Christmas Quest & State Of The Game

How are you all doing? Apologies for being away for quite a while, I'm currently preparing the game for its final release and with it, a few changes are being made to make sure the code is clean and the features are solid.

Quite a massive amount of changes were made on this one, here's a summary of the big ones:

• The game has been upgraded to use Unreal Engine 5

• Better compatibility with Linux using Proton (Tested using Linux Mint)

• Shop now sells different items depending on their locations

• New items and weapons

• Item physics updated to be more gameplay friendly

• Weapons now have attributes such as Damage, Attack Speed among others

• New compass UI to help navigation

• You can now revive your team members by interacting with them (No longer needs to head back to a flag)

• Lighthouse Cave lighting improvements

• Frogs and Notes achievements can now be completed by collecting all currently available ones (No longer need to wait for Full Release to get those)

• New loading screen

• Performance optimizations

• Various under the hood code improvements and refactors

And of course, the Christmas Quest is back!

Now by the nature of the above changes, I gotta be honest with you, there's probably new bugs that I now have to fix because of it. I tried my best to make those changes as smooth as possible. If you do see anything and would like to help please feel free to post them on the Community Hub.

Lastly, because I'm getting it almost ready for full release, you may also see from a distance the upcoming levels far away, this is because there's some assets being shared between Early Access and the Full Release version.

Unreal Engine 5 & Linux/Proton

As the game is getting closer to its final release, I realized that now is the time for a final engine update. There's a few features from the newer engine that I started to use but those will mostly be seen on the final levels of the game.

I've noticed on previous versions of the game that on Linux using Proton the videos were not working at all. However the rest of the game worked fine so that made me decide to strip away pre-rendered videos from the game, hence why a new loading screen (and also startup visuals). That should help Linux users have a better experience!

Shop, Items and Weapons

New items and weapons are being created for the game, and It only made sense to have custom vendors per location to better accommodate the change. Those items may have different attributes and the game will show you the difference between your equipped one and the ones you're looking for.

The physics were also updated because It felt a bit frustrating at times where items would just fall or slide across and you would essentially lose them. So they now use a simpler physics that makes them essentially not move around and only listen to gravity.

Compass

This might be a partially just for fun feature but I kinda do think it's nice to indicate where you should go, especially after the second quest where it pretty much becomes a massively open world.

It will show you the available quest map locations and undiscovered quests if there's no current quest.

Reviving Team Members

A bit of a frustrating thing I've noticed with previous versions is that every time Jonathan, Almika or Sarsi dies you have to manually go back to a nearby flag to revive them. I honestly didn't know how annoying this was until I implemented this new feature; all you have to do is get near them and smash your interact button and they'll be back up.

The only catch is that if you're in a fight you might not be able to smash interact enough to save them otherwise enemies will start attacking you, so be safe!

Lighthouse Cave Improvements

Here are some screenshots of the new Lighthouse Cave lighting:

That's all for now!

I'm sorry for taking a bit longer again on the full release but I really hope the amount of effort being put into this makes it worth the wait.

Please feel free to share your thoughts on the update or even the full release delays, I'm always keen on having an open discussion on these things, your support means the world to me.

Merry Christmas! Lucas