Taking your feedback to heart
Ûnsae
[p]Adressing feedback we recieved during Steam Next Fest.
I'll be speaking to you in the capacity of me, Mireneye, responsible for game logic, programming, studio/project lead & creator of the lore of Dynasthir.
I want to preamble this by saying that this is a first game for us. A small studio of two people. And that I don't have the greatest hardware.
1, The game runs badly on recommended specs.
You are probably right. On my limited hardware I pretty much would be happy with it running a locked 40fps. And I modeled the recommended specs after it. I recognize it's not ideal, and people expect a game that looks like a "Ps3 era game" to run at least 60 on modern hardware.
From what I can tell by our profiling, a strong cpu in terms of single core performance will help the most. As it appears to me we are primarily bound by game logic.
We try to simulate a lot of the world and how it moves without the player nearby. We had to give up a lot of that in order to get near good framerate.
Had I known years ago I would have done R&D into this specifically. I naively believed Unreal was going to scale nicely. It did not.
We WILL do our best to optimize. I've been on that train for the last two years; I have a lot to learn & a lot of profiling to do. We will continue to work on & improve performance as we go.
2, Game looks bad/monochrome/has bad filter effects/can't see anything
The world of Dynasthir doesn't have day/night it only has weathers. Dark & light come in that form, in various ways. This has been a challenge for us to design as for various reasons UE4 never matched visuals in editor and in game. I believe I've fixed this issue. And I hope you can see the difference yourself.
We tightened the Ambient Occlusion a bit. We reintroduced a bit of our colors from our desaturated set. We cleared up some fog that pushed up onto the camera. We no longer wash the entire scene towards red. We allow other colors to come through.[/p][p]
We have some ideas we might try to make the start of the game feel more engaging and exciting as you are just starting off on your adventure. One of them is making the town be in a more active crisis. With more combat encounters across the starting town. And while still inhabited, a more hostile environment.
But ultimately there will be moments where you contemplate your journey and slow down. I want to give you the right impression of what we are building. We are building a conversation with a dying world.
Finally. Even after release we will continue to infuse the world with more things. There are things we have dreamed of but not have had time to get into.
I hope that our final polish on things before the release will elevate the experience for all of you. Be patient with us as we use every single shard of time we have to make this game into something special.
I'm very excited to let you guys travel beyond the demo walls. We have a lot of weird & strange secrets waiting for you. Or perhaps, for someone else. I suppose.. you might have to talk to each other?
Perish the thought.
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