When It Sucks

 

Dear Reader,

Since you've made it to this little hidden corner of my dev blog, I'd love to share a secret with you today:

"I tested the game, and it sucks."

Well not entirely of course. But to my eyes, given my vision, my goals and my understanding of where it should be, it sucks. Plain and simple. And I know exactly why and I'll once again break my back over the next week to fix it.

But why would you write that on the internet!!! You are supposed to promote it, only share beautiful screenshots and talk about AMAZING new features.

You're not supposed to talk about the blizzard weather effect, that doesn't even move the trees slightly, while clouding the player's vision and that doesn't FUCKING STOP ONCE IT GETS GOING.

You're not supposed to talk about the ugly, ugly, ugly sections of the map, that you dread to re-do, because of UE4s beautiful accumulation of bugs, that happen when many instances of foliage actors are present.

You're not supposed to talk about the MASSIVE FPS drops, that occur when players go through map transitions during that fucking blizzard, that of course keeps going until 30 seconds before sundown so you can't even find a hideout let alone click yourself through the slideshow of images until you see something else besides fog.

You're not supposed to talk about the fact, that the souls suddenly stop talking after a weather effect takes place, because both particle systems max out UE4's internal limit, regardless of where and how you set the bounding box or turn them into GPU emitters in cascade.

Share a pretty picture on Twitter instead.

You're not supposed to talk about how you trapped yourself inside willow bushes on your mission to explore the world, after you've spent a good 20 hours re-integrating them after you realized they caused a framerate drop.

You're not supposed to talk about how it is god awful for the player, that he can only carry 4 (!) pieces of wood and 1 (!) tinder item, which ALWAYS leaves him short of lighting the first campfire, and how your dev integrity is in constant battle with your inner player conscious trying to up or decrease the difficulty.

You're not supposed to talk about the fact, that the shadows are SNEAKY FUCKING BASTARDS, that seem weak, move slow, are based on the most braindead AI known to man, but still scare the living hell out of you each time they catch you, bringing back mountains of childhood trauma and sleep paralysis.

Share a pretty screenshot on Instagram. Don't forget to post the linktree.

Don't talk about the compass, that just keeps going like a fucking fidget spinner after one of these trauma infested nights is over, even if there are no shadows nearby.

Don't talk about the watchers and the gallows and their heads and how you're secretly afraid, they will kill your FPS each time they see you, because their head movement triggers something in Unreal Engine, where it is completely overburdened by a moving collision box, that is NOT SET TO FUCKING SWEEP, BUT TELEPORT!!!!! And no matter how often you scream that at the engine, it still goes: "Is this thing sweeping? Prolly. Let's perform collision checks every step of the way".

Don't talk about the fact you've been working on this pile of shit for more than 9 years now and how you inject yourself with copium, telling yourself: "Well I had to learn the engine first" , while knowing fully well, that what you actually learned was to "work around" the engine's untreated and unfixed bugs, to which Epic's answer was: Fuck this, let's just release a new one.

Of course UE5 is also fucked, with new bugs and porting the project to UE5 would basically be suicide, knowing the list of updates they'll release. I learned all that when I originally ported it from UE3 to UE4. 

Don't talk about that. Check your followers on your socials.

Don't talk about the fact that your Dad called the game "Hinky's World" in a recent telephone call.

Don't talk about the stretched textures and low lightmap resolution in the cave, about the visibility spheres of some hideouts, where they suddenly pop into view 5 meters in front of you, how the player finds FRESH NEW CLOTHES in each dilapidated hideout, because you were too lazy to adjust those fucking textures too.

Don't talk about the footstep sound disappearing when he walks on the tiny, mini metal nail texture of the boardwalks, because you forgot to set the wood physics for that.

AND CERTAINLY NEVER TALK ABOUT DE-PENETRATION VELOCITY. The worst feature ever created. The demon of engines, the destroyer of physics, the breaker of a dev's will to live. A feature, that is fucking DEACTIVATED on every single item, every single mesh in the game world INCLUDING the player character and ALL HIS VOLUMES and collision, with PHYSICS IN GENERAL DEACTIVATED and yet he still ice skates across the meadow, because he moved a little towards that tree over there, and now the engine thinks: "OH MY GOD, HE'S OVERLAPPING, WE NEED TO PUSH, PUSH, PUSH HIM AWAYYYYYYYY"

Some days are just god awful. Fuck all of this. Let's get back to work.