Originally I planned on presenting the story as a sort of slideshow including a series of images with voice narration. As expected, I was not happy with my voice or any modification to it that I attempted to make. I am ambivalent about hiring someone to voice the narration since I will likely change the text. Another hurdle was that I had the story art for parts of the story, but not all of it. A friend suggested that I make the story interactive à la SotN. So I did that for one of the scenes I was missing: a battle where the player character was slain in a past life. This required some modifications to the engine so I could transition from the slideshow to gameplay seamlessly.

For the most part the game runs well enough to be playable on the Quest 2. However, there are some places where the framerate drops. The game uses a sector system that culls sectors that should not be visible, and hibernates sectors that should “sleeping” so AI does not run in those sectors. This allowed me to create a fairly large world for the game, but for some time it has been clear that further optimization will be necessary.

I also spent some time creating a build “preprocessing” system that enables me to generate the demo and full versions from the same source scenes (so I do not have to have a separate scene for the demo version which is what I was doing before). At build time this system removes parts of the game that are not in the specified version.

I am currently waiting on approval to sell on Steam. I am trying to submit the game to AppLab as soon as possible.