Renown News

Hello everyone!

As always, a huge thank you to our amazing backers and supporters. A big shout out to our mods here on discord likewise.

We’ve got some big news regarding the next couple of weeks.

Return to the OTK Expo 2024:
Firstly, and in no particular order, we’ve been invited back to exhibit at the OTK Expo 2024. In this case we’re not running in the competition (given that would be a bit unfair given we won in the past), but we’ll be doing an interview update segment during the Expo Stream.
If you'd like to see an early pre-view of just our segment:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We’ll be linking the Expo Stream, when it goes live. This will be running on the 4th of June.

Steam Open World Survival Crafting Fest (27th May to 3rd June PST)
We’re also very excited to be taking part in the “Steam Open World Survival Crafting Fest” between the dates of the 27th of May and 3rd of June, on the Steam Platform.

That means between these dates we’ll be running a free open demo of the current survival alpha. If you’ve got friends looking to try Renown out, or to just better understand the state of the game, this is a great way to try it out.

These events have also always provided us with huge amounts of both game data, and player feedback.

Extended Survival Map Ready – Algara
Another area we’re hyped about is our new extended survival map “Algara”.

You can find a lot more details about this map in our previous dev blog. Without overly going over the same, its roughly 60% larger than our previous survival map, and has an emphasis on increased building space for player bases. In the future it’ll also act as our test bed for the new PGC biomes we’ve created but are causing trouble when all combined onto our 4x4km map.

The map is currently playable for backers.

Renown: The Final Crowdfund
The last area of anxiety and excitement for our team has been preparation for a final Crowdfund during this event. As you know, we’re extremely grateful to the community here and our backers who’ve made our work possible this far.

However, we’re still only a small team of dedicated folks going for just over 4 years now.

We’ve been doing a lot of meetings with Publishers and Venture Capital.

The problem with this is at best we lose creative freedom, and in the worst cases (looking at the paperwork), they take control over the entire community, project, marketing and even when/where we can launch.

Kz has been working hard on a whole new set of cosmetics, and we’ll be providing new titles and packages. We’ll of course be offering testing and full game access as before at the lowest same price as on our store page.

Please see as follows for a pre-launch link to the new campaign: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/playrenown/renown
It’ll be going live with the Steam Open World Survival Crafting Fest.

One thing we really didn’t want, was to create a sense of pressure or FOMO on our old crowdfund by announcing this one early. We’ll be closing the old Indiegogo in the next few hours, and we’ll be temporarily taking down our Xsolla Play.Renown when the fund goes live.

This will likely see a return in the future, however with the updated packages.

As always, should this campaign fail, we’ve got plans for redundancy and fall back. We are dedicated to getting Renown out on steam, no matter what.

Again thank you to our amazing testers and backers. We truly couldn’t have gotten this far without you, and we’re super keen to keep going.

Till next time.

Welcome Renowners, Mr. Z here with some exciting news about a new map and changes to our backend.

One of the biggest complaints we’ve had in our Survival playtests has been the lack of space to build bases on the map, given the map was originally designed for a 4 Team Raid mode, this is quite understandable. Fear not because we’ve addressed these issues by completely revamping the map. The newly named map: Algara Isle, now has the shape of an island with water on all sides, and the former map boundary cliffs have been removed.




The overall size of the map is roughly 60% bigger, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. Originally, the Winterhold castle area took up a pretty large proportion of the map, with the area being unavailable for player bases. Most of the new areas with this map extension have added quite a bit more building space for players. We’ve also added brand new POIs to the map to give players more locations to fight over and to spread the loot a bit more, as it was too concentrated in the Winterhold area, which let high performing groups of players dominate most of the loot too easily.



Here KZ wrote us some details on what the goals of the new map expansion are:

Main Goals of the Map Expansion:
Increased Space for Building: The primary objective was to provide players with more room to construct without feeling crowded.

Enhanced Player Interaction: Despite the expanded area, maintaining player encounters was crucial to fostering community and interaction.

Abundance of Points of Interest (POIs): To prevent the expansion from feeling like a mere walking simulator, numerous POIs were scattered throughout, offering exploration and activities.

Balanced Development Opportunities: Ensuring that building in the outer regions remained worthwhile was a key consideration.

Integration of Features and Optimization:
Gradual Introduction of Biomes: The expansion serves as a platform for introducing and refining biome mechanics, allowing players to experience varied environments.
Incremental Feature Testing: Features from the larger map are being methodically integrated and tested in the expansion, optimizing functionality and player experience over time.
Continuous Improvement: The expansion provides an opportunity to address existing issues in the larger map, refining gameplay and performance iteratively.



