Greetings programs. Lost Harbinger here, broadcasting from the foggy coastal town of Last Chance, with the first of our Last Chance Market dev blogs. While I tend to want to work on making the game, rather than writing about it, now that we're getting [i]very [/i]close to releasing Early Access I thought I'd go ahead and start making some regular (weekly/biweekly) posts to keep up to date on how development is going, what we have planned and gather community feedback. First off, I want to address our planned release date for Early Access. Obviously our anticipated timeline was inaccurate. This is our first game, and there are a fair number of pitfalls in indie game development, not the least of which is underestimation of time required, and the possibility that, with only two people involved, work can be derailed by real life events. Unfortunately, this winter has been plagued with literal plague and other non-digital complications that prevented us from making progress the way we had desired. When we did get back to the bottomless pit that is gamedev, we ran into other hurdles, like an overeager upgrade to Unreal Engine 5.1 which concluded with a week of hair-pulling-out and a reversion to Unreal Engine 5.0.3. But, back at it we are, and closer than ever to [strike]feeding...[/strike] errr... [b]satisfying [/b]the customers of Last Chance Market. In fact, I'm happy to say that earlier this week we did some optimization testing to check performance on a range of systems and were extremely pleased with the results. Performance has been a bit of a gremlin for us for a few reasons. For one, in doing our best to create a detailed environment, the game routinely has ~6,000 unique actors loaded in a fairly small area, many of which are instanced meshes, meaning they are drawn anywhere from two to two hundred times (For example, one actor consists of say, 30 boxes of cereal on the shelf, or 100 oranges lined up in produce). Additionally, light and illumination are a huge part of the ambience we're trying so hard to build. So the decision was made early on (hubris or brilliance?) to use only dynamic lighting. That means none of the lights or shadows are pre-baked, and can be altered in real-time, including subject to gravity and whatever creatures might bump into them. Combining that with Unreal Engine 5.0's new Virtual Shadow Map system, we've been able to build a world that both looks amazingly foreboding, while being very reactive. Which is why, over the previous week, I've been working on an extensive update to our lighting system, adding some nifty new effects and increasing performance. The result is that even low to mid-tier graphics cards were able to run the game on high quality settings while maintaining ~35-50+ average fps. Meanwhile, the saner half of our dev duo, Onyx, has been hard at work putting the finishing touches on the bathroom mirrors. I don't want to spoil the surprise, but her work will put new meaning into the phrase "Stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back". I'm very excited. Finally, I'm hesitant to say when exactly early access will be out because it seems to tempt the elder things in dimensions just beyond human perception to interfere, but I feel confident that if we can continue our work here at the lighthouse, the market will be accepting customers by the end of March. Stay tuned for more signals from the fog.