Update #26 (& Demo 1.1 Release!) (Patreon)

This past week has been filled with Demo 1.1 patchwork and team expansion. So let's get into it!

Firstly, we have our Demo 1.1 patch release and a few important updates with the planned steam distribution. Unfortunately with the amount of people here, it's simply not possible to move forward with a steam-centered approach for the demo :/ Thankfully though, to counter this, we've been able to massively reduce the size of Demo 1.1 from a whooping 85GB down to a quite manageable 20.5GB! (More details on how we did this in "The Details") This means that our usual Mediafire approach with the past Alphas will again be able to handle the full demo in one file :)

Demo 1.1 will officially be releasing today at 6:00 PM PST (9:00 PM EST, 2:00 AM UTC)!🎉🎉

Highlights:

⋅ Demo 1.1 Patch Complete (along with massive size reduction)!! (more on this in "The Details")🎉🎉

⋅ Lots of team expansion work (and a possible few new devs)!!

⋅ Lots of Optimization work!!

Coming Soon:

⋅ Lots more Expansion Planning!

⋅ Puzzle addition poll! (Set for Thursday! 11/9)

⋅ Mechanics Polls! (Set for Friday & Sunday! 11/10 & 11/12)

⋅ More Seamless Level Transition Specific Optimization! (Loading hitch smoothing)

⋅ General Optimization (Level Streaming focused)

The Details (For Nerds):

Hey everyone! Let's get into some of the development work that has been going on this past week!

First and foremost, bug fixing from everyone's bug reports has been a major focus, and I'm happy to say every single bug reported in the discord has been fixed and updated in Demo 1.1! 🎉

On to size reduction! Earlier on in the week, we got some unfortunate news. Because of the sheer number of keys that Steam would need to have generated, it would be very likely that a few days after the demo release we would have hit our limit of key generation and have been stuck with no way to give the majority of everyone here access to the demo :/ Fortunately though, because it was still early in the week, we got to work on the most aggressive size reduction we have done to date. And within a few days (thanks to a ton of level streaming, sub-level organizing, and general asset size reduction) we had gotten the final build size done to a mere 25% of demo 1.0 with little to no noticeable difference ingame🎉

To be clear though, we do still expect quite a few bugs in Demo 1.1, along with a few slight quality degradations due to the size reduction. So as always, bug-reporting channels are open in our discord server and waiting for your found bugs!

**In Addition: For those here who would still be interested in joining the Team, below is an updated list of all specific categories that are still up for grabs! :)

- 3D Character Animation

- Sound Design (OST specific)

- Sound Design (Sound effect specific)

- VFX (2D and basic 3D video animation and compositing)

- UE5 Blueprint & C++ Development