August Update

Hello Internet,

Thank you for your support and interest in Time-Storm. Let me start off with an apology as it has been almost 2 months since my last update. I will explain later what was going on but I should have "found time" to write an update. So everyone please accept my sincere apology and know I will do better to keep to once a month updates.

In my last post I stated I was in the process of moving, and I still am. Due to the pandemic the process of finishing the home purchase process (closing) was delayed several times leaving me living out of boxes just waiting to finally move. I have recently passed this hurdle and am now physically in the moving process, which should complete in about 2 weeks. In addition the increased workload from my "day job" has continued and is expected to continue into early next year. 

So what have I actually got done? To be honest and transparent not much has changed in the current build. 
However behind the scenes a rather large change is being worked on. After careful thought and internal debate with myself I have decided to change the engine powering this project to the Unreal Engine.
The top reasons for this change are:

• The extras that are included with Unreal for free, such as the Quixel MegaScan library, monthly and permanent asset packs.
• The ability to if desired to change the engine source code, to customize it for this project.
• The marketing hype/demo for the Unreal Engine 5 (I am not immune to some good marketing hype)
• The recent changes to the royalties for the Unreal Engine instead of paying after making $3,000 now you pay only after making $1,000,000. This change is probably the largest contributor. I am not out of touch that I think I will make a million dollars on my first game, but any developer that says they don't wish it would is a liar to me.
• Lastly I do not have to pay a monthly licensing fee for dark mode.

This change does come with some new challenges. First I am a technical person and I usually create quite a bit of code in my projects. This is a challenge as Unreal uses C++ language for coding where Unity used C#. While they are similar these 2 languages have some big differences, the kind of differences that will cause many crashes. As I have never used C++ before, I am having to study a new language for this engine. Secondly I only have a limited usage of the engine editor, so I am using online study to learn and practice the editor.

Getting up to speed on Unreal will likely take a couple to several months. During this time I will continue the monthly update which will likely include a link to the sample projects I am creating while learning. (these will be little demos with less than 5 minutes of play and are mostly just good for a laugh)

Thank you all for your continued interest in my project and I look forward to having more for you soon.