We're back!

Hello everyone, we're really close to being finished with this next update. We've spent the past few months working really hard.

AI

AI has been a challenge. So far in Mist of the Dark, we've tried to focus on the atmosphere and immersion right out of the gate. Horror is a really hard genre to nail. It takes incredible amounts of time, patience, and vision.

If you've played any game with very basic AI, you'll notice that they often make decisions that don't make sense. To avoid breaking immersion, we designed an entirely new AI system from the ground up using foundations from GOAL, Behaviour Tree, and Utility Scoring. This new system lets the AI always choose the best action in any given circumstance.

We obviously will still have bugs and fixes to do, but the foundation we've built will make it easier for us to add features and debug in the future. We'll also be putting this new AI foundation on the Unreal Marketplace for anyone interested in using an advanced system that requires way less time to develop on!

The AI is currently being tested and implemented and we'll be releasing it to our testing branch within the next few weeks. That means no more waiting for others to play!

Game Improvements

Mist of the Dark is 5 years old at this point. We started developing this game in a pre-release version of Unreal Engine.

This has caused us a lot of trouble. We've built many of the systems without using Unreal's built-in features, which has made developing new features a difficult task.

To address this, we've been re-doing a lot of our code. (There is a lot to redo…) While this doesn't make a huge difference in the game visually, it will set us up for a future of better development. It's also cut down on performance quite a bit, so you should see some FPS improvements.

We've also been working on finishing the systems that we currently have implemented, including combat updates, UI changes/additions, and some small feature implementation.

Bug fixing

Before our launch, we didn't have a wide set of users to test and find bugs for us. Launch opened our eyes to the road that we need to take in order to get Mist of the Dark to a point that players enjoy.

Sooo, for the past few months, as well as creating new features, we've been fixing a ton of bugs.

The Future

Mist of the Dark is on a road for improvement. After we release this next update, get some feedback, and adjust as necessary, we'll be pushing onto our Gamemode Update! That update will be focused on pushing out a new gamemode which we'll be revealing shortly after this coming update.

Thank you to everyone in the community for all your help reporting bugs. We're really excited to get this game back on the road! When the next update is ready, we'll have a new post detailing everything we've done the past few months.

Happy gaming!