Its been a minute since our last update, and a lot has happened.

Time has gone by exceedingly fast as well. By the time we finish Ira youll be able to play Ira on the new Nintendo Neural link by Elon Musk while flying around with your jet pack Moving on. As always Im going to give it to you straight. Weve gained an incredible amount of ground in a lot of fronts, and got tripped up in a few others. Thus is the life of a game developer! First off, Here's an image from a long abandoned project of Intel Cos dubbed "The Black Iris". What's its purpose? How does this tie into our haunting retro future narrative of Ira? Well, you'll have to play game to find out.

Where did we get tripped up?

BUGS, BUGS, and more BUGS. We ended up updating to a (supposedly) commercially viable/stable version of Unreal and you guessed it. It wasn't quite as advertised. We spent 2 weeks logging and submitting bugs for features that Ira requires. Specifically in the Sequencer department (sequencer is the tool we use to create interactive cutscenes and animations). One of the many bugs we ran into lead to entire sequences being destroyed. Literally hours, days, weeks worth of work rendered useless. Nick and I were a little bit upset to say the least, but, Epic games has accepted our bug reports and will be fixing most of our issues by the next hotfix. I got rid of our custom toon build of Unreal 4 that allowed for our unique style of toon shading to exist. Why? Because It was losing support, and I had no way to guarantee future supported versions. That left me with the daunting task of taking the art style Ive created, and recreating it in an unmodified version Unreal 4 (which was no easy task). Im not going to sugarcoat it...Things could have gone very badly. However they didn't. After countless hours of research, experimentation, crying in the fetal position, and some helpful insight from others I ended up creating a specialized post process system the likes of which have yet to be equaled in Unreal 4. To top it all off Ira looks even better than before because I built exactly what we needed!

Overall we are pushing forward

feeling good, and we can see the light at the end of the tunnel! After all this time there have been so many hurdles that could have taken us down (knock on wood) but we keep persevering. If youre still reading this then thank you for sticking with us thus far. Stay tuned as there is more to come. Until next time folks - The Ira Team

[ 2018-12-22 18:59:10 CET ] [ Original post ]