Development Update #1

Dear Steam Community,

If there's anything we've learned the past few weeks, it's that transparency is key. This blog post series will be an attempt to keep the community up to date with what we're doing behind the scenes, and include you in this journey.

First of all I would like to give all of you a massive thank you for the support, bug reports, streams and kind words you have given us since launch on behalf of the entire team.

[h2]Launch Day[/h2]
As you all may know, launch day wasn't the most stable launch you could've imagined. Performance was a little wonky, people had trouble joining and hosting games, AI were stuck floating in the air and games would crash.

While most of these issues had some pretty obvious fixes, one issue did not. The matchmaking system didn't allow all people to host or join games, and only restarting the game a great number of times seemed to resolve the issue temporarily, if at all.
As soon as we saw the first bug reports of this problem we started digging into the code.

[h2]The Multiplayer System[/h2]
To give you some context I will quickly explain how the multiplayer system works:
Unreal Engine allows for the use of plugins. The build you are all playing on right now uses a plugin called "Steam Advanced Sessions".

This plugin allows our netcode to work with steam. Such plugins provide us with a handful of handy functions for hosting games, joining games etc.

[h2]Trying to fix the problem[/h2]
When we first started looking into the problem we took a look into the code, seeing if there was anything we overlooked. After confirming this was not the case, we tried updating Unreal Engine to the latest version, also to no avail. That's when we made the decision to swap to a new plugin which makes use of entirely different netcode and has many more features.

Hoping this simple swap would fix the problem we implemented the system. On a first glance, the problem seemed to be fixed. We were able to see all lobbies, host one, and join eachother without a problem!

We rolled out a quick test version of the game to a separate channel and gathered a few testers to see if they could get in. To our surprise, no one was able to either host or join a game, except for the developers of the game.

The week following after that, we have worked with many people trying to figure this problem out. To get into the more technical side of things for those interested, this is a small part of the fixes we have tried this far:

Tried using IpNetDriver & SteamProSockets, neither worked.
Tried numerous different DefaultEngine.ini combinations
Tried changing the QueryPort to 27015, 27023, 27019:27049
Tried changing the port to 7777, 27015, 27023
Tried enabling normal SteamSockets
Tried doing a full rebuild
And many more.

[h3]Closing words[/h3]
Even though it may seem like we are inactive at the moment, be assured we are working our hardest on this problem every day. As soon as we get the matchmaking system functioning the way it should, the community can expect a lot of fun, exciting, and scary updates. For now the priority lies with making the game accessible to everyone, meaning the matchmaking should work the way you'd expect it to.
In the meantime, please keep sharing your funny moments, bugs, jumpscares and everything in between with us and the community. We truly love to see it!

Again thank you all so much for the patience and support, and we'll see you in the next dev update. You can join the discord here.