With the release of Second Nature: Night Authority getting very close, one of my biggest priorities has been making sure the game is not only content-ready, but also runs as smoothly as possible.
Over the latest development passes, I've worked through systems across the entire game to reduce unnecessary processing, repeated calculations, allocations, background checks, and other work that was quietly affecting performance.
The result has been a massive improvement in FPS.
In my testing, performance has improved by around 200% in many areas, with even larger gains in some parts of the city.
Most importantly, this was achieved without lowering the visual quality, removing content, or cutting systems from the game. The city, characters, lighting, gameplay systems, abilities, quests, and existing content remain intact.
Instead, the improvement came from making the systems behind everything significantly more efficient, including world activity, AI and navigation processing, UI updates, repeated runtime lookups, and other systems running throughout a night.
After extensive testing, balancing, bug fixing, and optimization, Second Nature: Night Authority is now in a state where I'm confident it's ready to be published.
That doesn't mean development is finished.
Since the game is launching in Early Access, development will continue after release as well. New content, improvements, balancing, fixes, and additions will continue to expand the game over time.
A big part of Early Access is being able to develop the game alongside the people actually interested in playing it.
If you have ideas for new content, activities, abilities, quests, improvements, or simply want to follow development more closely, you're welcome to join the community and share your thoughts.
Discord:
https://discord.com/invite/M6VjDsKJUw
Your feedback and suggestions can directly help influence what gets worked on and expanded as Second Nature: Night Authority continues to grow.
The release is getting close.
See you in the night.