Development Update 2/25/25

Here’s what we’ve been up to:

• Improved Audio Ambiance: Improved audio ambiance across all levels in main release and prologue builds by rendering out audios of room tones and various spatial ambiance with (very close to) the exact room dimensions and materials.

• Added Lore snippets: Added various snippets of lore throughout the prologue build: Drawings, books, boardgames, warped reflections, etc. 

• Continued Level Streaming & General Optimization: Continued implementing optimized streaming for faster load times and smoother transitions across all levels and areas in the Prologue. Also continued making general optimization tweaks (more reduced models mainly along with UI optimization).

• Continued Draft Final Prologue Builds: Started final draft builds for the Prologue! Fixed most major bugs and started cleaning up smaller bugs. (We should have general bug testing start in the coming week!)

• UI FX Improvement: Improved the look of the new UI shaders by adding in color noise, rolling vertical distortion (scan distortions seen on CRT TVs), and chromatic aberration, along with various tweaks to fish eye distortion, glow, etc.

• Bug fixes: Squashed 6 BIG bugs in the Prologue build.

Upcoming Focus:

• More Optimization: General optimization to squeeze out as much performance as possible as well as improve level streaming setup.

• New CM Smile Encounter Animations: Finish first drafts of animations for the newly added Smile encounter in the Prologue. (continued from last week)

Note from the Developer:

Hey Everyone! This is Sven. I wanted to write a few things out here personally to you all. Firstly, I want to apologize overall for how long we have delayed from our planned December release. This was not something I or anyone on the team had anticipated, and along with our recent issue getting funding from our publishers, it has definitely left a sour taste in our mouths and been very frustrating not being able to get this project out when we wanted to. On the brighter side of this though, we have been able to flesh out and polish up a lot more of the lore side to this project, that I hope you all will appreciate, along with being able to get in a lot more optimization for some hopefully much better frames, and most importantly get in a lot more content into this Prologue than we initially had. This overall has turned into something I am even more proud of getting to put out and have everyone experience, and I can’t wait to start our countdown to release! Thank you everyone for your incredible support.

Cheers,

Sven