[News] The game has some problems, and here's how we'll fix them

Hello everyone, Corintio here!

Today I have a long post for you, so grab some coffee and take a seat because we'll go through the reasons why so many people are currently having performance issues in the game and how we plan to fix those issues in time to finalize a release on steam at the end of the year.

So, I'm not sure if many of you know, but our Patreon page has been around for a long time. It all started when we were making games as a hobby, not a profession, for the team's former members, who are currently working on their dating game, and myself. I was still in college, didn't have too much knowledge about what we were doing, and this made us go on to try and error route for a long time until, somewhere around the beginning of 2020, we released version 0.8, which was an incredible milestone for all of us: We knew then what we wanted, and it was to create an open-world RPG that would blend a lot of great mechanics together, that we've seen, but with the plus of showing what other big games of the genre don't: Erotic themes. =)

But still, we were learning, and this caused issues like the following:

• The scale of our open world doesn't follow the industry standards. When I talk about the scale, I mean inside the Unreal Engine. The landscape has a size of 0.49, while it should be 1. This quadruples the vertex density that the landscape has, which also quadruples the maths of everything from the sunlight hitting the ground and calculating the shadows onto the number of vertices the player's video-card have to render;
• We are not using the world composition system, which is the very thing that most open-world projects done in Unreal Engine should use; otherwise, the players will always have the whole landscape loaded on their PCs no matter where they are;
• The current rig Kalyskah has doesn't blend very well on the knees;
• Every parameter of our AI, position and behaviours, are run in real-time instead of sent to a manager who abstracts the data and deals with it in the backend, removing inactive and unused actors from the level;
• The structure of classes in the game has a mixture of asset packs we bought to have a starting point with what we developed on top of it to make them work in the way we intended.
• Extremely bad shader complexity in the open world:

• And many other more minor issues accumulated with the whole ordeal formed a snowball causing a scenario where many people have infinite loading screens, their PC fans screaming while Kalyskah is walking around the map, or can't play the open-world at all!

But not everything is hopeless!

Despite all the issues, we could still tell the story we wanted and build the world around it. Despite being simple and even a bit clunky, we have a combat system that can still be fun to play. We have spells and graphics that can keep up with the current times and the fantastic help of our patrons to keep moving forward, keep studying and improving the game!

Why and what is the plan?

We aim to create a page of the game on steam as soon as everything is stable so this won't backfire on us. We learned so much during the years, and we were able to bring people to the project that are highly competent and experienced in game development, and these people pointed out the issues and helped us build a plan: To go back to the open world and fix the accumulated problems. To do so, we are creating a new landscape using the same Height Map (geography) of the old one, but now on a scale that fits the industry standards, and with the correct procedures to cut it into several slices that will be loaded only as the player traverse them. This will bring some exciting changes:

• The playable area will be twice as big as it currently is. This might sound like a big step but think about it: Right now, we have areas where we plan to run story events, but in between these areas, there isn't much space for us to introduce procedural events, like bandits patrols, characters that can approach to interact with Kalyskah asking for help, etc. So the paradox is that our current landscape is empty outside of Millhaven, not because it's too big but because it's too tiny. Until we have the story events happening on the towers and ruins we have prepared, we can't add small pieces of content to make things look and feel alive… we have a whole world on standby. With a world twice as big, we'll be able to leave the story places untouched whilst adding bandit patrols and other things that are already programmed or that we already have voice acting for that simply didn't make it through yet because of the lack of space.

On the right, the current landscape for chapter 1 and 2 of the story, in grey, the new

• Loading times will be heavily reduced, and the player will be able to freely transition between the dungeon and the open world. Having a better way to manage our NPCs, they will be able to transition between these areas. This will cause massive performance improvements since when they are not rendered, they can simply be deleted from the world to stop consuming memory.
• The system requirements to run the game will be heavily reduced! This is the most significant update of all. Currently, the game takes way too much ram, CPU and GPU. Once we introduce the new system, all this will be heavily reduced.
• Scalability: with the new World Composition activated, we'll be able to smoothly transition to chapter two of the game once the time for it comes, without ever going back to touch chapter 1.

How world composition will split the map into several sections to improve performace

• Fewer crashes and glitches: Whilst rebuilding the AI, we'll take a look at the whole class structure of the game and clean the code we don't use or don't need, merging components. This will increase our control over the code and better pinpoint where and what is causing issues.
• We'll have a more finished version of the landscape and, finally, be able to have a mini-map to help with navigation.

When?

Version 0.20 is the milestone for that. It won't be done this month and probably not by next month either. The actual implementation of the world composition is not the most complex part; the most challenging part will be working on the level design to fit things on the new scale and reviewing the cutscenes. For the first, we are counting on Ricardo, the latest member of the team that filled the slot Luke opened, and that will be solely focused on working on our vegetation and forests to fit everything that should be in the new landscape. For the cutscenes, we're bringing Iung back to help on reviewing them all to fit the new scale.

Meanwhile, Oye is reviewing Kalyskah's rig, so the quality and anatomy of all our sex scenes will be heavily increased moving forward. And I'll be working together with Henri to add polishment to all the unstable systems.

Old rig vs new rig

With that in mind, we imagine that it might take us between two or three months to finish everything and release patch 0.20 to the general public. And whilst we are at it, our patrons will have access to playable demos where they can give us feedback and see all the improvements we'll be bringing to the table.

How can you help us?

This whole thing will be a big crunch, so we can get back to the storytelling as soon as possible; if you are interested in helping us work faster and release this earlier. This is a lot of work, and currently, neither Henri nor Ricardo can work on the project full time. If you can help us with your pledge, I might be able to either increase their payment so they can dedicate more time to the project until this task is done, or I can hire more help to work on the days when they can't.

Optimization = Optimism!

We face two issues on the project right now that is always brought up whenever we make a poll or a question: The first one is the number of bugs and the bad performance, and the second is the amount of content. Both are much more entwined than some may think: The more we need to go back to fix issues, the more time we lose that we could be adding more story content; The slower the engine runs, the slower we can work on new cutscenes; The better the performance, the bigger the audience we can reach, which means that it increases the chances of growth on our Patreon, increasing our budget. So with all that in mind, I think you can understand why this whole process is making me very optimistic!

Release this month

This month we'll release to our neonate-tier patrons the new negotiation system, where bandits will approach Kalyskah if she gets too close and try to rob her. She'll be able to bribe, intimidate, seduce or use her charisma to get out of the situation, among other minor fixes.