March was a crazy month, with me and the family succumbing to COVID, and generally feeling pretty poorly. It's been a time to reflect on priorities and time, and this has had a material impact on the project and progress of our game development. I've made some big changes over the month, in the short snippets of time afforded to me to play in Unity, and these all go towards the bigger picture goal of building the game we want everyone to play. It might not mean much, in terms of building out features and overall delivery of the game, but here's a snippet of what's been going on over the last month:

• Complete project rebuild on Unity 2021.3 LTS release - this represented a huge piece of rework, basically re-implementing the whole game from a blank canvas created using the newly released "stable" Unity build. The impact is significant, with much faster compile times, and improved system and run-time performance in the game.
• Implemented The Vegetation Engine - this brings significant performance benefits and a consistent set of shaders and functionality to trees, grass and shrubs. This also introduces GPU instancing to vegetation, which really bumps FPS up a notch.
• Implemented Dialog System for Unity - this asset introduces complex, branching dialogue, that really brings life to the game. I've re-worked this into the Quest Machine implementation, giving a combined set of functionalities to inject life into NPCs and give the player real purpose in the game.
• ImplementedGeNa rivers and roads - I've been building a load of prefabs that will allow me to consistently spawn villages and towns, and connect them with roads, tracks and rivers. This foundation work will really add dynamic life to the world, as well as help to guide players between quest objectives.
• Brand new Nav system - the minimap radar has been replaced with a fully-featured minimap. There's also a compass bar that shows the same detail as the map, along with distances. Both features can be turned off in the options menu.

What I've also decided to do is to focus on the "adventure" RPG game mode, and have therefore cut the "speedrun" levels and functionality from the game. These worked great as test beds for various features and mechanics, and I think I let my pride keep them in scope of the game. The real objective is to build a believeable world map, so killing them off just gives me more time and space to focus.

I'm hoping to have a build ready mid-May, that brings the new mechanics and systems to life a bit, and give you a taster of how the game is progressing. Finding time around a busy work and family schedule is really the challenge, but I'm allowing myself the time to get things done slowly and just enjoy the process. We'll get there, eventually!

You can see a gameplay preview on my YouTube channel here: