Hello fellow Penal Colony Workers,
I'm happy to finally announce a release date for Crabmeat! You'll be able to play the full game March 10th this year! Keen to play the game right now though? The demo is available now! Check out this new trailer mitch and I put together to announce the date.
So what have I been working on? In the lead up to the announce we developed the new trailer (see above) and as part of that I needed to add a ton of improved lighting visuals and props to the ship to finally start detailing out a bunch of the dead space visually. I've also updated all our screenshots on steam. Here's an example showing off the refreshed lower deck. In general visual improvements and polish has been my main focus for the last month with a lot of the games features being locked in. For those following along optimisation has been an ongoing struggle as the games unique constraints mean traditional rendering optimisation does not work.
I did a full breakdown of a new occlusion method I wrote to optimise rendering of the boats different rooms.
The TDLR is essentially I'm using a legacy portal technique where we break the ship up into zones, props and lighting gets assigned to zones then we limit which are enabled based on the players position and line of sight to said zones. It's still not perfect but as I get closer to launch I will continue to refine it and improve the occasional pop-in it produces. That's all for now, I hope you enjoy the demo and I can't wait for ya'll to play the full game at launch. Want more frequent updates?
Watch development live at twitch or join the discord to chat with me and the community about the game.