Well, April certainly has been a challenge! Even so, I've made significant progress on a number of key functions, as well as completed an almost complete platform refresh of a whole load of backend stuff. You can see a gameplay preview on the Youtube Channel here: 

As ever, all are welcome on the Discord server if you have feedback and thoughts, or even if you just want to chew the fat about games and such.

Details of the release are as follows:

Bug fixes

• Fixed sky flickering bug.

New features / enhancements

• Deprecated the "speed run" mode. This was a tough one for me, as I put so much time and effort into the biome levels! They were becoming a distraction from the main game, and so their time is up! This allows me to fully focus on building the open-world map, without getting bogged down in maintaining those additional scenes.
• Brand new dialogue system. This is just amazing, and I love it! This opens up a world of possibilities for branching dialogue, lots of lore and story to reveal, and just generally adds life to the game world.
• Brand new minimap and compass HUD feature. I've been trying to get a proper minimap in the works for months, and always hit a snag with performance. This release sees a fantastic new HUD system, with icons, distances, and an actual underlying map!
• Load and save feature. This is in its first iteration, so very buggy and limited at present. But the framework is there, and I'll be building on this in future releases to enable a solid system for loading and saving progress.
• Options dialogues and general UI updates. Each release sees an iteration of improvements to the UI, with a focus on consistency and usability. There's still some way to go on this, with one of the main milestones being the ability to play the whole game with just a controller.
• Rebalanced bow damage. The bow does significantly less damage than before, so requires a more tactical approach to its use in combat.
• Replaced the small village houses with the "Meadowville" settlement. This is looking much more interesting and is accompanied by a new settlement discovery and notification system.

Internal

• Complete recreation of the project in Unity 2021.3 LTD.
• Updated Gaia, GeNa, Enviro, Invector, Pixel Crushers assets to the latest versions.
• Introduce Vegetation Engine. This gives me a significant performance for tree, shrub and grass rendering, as well as new features such as wetness and global wind. I'll be making more and more use of this as I build out the open-world map.
• Use of GPU instancing. This lets me push some of the shader rendering to the GPU, giving me a much better balance of GPU / CPU usage. This adds significant FPS to the overall gameplay experience.
• New global volume system. This applies post-processing filters at different times of the day, to give me control over how the world looks.

Known Issues

• Load and save system is very sensitive and incomplete.
• Dialogue is not yet branched to cover all scenarios, so some odd conversations are possible!
• The spawn system uses scale lerping to fade in and out spawns, and I hate it! Still trying to get to grips with how to do a transparency fade in HDRP, at which point this will be replaced.