I've published a new alpha of the game, finally!

This version represents a complete reset of the game and a move away from the High Definition Render Pipeline in Unity to Built In. This gives me much more control over performance and makes things much easier to progress. There's also been a complete rewrite of the code base, using all I've learned over the last two years.

The core game and roadmap remain largely unchanged. I'm still kind of winging it in terms of the actual gameplay and spending a lot of time building a solid foundation of features first. With that in mind, the current alpha is VERY light on things to do, so please do bear that in mind. I have a growing list of features in my Trello board.

A quick summary of some of what's in this latest alpha:

Game Engine

• Much improved render performance, and tweakability, allowing for smoother gameplay across a wider range of target PCs.
• Advanced culling, merged meshes, GPU instancing, and additive scene loading all go towards improving the FPS and player experience.
• Baked lighting and interior volumes to keep things looking beautiful with minimum performance impact.
• New camera effects, including sun flares, bloom, and other effects that bring the world to life.
• Working, modular and extensible load and save mechanics, accurately saving player position, quest and inventory state, and other dynamic features of the world.
  
• Modular, consistent UI that's aligned with the look and feel of the game. The UI is built with a mouse and keyboard or controller in mind.
• A tutorial system that provides guidance and instruction as the player progresses.
  
• A new "readable" system that presents lore and information to players via an interactive book interface.
• A minimap, quest system, journal and dialogue system.
• Unified time and weather system, with the landscape, flora, trees and environment responding to wind, rain, snow and storms.

World Map

• A brand new 2km x 2km map, with points of interest, new villages, towns and a player homestead.
• More varied foliage and biome features, including more diverse world textures and flora and fauna.
• Dynamic sound, with ambient audio responding to the environment around the player.

AI

• Smoother, more realistic root motion animation across a wide range of forest and farm animals.
• A more diverse range of enemy creatures.
  
• A spawning system that keeps the world populated with diverse animals and enemies, while keeping performance in check. This allows spawning in areas, and biomes, during certain times and weather conditions, as well as triggered and random spawn encounters.
• A job and home system gives NPCs purpose in the world, and they will go to work and come home at various times of the day.
• NPC "bark" system, where NPCs will chat with the player through speech bubbles, sharing news and hints around the world.

Player Features

• Physics-based materials and hair, synchronized to the environment give an immersive feel of the world around the player.
• A horse riding system provides fast locomotion across the map, with a call feature to call the animal to the player.
  
• Unique animations for male and female characters.
• A footstep system to accurately place characters or stairs and terrain.

That's just a glimpse, really, and you can hopefully find more of interest by downloading and giving the alpha a quick try!

There are some things I've yet to complete and some bugs that I have yet to address, so things to look out for:

• The game initially defaults to "Medium" quality settings. For some reason, these don't get applied correctly on the first run. You'll need to go into Options > Performance from the main menu, pick your performance options there, save, then Quit to Desktop and reload. I'm working on figuring this one out!
• When loading from a game save, the player can't call their horse until they've mounted and dismounted.
• Inventory has not yet been implemented, so the sword in your house can't yet be collected.
• The "A Dark Dream" quest can't be completed yet, it's a stub in place to test the quest and journal system. There are no other quests implemented.
• You cannot yet interact with Yannah or other NPCs.
• Some settlements are missing and most are incomplete, with no NPCs or animals spawning. Many are yet to be "landscaped".
• Steps and doors can be buggy, and movement a bit rigid.
• Lots of other things, I imagine!

As ever, I'm very open to feedback, so please do give it a go and let me know your thoughts. This is purely a hobby project, done in what spare time I have, so all help and thoughts are welcome. Please don't be shy!

I'm hoping to have more regular alphas to try over the coming months, and maybe even start to build out some of the gameplay. Watch this space!