In this new dev blog, we’ll explain why we’ve been silent for so long, and why the game was delayed.
Months ago, before we even announced Northern Shadow, we wanted to submit our game as early as we could, because we thought the process of getting greenlit would take months. Our hope was to get a greenlight around the same timeframe with the alpha finish date. We didn't think the announcement would get the traction that it did. The amazing responses we got from everyone caught us completely off-guard, which is one of the reasons why we’ve been silent for the past few months, we weren’t prepared to keep up with the fast Greenlight tempo. The other reason requires a bit more comprehensive explanation.
We started game development in 2011 with UDK (indie version of Unreal Engine 3). In November 2013, we switched to Unity to have less restrictions on the prototype we've been working at that time. As the development progressed, we started having some issues. These issues started showing their heads around March, at that time, Unity 5 was announced, and had fixes for the exactly those issues. We were hoping that Unity 5 would be released before these issues became unmanageable. In hindsight, that was a mistake :). In June these issues did become unmanageable, we realized we were spending more time on solving these issues than we did on developing the game. As the issues accumulated, the cost of these workarounds started highly outweighing the cost of an engine switch. Which is why, even though after such a large amount of development, we decided to switch to Unreal Engine 4. ... We've completely redid the world. Originally we had 3 overworld zones that was 15sqkm big. We now have a single 103.4sqkm overworld zone that you can seamlessly travel. We've added seasons to the game, AI acts accordingly to them and your cities' requirements change over time.
We are still away from the release, but it is getting closer (in fact, closest we've ever been!). We will be doing regular dev blogs moving forward. You can find the new Unreal Engine 4 screenshots in our Steam Greenlight or Facebook pages.
Title: Re: Northern Shadow
Post by: Christo on February 16, 2015, 04:23:24 pm
"It's like Skyrim with Skyrim " - IGN
Title: Re: Northern Shadow
Post by: Leshma on February 16, 2015, 04:32:52 pm
Thread was made, merge would be in order: http://forum.melee.org/and-all-the-other-things-floating-around-out-there/northern-shadow/msg1015342/#msg1015342
Title: Re: Northern Shadow
Post by: LordBerenger on February 16, 2015, 04:35:45 pm
Wannabe Skyrim
Title: Re: Northern Shadow
Post by: Golem on February 16, 2015, 04:53:45 pm
It does look alot like Skyrim in some aspects, but I have my hopes up.
Title: Re: Northern Shadow
Post by: SeQuel on February 17, 2015, 04:42:39 am
Looks awesome.
Title: Re: Northern Shadow
Post by: Taser on February 17, 2015, 02:23:34 pm