Believe it or not, I'm still chipping away at the game and making some great progress! This year saw another "reset", and a focus on taking everything I've learned so far about Unity to build a performant, extensible baseline for the game. This has led me down the path of looking into GPU instancing, managing light and shadows, dynamic resolution, quality settings and a whole lot more.

As ever, it's been good fun re-doing stuff now that I have a lot more knowledge and experience, and the results are a much smoother, far more enjoyable gameplay experience. I've posted a short gameplay demo of the latest build:

I'm refactoring, re-designing and rebuilding core elements all the time, which is very much why these latest builds are clearly flagged as "alpha" builds, and so various elements have been dropped from older builds or remain somewhat incomplete. A high-level summary of what's in and out of this latest build:

Almost complete

• Character controller and animations.
• Sky and environment systems, exterior lighting.
• Core minimap system, quest and dialogue systems, and integrations between them all.
• Points of interest, providing lore and interest in the open world.
• Basic animal AI and spawning.
• Display options have defaults that will hopefully cater for a wide range of player setups.

In progress

• More quests, dialogue and expansion of the lore and story elements.

Not started

• Creature AI and combat mechanics.
• Buildings and settlements expanding the world.

Though I "never say never", I am getting really comfortable with where I am now with core system design and the capabilities and stability of Unity 2022.3, so as far as I'm concerned this is "it" in terms of the build I'm moving forward with. I don't envisage any other "resets" now in the future.

I hope you get a chance to test out the alpha, and please do provide any and all feedback. I'm particularly interested in performance feedback across various configurations, especially from lower-end GPU and CPU platforms. Any and all feedback is welcome and really valuable to me as I progress through the development process.