Our sincerest apologies everyone. Its been a crazy year for us. Both great and awful things have taken place that have affected both our personal lives, and the development of Flesh Asunder.
I'll try to keep the bad news short. None of the in-game monsters we had previously shown will be used in Flesh Asunder. I know, it sucks. This may cause you to ask, "so what have you been doing?" Well, I'll explain as best as I can.
*A New Direction: Amongst other things, we decided that we needed to be more focused on what we were trying to achieve. To that end, we have almost entirely stopped hiring new people for the team when others have left. Right now, the only people that are on the team, are dedicated veterans of Fledgling Studios that have been part of this project for at least a year. This has admittedly slowed our rate of progress, but it has also ensured that everything we are doing is more consistent.
*Practice Makes Perfect: The November build of UDK comes with a bare bones installation option that strips away the placeholders and demo content. It is perfect for building a game from scratch. However, it also broke a good deal of our programming. We took this as an opportunity to re-write the majority of our code in a manner that was more organized, efficient, and better for performance. We also cut out a lot of code that we had used to test gameplay features that we ultimately decided against.
*Gameplay: Gameplay is back on track from being almost completely derailed. We were trying to do too much, admittedly. We've simplified some of the stat related mechanics and a few other things. Demonstrations are to come soon, hopefully.
*The world we live in: We have a workflow established for creating environments. This might sound like a minor step, but how environments are built vastly changes quite a few aspects of development. We tried a few things. Some worked, some did not. Ultimately, we decided that we will be building (indoor) environments using premade rooms. There will be several variants of each room, and they will all be manually populated with props so as to ensure there is plenty of variety.
*"...When a plan comes together.": We now have a plan for establishing gameplay and how we will proceed. We will share more about this in the future. For now, I'll just say that it involves a gameplay video and, when the time is right, providing alpha access to players.
I'd be happy to answer almost any questions you all might have. We hope to have more updates for you in the near future. For now, have a nice day.
-Tony