There’s a couple of questions many of you must be thinking, why did we expand the old map and what's going on with the upcoming survival map? As many know, navigating the waters of game development is a very volatile experience, and often requires changing course quickly. We’ve made a slight course correction as we were expecting to be able to release a new map around this time, but unfortunately we ran into a lot of obstacles along the way. The biggest of which was performance issues that we haven’t been able to resolve yet. When making the new map we decided to use a new system for placing foliage in Unreal 5 called PCGs. It produces some pretty impressive and organic looking results but unfortunately it has nuked our performance to well below our intended targets.



Given the time crunch we’re currently under (we only have 4 developers), we decided to revamp the old existing map to alleviate most of the issues players had with it as it was pretty playable already. Thankfully, the expansion of the old map seems to have had no effect on performance. There were also other performance issues with the full survival map, and we haven’t had enough playtesting on it to balance out all the Loot and POIs. A map extension to our old map seemed like the obvious thing to do and it seems to have paid off as we’ll be getting it released in a major patch shortly.



So what’s the plan with the full survival map? Our focus right now is shifted at the Steam Open World Survival Crafting Fest at the end of March. That’s right, we’re doing another demo and this time for a Festival, we’re going to have a lot of players during the festival so this is the perfect time to gather up the gang for a new wipe. After that demo ends we’re going to redirect and redouble our efforts back into the full survival map. We’re very excited to get it playable since the map’s large size is also going to necessitate the introduction of rideable Horses to the game, which have been expected for a long time.



We have some other good news relating to the backend of the game.

We’re now using Epic Online Services (EOS). EOS gives us 2 new features we’ve been badly needing, a good anti-cheat service and VOIP. To be perfectly clear, the game is still coming to Steam without question, EOS is compatible with Steam and lots of games on Steam are using it lately.

Anti-cheat has long been on our minds, despite the game still being in Alpha we’ve already attracted the attention of hackers. Nobody likes hackers, we’ve all played many games that have been ruined by their presence, so we’re taking a proactive approach early to deal with them.

One key feature that was missing in our last playtest was Voice chat. It’s a very integral feature of PvP open world survival games and its absence was felt pretty strongly. We were relying on a duct tape solution for voice chat that was sending the voice data through the same game server that players were on, but unfortunately that has massive performance issues and simply doesn’t scale to the player counts we’re expecting. We’re now using Epic Online Services Voice, which shifts the performance costs of Voice chat to the Epic Backend instead of our game servers. We can’t wait to see what silly antics players will get into now that Voice chat works again.

We’ll have another dev blog soon with a big announcement, follow our announcements channel on our official Discord and Renown on Steam to stay appraised.

Alpha 1.1.7

Fixed recipes missing Axeheads
Fixed networking issues that caused lag
Optimized animals path finding
Fixed issue with Barrel shield
Fixed a bug with the Bed respawn timer
Fixed not being able to click the spawn buttons while being raided
Fixed not being able to spawn in while the game is saving
Final save warning is 10 minutes now
Rewrote NPC spawning logic
Fixed many NPC spawns
Throwing weapons cost stamina now
Fixed Petard sound attenuation
Fixed an issue where the inventory would disappear randomly
Fixed not being able to move Banners
Fixed Alt Overhead Morph to Slash anim with Greataxes
Fixed an issue where all Furnaces would stop smelting
Fixed Petard Damage detection and added a more reliable splash radius against players
You can now input queue an arrow after firing
Fixed an infinite arrow bug

Alpha 1.1.6

Fixed Scoreboard scaling
Fixed Servers Display
Fixed Server crash issue
Fixed issue with Saving
Fixed issues with Party system
Added Save Snapshots
Improved Player Banning admin tool
Changed silver smelt from 20 ore to 10 ore
Fixed Poleaxe recipe
Fixed Banners not taking damage
Fixed issue with maintenance cost naming
Reduced cost of components from merchants
Fixed issue with pitch on some weapons
Fixed admin messages not appearing in chat filter

Alpha 1.1.5

Added Pole to Research tree
Lowered costs of components
Fixed Audio issue with Furnaces
Fixed Home page
Fixed a duping bug
Fixed an issue with stagger
Fixed anim blending on legs
Fixed Merchants being naked
Tweaked the Loading screen
Added a new Quit prompt
Updated animations
Added the Encyclopedia, which contains a Survival tutorial in it
Fixed Petard research
Fixed Crossbow draining stamina when loaded