Where the hell have we been?!?
Last year, I have stated in our last article that we were going to try to reach the April 2017 release window for the game. That was before I realized how limited UDK truly is. Personally, I don’t care about the complaints on graphic inferiority compared to Unreal Engine 4, or Unity, as most computers are still not strong enough for UE4 yet anyway and the graphics of UDK can still suffice to this day and the gamers will still buy and love a UDK game if it shows promising potential. That said, I only cared for the most important aspect in making a great game – the gameplay. Problem is, UDK only supports 7th-gen consoles. What this means is that if we want to ship our game to consoles such as Xbox ONE, PS4, or Switch (which we do), then we’d need the full-license source code to UE3 AND we have to implement 8th-gen console support manually, which neither prerequisites are cheap or worth the hassle (since I have to pay my way through each console provider individually). So we chose our best and only option – move to UE4. They console support and code is already bundled and updated in UE4 saving developers the finance-crushing hard-work. That also meant we had to restart the project nearly from scratch, which leads to our next problem.
I am currently struggling with publicity and marketing for Maze Qore. With our first game, this less an issue since we were using an existing IP and the notoriety from it could still be diverged into a positive one with just a bit of know-how (which I have). However with a new IP, it becomes insanely difficult and an easy make-or-break scenario. No one knows what Maze Qore is yet and we've not proven enough reason for them to care either nor do we have enough resources to do so. I am afraid it may take longer than I hoped and I am unsure if we'd even get the game into early access before the end of the year, especially now that Steam will be replacing their distribution model.
Starting on April 20th, 2017, I will be hosting a live-stream on the game. Hopefully this will help garner some support for this project. We will create a Twitch account for NeotlEmpire in due time and will announce it a few days prior to the stream date, but just in case something goes wrong with Twitch. Feel free to follow us on Beam instead.
Alright, time for screenshots as you've all been waiting for.
A few developer-only editor nodes to guide us with our AI system and our custom-made actor master-class.
We have also redesigned our HUD from the UDK version complete with mini map (WIP).
Finally as an added bonus, I have made one promotional drawing to celebrate the #MakeItSUPERHOT contest from the last two months.
Meanwhile, stay tuned for more in the future through social media.
That's all for now, Lord Iheanacho signing off.
Establish, Explore, Expand.
