Hello everyone!

Hard to believe it's been 6 months already since we first posted our test build. We have not been idle during that time.

We decided about 4 months ago that Unity was not technically capable of doing everything we want from this game, and so we decided to make the switch to Unreal Engine 5.

Its been a lot of work and there is still some work to do before we are back to exactly where we were in Unity, but I would like to highlight a few technical improvements this is allowing for us:

- Larger maps: Unity is not very well geared for open world games. Our initial tests show that large maps in Unreal are running significantly better

- Better AI. Unreal has many tools for building interesting and unique enemy AI, which will be a cornerstone of this game

- Much better lighting: goes without saying, but you can download the build and see this one for yourself!

- Multiplayer / Co Op: We've been building this game with Co-Op in mind since the beginning, but it was always pretty broken in Unity. Just within the last 4 months of rebuilding everything in Unreal we are significantly closer to having stable Co-Op infrastructure. (Stay tuned for more about that...)

There are more good reasons I think this has been worth the time investment. It's kind of like stepping back to go forward.

Unreal has so many features built in specifically designed to build multiplayer shooter games. I spent SO MUCH TIME in Unity trying to rig together systems to do the most basic things... things like: drive animation states, apply damage over the network, blending textures over landscapes, control AI states...

All of this stuff is built in to Unreal. It's been there since people played Unreal Tournament and to be frank it works better than my homebrew hacker solutions.

So I believe this will free up our time to be better spent where it's needed most. Designing cool characters and environments, and (eventually!!!) testing out and refining gameplay.

Stay tuned, hopefully you'll hear from us again in less than 6 months.