January 2022 Update

Hey Everyone! 👋

Happy New Year! It's been a busy last few months for us but we are excited to share some news with you. 

Firstly, we have solidified the design and supplier/manufacturer and have put in an order for both the Lockle plushie and the T-shirts. We expect to receive both items in the coming months and we’ll ship them soon after receiving them. Please expect us to reach out about shipping addresses once we get closer to receiving them from the manufacturer. 

Secondly, over the past few months we have been hard at work at optimizing the current systems in Laxidaze both from a gameplay standpoint and a technical one. One of the first upgrades we wanted to do with the Kickstarter funds was update the artstyle and graphical fidelity of Laxidaze. To get a bit technical, we had been using the built-in render pipeline of the Unity game engine to create the current version of Laxidaze. Through the last few months we have been running into performance issues and Shader problems partly due to using a lot of store bought assets and also due to limitations in the engine and render pipeline in and of itself. 

Through much deliberation and analysis, we have come to the conclusion that in order to reach the graphical fidelity and performance we envision for Laxidaze, we will have to move to a new engine or render pipeline. The two options we analyzed were switching to Unity’s HDRP pipeline or switching to Unreal Engine 5. Using Unity’s HDRP we were able to improve the graphical fidelity greatly but still came into performance issues when trying to render larger and more open game worlds. We then did some prototyping on Unreal and were able to hit the graphical fidelity we were looking for at a much better performance than HDRP. 

This left us with a big choice to make, do we use Unity HDRP which gave us the graphical fidelity we were looking for but not the performance and also allowed us to reuse our current code library. Or do we make Laxidaze from the ground up on Unreal Engine 5 which allows us to reach the performance and graphical fidelity we envision which includes bigger and more intricate game worlds. We have experience using both Unreal and Unity, and while we have more experience with Unity, we find game development easier in Unreal thanks to the multitude of tools Unreal contains out of the box. To make the Laxidaze we have always envisioned we have decided to switch to Unreal Engine 5 as it allows us to reach the graphical and performance standards we strive for. 

Unfortunately, this means there will be a delay in the planned Laxidaze release schedule but ultimately we felt this was the right choice in order to deliver the Laxidaze that we envision.

For a spot of good news, development of Laxidaze in Unreal is already underway. As we rebuild Laxidaze, we plan to release major game updates every 3 months going forward. Please follow us on Twitter and join our Discord as we will release more minor updates more regularly there. We know this is a big change and we want to know what you think as we’ll take that feedback into consideration.

That’s it for our January 2022 update, catch ya soon!

-Machine Elf Studios 🤖