Dev Update #1

Hey y’all! We’ve finally decided to get started on a development blog. This will most likely become a regular thing. Don’t get too excited, though ;) First things first: introductions! I’m Nico, head of story and sound design.

The way this is supposed to work is that each week, a different department within the team will write up a changelog and short blog post like this one, just so you know we aren’t dead. Yet. Without further ado, here are last week’s news.

Story-wise, we’re currently relocating all of our info to a new location. Because we were a bit underwhelmed by the built-in wikis on GitLab and Taiga recently, the whole team moved to a more comprehensive wiki software (check it out: https://www.bookstackapp.com/ ). Since there is a lot of stuff (potential dialogues, maps, lore and the likes) the story team had been keeping to themselves, we had to look in lots of different places to just gather all of the things we had been planning and writing. Now most of these are at a centralised location so the whole team can look them up (tagged full-text search and all the works).

The sound team has been hard at work studying up on the brand new sound system in Unreal Engine 5: MetaSounds! In contrast to legacy Sound Cues, MetaSounds allow sample-accurate access to sound files and also introduces very powerful generative nodes to create procedural sounds. There are still some things that are unclear (Soundscapes, brr), but all-in-all we’re pretty happy with what we have been able to achieve so far. There are (hard-coded) footsteps, procedural wind, puzzle cues and ambient sounds for some parts of the main level. The latter will (probably) be replaced by Soundscapes, which are a new and fancy way of organizing and playing ambient sounds.

And that’s it for this week! Thanks for your time, stay sharp.