Quarterly Update 3

Date: Sat, 04 Feb 2023
Ortharion : The Last Battle Game Banner
Genre: Action, Adventure, Indie, RPG, Early Access
Developer: Ortharion project
Release Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2023
Hello Adventurer,
Here is Sylvain, what's new since our last news of March 1st?
Today, we're going to share information about the game's roadmap and development.

Let's start with the annoying things: we won't be participating in Steam Neo Fest in June, but it will be postponed to Steam Neo Fest in October. Why are you going to ask? Simply, because we seek to offer you the most optimized and polished game possible. So Adrien experiments to see what would be best for the player and for the developer. So he tried to offer an open world with a single map instead of 16 distinct levels. But it was not very conclusive technically.

There are also the vagaries of life and when bad luck mixes with development. So Adrien's hard drive gave up the ghost and we had to start from a version that dated back a month. Fortunately during this period many tests had been carried out, not always conclusive like the open world test. So in the end, the work could be caught up in 2 weeks by Adrien.

We also ask for quotes to offer prices on the different levels of the campaign, which takes some time. The first being, the use of a 3D modeler for the creation of the main character and all his armor.

Here is why, we prefer to postpone the release of the demo in October (even if it has been playable since April), just like the participative campaign, which allows us to take the time, because we remind that we are working on the project during our time. free.

During the summer, this will allow me to finish the story part of the game as well as the faction and secondary quests and perhaps the romances (if they are added. We are thinking about this possibility for the moment).

I now leave the floor to Adrien for the progress of the game.

Hello, as Sylvain already mentioned, I had a backup problem, which made me waste a lot of time.
I had greatly improved the visuals of the first terrain, adding many details and working on the verticality of the terrain, but a 1km by 1km map with a high level of detail took too long to load. over a minute! So I wanted to experiment on an open world.

The open world on the editor worked correctly. But alas, in game, Unity was just crashing. Crashes coming from the Unity Framework itself, I knew that I would have had a hard time fixing this kind of problem having read several posts on the forums without real corrections, neither from users nor from the Unity team. In addition, the open world adds a lot of constraints, so I stayed on the old version.

Then for the game itself, the demo is not just playable, but finished as far as quests are concerned. There are no more bugs, but new design elements need to be added, such as hidden chests with related achievements, item identification system, runeword crafting, and rune pillars. You can see in video what the first 15 minutes give (cut in 6 minutes of video). But the demo in its entirety easily lasts 1 hour, with the same level of quality.



Internal tools have been added to improve the visibility of the project for us, as well as increasing the speed at which we can create quests later. You can see what the possible scenario choices look like below.



Thereafter, I will have to work on functions specific to Steam: Steam Cloud, Steam ranking then a lot of work on the animations and the fights must be done, as much on the player, the pnjs as on the structure of the code to improve performance and more easily create rare/epic/legendary skills and gear later. Because the game is designed to last over time, so with regular content updates.

But let's stop there for now. And let us know in the comments if you have any questions, we'll try to answer you as best we can. See you soon adventurer.

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