An Update

Hello friends...

It's been a long time, hasn't it? Null Faint Phantomra has gone through some changes. Most notably: The game has switched Game Engines! 

After thorough consideration, I have made the decision to cease current development on the Unity Engine build of the game. This decision happened not long after the unfortunate announcements that were made earlier last year. For professional reasons, I will not give my unfiltered opinion on the matter, but it has put a damper on things. 

This means that work has restarted from the beginning. 

What Engine will be used now?

The Engine of choice is Unreal Engine 5 (Version 5.3.2).  The reasoning for this stems from UE5's robust integrated tools and its editor stability.

With UE5, the game can be finished much quicker than before.

This is because many of the basic editor and game features present in the older version do not need to be manually built because UE5 has the basics built in.

Performance

As you are aware, high performance is a REQUIREMENT for reaching as many players as possible. With that in mind, I've moved the minimum target specifications to Steam-Deck level hardware.  That means the game must run at 60fps on Steam-Deck 99% of the time and still offer an attractive visual experience.

Concessions: 

• No Nanite (File size will balloon and test builds to Itch won't be feasible if used)
• No Lumen (From thorough testing on Steam Deck hardware, I've determined that Lumen is too expensive at its lowest settings and the image quality sacrifice is not worth the dynamic lighting)
• Itch Milestone Builds will max out at 1K textures (1024x1024) (This is to keep file size down.)

Why not Godot?

Simply put, a lot of the tools needed to get back to or exceed the level of the previous game's build would have to be rebuilt manually. I intend to use Godot for my much smaller scope project that I will reveal soon. 

What can you expect?

I intend to provide more frequent development updates via Itch and YouTube in the long term. 

Depending on the level of compression I can get away with, I will still upload milestone builds to Itch, however, once the game is further along in development, it will be available in Steam Early Access for an attractive price.

Closing

Thank you for your continued patience. I've always wanted to make my dream PS2 gameplay inspired game a reality and I hope you will enjoy the builds when they come through.