A bit of time has passed since the last blog post so here are some updates, we are taking a break from Fight'n'Flight for a bit and we have two new games in the works.
From beginning of 2018 until late 2019 it was just two people working on Fight'n'Flight (me and Cecile) and while there has been a bunch of progress overall, there has also been burnout. During all of 2019 and into 2020 I was dealing with the US immigration process while working on the game which didn't help much. During this time though we added a few extremely capable people which will help going forward once work starts on it again.
Multiplayer VR games are difficult and individually, those types of games are not easy to begin with. The hope is that we will be able to keep putting out new content for FnF for a while so we want to be able to work on it after we launch. The plan is to start working on it again towards the 4th quarter once our new team members have finished their existing commitments.
Ink
To prevent complete and utter burnout, we decided to make a much smaller game tentatively titled "Ink".
Player will get to move around fairly large maps with grapple hooks and air jets to convert the obstacles from dark to light.
I had the surprising experience of implementing Wwise into this project after the FMod free license terms were not very acceptable along with arguably simple functionality not existing (audio fade in/out). For the first time in six years, I was actually able to install the integration and build the project with no additional fixes. The FMod license terms for the free version are one project per year and any additional projects are $2000 per project. On top of that there were multiple spamming errors in the log, somewhat barebones features exposed to UE4, and our Audio Director was having all sorts of miscellaneous issues getting ambisonics correct. With the exception of the integration instructions not telling me to add the Wwise folder to the always cook settings (by default I only package playable maps), Wwise has been significantly better for everyone.
The intended release date is relatively soon, the last 10% always takes the longest so stay tuned for updates. We will have a demo and are intending to support Windows 64 bit and Linux.
Cutesy Attack
(Working Title)
I was cleaning out my hard drive when I came across a prototype game I made back in November of 2019 in an hour or two just because I was playing around with some marketplace assets. I had sent it to Cecile but she didn't have the time or energy to play it back then so I upgraded it to the latest version of Unreal Engine 4 (4.25) and had her play it a week or two ago. She wanted to try it really quick, test a map in Ink, then go play some Beat Saber before dinner but that turned into her playing it for over 30 minutes.
Ink is more of an experience with gameplay and this is more of the dumb fun people can find in games like Dynasty Warriors (put the pitchforks away, I still play DW: 8). I am in the process of creating the core systems behind the game (which I would like to write more on) so there aren't screen shots yet. Let's just say that this game is not meant for younger audiences.
Mermer Xenoscience
I mentioned in a previous post that this was a game we were working on and we still are but it's in the design phase. After prototyping a few mechanics, it was clear we needed to wait for a while to let some technology catch up (water and rendering mostly). After seeing the Unreal Engine 5 announcement it was pretty clear that we will need it to create the game properly. It is fully doable in Unreal Engine 4 however the amount of "hacks" I would have to do to get the project where I personally would want it take time away from making the game. We do want to make the game as it will help with a future project but it's not time yet to start.
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