Coffee Diary - April 2026

Hey Exanimates, It has been a very busy month indeed. Our next test run will basically be a release candidate that includes pretty much everything. Testing so far has gone pretty smoothly, so hopefully the trend will continue, though there are some pretty big changes and additions. Besides some more content and polish for the Gardens, a lot of focus has been on overall polish and making sure that some core systems are really solid. We mentioned we were working on solving some pathfinding issues, mostly to stop your companions and enemies from falling into holes with your precious loot, but this went really deep with a lot of fundamental improvements and additions to pathfinding systems and features. The smarter pathing is a big improvement and NPCs can now negotiate some seriously tricky paths. In the same vein, we wanted to finally solve issues with characters occasionally getting stuck in objects or the environment. This happens when distant characters stop testing collision to save performance, or when the game lapses time while you're unconscious and repositions them, or when entering a map with followers in tow. All it takes is for a character's foot to be in the wrong place (for example) and they can become permanently stuck inside something. Trying to fully position a character in a way that no part of them is colliding is actually a very difficult problem that requires many things to solve. But these solutions have many uses, we were able to solve various other physics and placement issues and we can now also do a really solid unstuck feature. These aren't the most exciting things to be working on, but the complex nature of the game and developing our own engine means we have to tackle these difficult problems and can't just work on game features and content. We also did some nice improvements to the new thaumaturgy domain. We were happy with the new core visual effects we developed for it, but some of the supporting effects were letting it down and there were still a few quirks to solve. The effects we wanted to improve seemed like hard rendering limitations at first, but we started to see ways they could be overcome. These were not easy to do though, so we were hesitant to try, but in the end we just had to do it so now we have some really nice new features in our rendering engine that will be useful for many things. We can't really go into specifics without spoiling what the new thaumaturgy domain is, but the changes and additions are about solving some fundamental real time rendering problems and here they provide some nice visual polish. Some of the new content we're introducing in Gardens put us in need of very fast loading times. We're always trying to improve them, and we'd already done a lot here, but the levels keep getting bigger, more complex and varied. Procedural items and characters also require a bunch of extra processing and resources compared to non-unique pre-made assets. The dream would be for any content to be fully streaming with zero loading times, but in many situations this is extremely difficult to do and requires many clever systems working in perfect synchrony. Very fast loading times would allow seamless travel between zones, entering buildings, sections of maps or falling into pits to land somewhere else, without breaking the flow of the game, but streaming and virtualisation can also be critical to some game features, make many other things seamless and responsive and reduce resource consumption, allowing