Supraworld
Today I have some screenshots for you from inside the level editor.
The development of Supraworld is now going for roughly 2 years and we're not as far as I had hoped but the quality is great! Remember, Supraland 1 was already finished after 18 months.
But Supraland was kinda rushed, not expecting to sell more than 10000 units. Way over a million players later we now have a team of hardcore Supraland fans working on Supraworld and I couldn't be happier about those guys.
There is so much love going into all the details of Supraworld, you will be able to feel that everywhere.
We're maybe putting a bit too much effort into a lot of systems even though we only need them once or twice. But we're trying to make the game moddable so you can easily build your own levels with our assets and tools. We're trying to make all the little placeable gameplay scripts easy to use and I even put effort into making them look good in the editor, the things that no player ever sees.
It won't be Mario-Maker-easy to use, it's too complex for that. It's not a casual thing for everyone; you really have to mean it but then you can create your own Supraworlds and share them.
The main menu is supposed to have a "Custom Levels" category for this, but I guess it's one of those things that will be added after launch as it's not our primary focus of course but we always have it in mind when creating new things.
Some of our little scripts in use:
We're mostly done creating all the fundamental systems, which took us almost 2 years, so we can focus more and more on the actual game experience. Creating the world is the quick part really; the systems take all the time. So I expect development to speed up a lot.
This fluffy red guy has a huge fan:
I would like to talk so much about all the cool ideas we put into Supraworld, but we're making a huge surprise party for you all, so you really want to go in blind.
You can't even imagine what the solution to this will be:
My biggest development worry overal is the performance. The whole Unreal Engine 5 thing with its amazing lighting looks great on Youtube videos, but in reality it's not so perfect as it's quite demanding and many players don't have the latest hardware. There are 3 things I'm considering:
- Unreal Engine 5 is still improving, we're hoping for it to just perform better on its own over time
- Player's average hardware will get better until we release
- We might just need to offer 2 options: Raytraced and the old lightmap system. The latter would be a bunch of additional work and look less fancy but maybe it's necessary. We'll see.
Random supra meme in the middle of the post:
Wishlist wise Supraworld is doing great. We're about to hit 40000 and the magic number to cross, to be taken seriously in the Steam algorithm, is only 10000. This is your call to action if you haven't wishlisted it yet:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1869290/Supraworld/
Meanwhile the FAQ still applies for all the questions you probably have: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1869290/discussions/0/3843305689136654170/
Six Inches Under
The whole Six Inches Under on Console and Gamepass thing was not handled well and I'm super dissapointed. It's all fine now, but the launch was really messed up.
We ourselves have almost nothing to do with those ports, that's why it's especially painful when something that broken is released in your name. We had no worries because they handled the Supraland 1 ports super well.
The huge problem was that saving and loading basically didn't work at all. The game went through QA and it was all fine, and then someone made a last minute change that was so fundamental that it broke it all. Many months later it was finally fixed, and that took way too long as well, but the launch is the moment where you get the big attention, especially on Gamepass, which is very big for us to be in.
Really sorry to everyone affected by this mess. We'll be much more careful in the future.
-David
PS: Liking this post speeds up development, obviously.