Magic is forever changing - it is your duty to know when you must learn and change with it, or stand fast in your ways and master what you know.
Greetings travellers! Hope everyone is doing well! It’s been a while since we’ve stepped away from the arena and joined you at the hearth to blog about our development. We’ve made a rather crucial decision which we’ll be committing to from today onwards and we wanted to sit with you by the fireside, explain our decision and share some of Doreth’s fine Ale!

The Engine Lock

After some lengthy discussion, our programmers have decided to engine lock Spellsworn at Unreal Engine 4.14 - the latest version - for the foreseeable future. (in our 0.8.8 patch update)
For those of you not in the know, an engine lock is a developer’s decision to stick with a given version of their game engine and suspend, or stop altogether, updating it. As I’m sure you are aware, the guys and gals at companies like Unity and Unreal are always hard at work fixing bugs, making improvements, and add new features to their engines.This is hard, time-consuming stuff, which is typically why engine updates occur on an infrequent and unpredictable time scale, often with several months passing between releases. This is also why engine updates are a meaningful affair - rather than dripfeed updates, they’ll release a large patch containing a collation of their work since the last update. These engine updates are of massive benefit, but also tend to throw an unexpected fireball into the works; changes to the engine affect in-game content, assets, scripts and many other neat things. This leads to a variety of bugs, both benign and critical, which take time to work through; time that’s taken away from working on Spellsworn, often for weeks at a time as we familiarise ourselves with the changes and address the issues. And, since we can’t plan for it, there’s no means for us to add this into our work projections. An engine update is great when a core feature is added that we can massively benefit from, but is quite a nuisance for fixes we’d created a workaround for, or the changing of a feature to make improvements that Spellsworn doesn’t benefit from but is affected by. To simplify our workload so that we can commit to bringing you excellent content and updates, we’re going to lock the engine at Unreal 4.14 for the foreseeable future.
That is not to say that Spellsworn will not be receiving any more updates - It most certainly will! With the engine on lockdown, there’ll be less development interruptions as we address any bugs present in the new engine version or adapt content. You could even say that since there’ll be less interruptions, we’ll have more time to bring you fantastic features and updates. That’s 10 times as much rock-pillar goodness! As we mentioned earlier, this is a decision for the foreseeable future. Should a crucial fix or an alluring feature pop along that we’d like to take advantage of, we’ll make the decision to update the engine (knowing the mysterious ways of the universe, this’ll of course be the 4.15 update!). For now however, we’ll be staying as is. If you’ve any questions or would like to know more about this process and decision, hit us up in the comments or drop us a line on Twitter, Facebook, Discord or Reddit. For now, enjoy yourselves and see you at the next playdate!
Check these places to keep yourself up-to-date with everything Spellsworn Facebook, Twitter and the Discord channel.

[ 2017-02-09 13:01:31 CET ] [ Original post ]