State of Development: 1.4 Update

Hello. It’s been a while since we announced our 1.4 update for the demo of Akolyta. We did encountered some roadblocks and for a while we didn’t had a clear picture of what we wanted to do. That’s now mostly resolved and the development is coming along more nicely. In this post however I would like to talk about those setback and the development of that update in general.

The Roadblocks

In the game development and while doing creative things there are days for me when I’m completely lost. Those are really dark days when I just don’t know what I want to do. Days where I loose my vision and taking a pause from the development or working on more technical things just to get a better perspective. Honestly those are the darkest days for me – not actually making torture rooms filled with blood … Days where I want to do anything else but game development because I think I lost it all. I can’t really tell you what helped me to overcome this but I finally made it and I was able to start developing the update again fully – not just the technical parts but doing actual creative work. If any developer or creative person reads this and you have the same problem – let me know in the comments or on our Discord and let’s share the depression together …

Great Development Community

When it comes to game engines people have often times reservations when it comes to CryENGINE. But there is a huge advantage when it come to using this engine and that is the community. We try to share most of our work in progress stuff with that community and we got some great responses and some great feedback and suggestions. Recently we got a great feedback when it comes to lighting in our level and it pushed us to create something even better. Furthermore there are some great community contributions that every developer can use for free. Example of this are those great looking lens flares that were share in the Facebook group of CryENGINE. The last thing I would like to mention is that because of the community around the engine is smaller then the competition you can get in touch with the team behind the engine itself! Overall the community in around CryENGINE is something really unique in the engine space.

What Can You Expect

We made a post in the past explaining what you can expect in the 1.4 update. But in this post I want to be a little bit more specific. Before I list new features that are currently in development I want to promise one thing – improved technical state of the game. In the previous version the game could be broken if certain steps were taken. We watched every gameplay video put our there and we were able to see how the game breaks in some of them. The reason for this was that we are indie studio with no funding so far. We don’t have a lot of testers and we were too excited to share our work with – and not trying to do proper stress test of the game. This is something we would like to change with the new update. It seems like it’s becoming a trend to release unfinished or broken games in the industry. That’s something we don’t want to participate in and we want to bring you the best experience possible. We also have a lot of new features that we want to implement. Here’s a list of those features:

• New UI Design
• New Settings Options
• Multiple Language Support
• New Locations
• Re-Worked Existing Locations
• New Enemy AI
• Better Inventory System
• More Puzzles
• Increased Gameplay Time
• Batteries Store in Inventory
• Sound Effects for Physics Interactive Objects
• Dolby Atmos Implementation
• Credits
• Re-recorded voiceovers
• Better Optimisation
• Shadow View Distance increased
• New Particle Effects
• New Lens Flares
• More Lore Content

That’s all the features we have planned for the 1.4 update. I hope you’re excited as we are. We can’t wait to show them to you. A little disclaimer not all of those features might make it in the end to the update – in very extreme conditions – but we tried to select the features according to our abilities, so that we are able to deliver them to you. If you want to see the status of those features (in development, implemented, cut) we have a #roadmap thread on our Discord server – so feel free to join!

The Future

As of right now our biggest priority is to release the 1.4 update for the demo and make the demo even more polished and better experience. We can’t specify a release date yet as we don’t want to disappoint you by setting a release date and then postponing it. We also want to bring you a new trailer showing you the new parts of the game before the update is released. But I would like to be completely transparent about what are our plans for the future. We of course want to get feedback from you after the release. But after that we have two options moving forward. Our preferred option is to get funding from a publisher or investor so that we can continue the development not in our free time but full-time in one office bringing you the game as soon as possible. If this option will fail we will have to think of plan B. We briefly played with the idea of crowdfunding but there are two main problems with this approach. First – we don’t have big enough community to pursue this and second – Kickstarter and IndieGoGo are not available in my home country – the Czech Republic and I’m not in a financial situation to be able to afford services like Stripe. Therefore Plan B is making the game available episodically and getting the funding from the sales. It’s the most rough path forward – one that we hope to avoid but we can’t completely rule it out.

If you were able to digest all that text and read it all the way down here thank you. I would also like to say a huge thank you to all the people who has supported us throughout the journey. Before you go consider following us on social media and be sure to let us know what you think down in the comments or on our Discord server. And if you’re new to Akolyta definitely join the server as we are trying to build a community not just around this game but community of people who love horror and video games. Stay tuned and I will speak to you soon!

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