombified and vampiric voices. I'll share more about her in a future post. The idea is that new cutscenes will play as you explore the dungeon, deepening the sense of loss for Kalyskah as she uncovers what happened to her Legion.

• The high-poly model of the Goblin is finished, and we’re now working on his textures. Once that’s done, I’ll share a picture with you.

• The mocap animations we recorded for the new intro have been polished and are ready to be imported into Unreal Engine. We just need to apply some final touches before we start working on the cutscenes.

• The Prologue’s landscape is complete, and our level designers are finishing up the new dungeon. Once that’s done, they’ll focus on the open world to make the necessary adjustments, allowing us to reintroduce the prologue content.

• We’ve also fixed the lipsync generation issue that caused Maynard's and Henrysson's lips not to move in the last patch.

• One of our programmers is actively tracking and fixing the bugs you’ve reported on our Discord. The goal is to make our public release address almost every complaint people had throughout the years regarding the game's stability.

I hope this gives you an idea of how, after the challenges of migrating the game to Unreal 5, we are now working at full speed to make up for the time we invested in the upgrade. Thank you very much for your support!

About the Public Update:

After some thought, I’ve decided we should wait until all the dungeon's cutscenes are complete before making the next public release.

Although the game is now far more stable and optimised, the dungeon is shorter than what is currently available on Itch. I would prefer to release something the general audience can experience once, giving them a good sense of the progress we've made in both optimisation and the storyline. After that, we can focus on the re-release of the Prologue, which will follow shortly.

There’s a chance these cutscenes will be finished either by the very end of this month or early next month.

I’m open to reconsidering the timing of the public demo release if anyone presents good arguments for it! 😄