Dev. Diary # 23 Important Message to our followers news - 3:00am Dead Time™

As you have noticed, this post is lacking a lot of images and videos, as well as the latest demo we released less than a month ago. Due to legal reasons, and to comply with the terms of the UDK license, we had remove all the content related to this engine. The reasons behind this are explained below :

Yesterday, March 19th, we received an email with some news from Epic : their new engine, UE4, has just been launched to the public, and all the documentation and files from UDK have been archived.

They invite every developer whose games are not in a final stage of development to switch to the new engine. Epic warns us, however, that this vesion will be unstable for the next six months (at least) and that it has scarce documentation. Besides, the Unrealscript language that was used in all the previous versions of Unreal isn't supported now, and will be replaced by C++.

Besides, this new engine is not optimized yet, so it has extremely high requirements, so it would be impossible for us to continue the development of the game in that engine with our current machine, it would take a lot of time to port everything from UDK to UE4, and most of our followers and funders wouldn't be able to run the game anymore, due to the said requirements.

We hoped to stick with our version of UDK, but we found several incompatibilities and bugs that we thought would be corrected with some update from Epic. But said updates had even more incompatibilities (mostly with integrated cards, such as ours), and with the release of UE4 it was hinted that UDK will not receive any further update, so people can switch to UE4.

This change would represent a big delay in the development of the game, at least 8 months until a stable version of UE4 is available, and several months after this until we learn how to properly use the new engine, port the resources, and all the source to C++. It would be like starting from scratch.

Given this, we have a version of UDK that will soon be obsolete, will not have any new updates to correct its bugs,incompatibilities and restrictions, and ultimately, will produce a lot of troubles to you, the end user, and we would be forced to release a game with a lot of incompatibilities and bugs, from the engine.

With this in mind, we took a difficult decision : we are going to switch back to Unity Free, the engine that we originally used to develop the game.

Fortunately, one year after we moved from Unity to UDK, a lot of new tools and add-ons for Unity have been released, which will let us raise the visual quality of the game in a way that the change from UDK to Unity won't bee too rough. Most of the features we have developed in UDK will be available in Unity, and a lot of old features that were impossible to reproduce in UDK due to its limits (for example, the ability to save and see the images or other footage that you captured in a mission inside the game) will be reintroduced in the upcoming versions. Even if we will have to adjust the game to the Unity engine, it will let us add very interesting features.

We are not happy with this situation that was beyond our control, but we realize that there are several advantages with the return to Unity :

We know how to use the engine, and have enough experience with it. We know the limits and capabilities of Unity, and the port from UDK to Unity will be shorter and easier than the port from UDK ot UE4. We had a lot of snippets of code in Unity that will be polished and updated so they can be used in the new Betas. We are not going to start the game all over again, we'll just resume our work with Unity, so the development will return to its normal speed soon, and once we have set up everything, it will be faster than now.

Unity will give the game a better performance and lower requirements, so the game will be playable in lower-end machines, without comprosing the graphical quality. We are going to spend the money we'd have used in the new UE4 to buy new addons and tools to improve the graphical quality of Unity Free as much as possible, and improve the overall gameplay experience.

In short, Unity is our best shot now that the development using UDK is impossible.

The project is still in active development, and we are working really hard to give you everything we promised, despite this really hard blow that was completely unexpected, and beyond our control.

We apologize for this series of events, that will represent a minor delay in the development, but we can assure you that we took this decision after a long and thoughtful exam. We believe that in the long run, this will prove to be the best action in the current situation, to ensure that all of you can play and enjoy the game and we can keep developing it until the final version. In the upcoming days you will get more news and updates about this event, but we can tell you that 3:00am will continue its development, and we'll keep improving and adding more and better content to the game as we progress.

Thank you very much for your support, and if you have any doubt, we will try to solve them in the comments section.