[h1]Upgrading To Gamemaker Studio 2[/h1] So a few days ago we started work on Upgrading New Outbreak to Gamemaker Studio 2 and so far it's been a massive success. This was expected to take longer but the import process was swift and the damage to the game is minimal, this is a MASSIVE thing for us as GM2 adds a lot that we really could have benefitted from when originally making New Outbreak. An example of what a massive help GM2 has been so far I'll make a comparrisson, to make a stretch of road linking the 2 current towns together would take around 3-4 hours as we had to do each tile individually, with GM2 it took 3 seconds which was as simple as drawing a line. But that's not all, each house also has to be made tile by tile so include this with the lag caused by the size of the map and each house could take 40 minutes just to tile whereas here we can pre-make houses outside the room and then paste them in ready which is beyond helpful. [b] So What Are You Doing With This? [/b] With this we are going to properly re-imagine the other town on the other side of the map, adding a lot more buildings and making it feel like a real town. We are also going to fill in the rest of the map with more things not only look at but scavenge. [h1] Bandits [/h1] We are working on making the Sandbox more interesting with the AI, having bandits that roam around the map and either cause problems or help you. We're still working on exactly how much we want them involved with the gameplay, such as will some shoot on sight? Will some need your help? How many can you become friends with? Etc. Whatever we do with them you should be able to de-activate them to customise how you want to play the game (Like we've done with the Zombies). [h1] Story Demo [/h1] We're locked down on how what we're showing for the Demo and now it's more about polishing it and getting it along with the rest finished and ready. One thing that might be missing is some voice acting but hopefully we should be able to sort it out. [h1] Bigger Town And More?[/h1] As we mentioned above we are upgrading the Town on the opposite side of the map to make it like the beginning town but better and bigger. We want to continue this however and make the map more complete with more areas to explore, we have an entire center of the map we want to flesh out and make it more enjoyable to explore. [h1]Optimisation[/h1] A quite important thing is Optimisation so we've been working on that aswell, 1 issue I noticed was when people stepped outside or into certain areas there was sometimes extreme lag, that should have been fixed and was due to the game trying to cope with you being on a certain tile layer. [h1] What's going on? [/h1] So finally it's time to explain what has happened the past couple months, we have been extremely busy with Colleges and since we're a team of 2 and neither of us can do both jobs so it's been difficult to proceed, however with GM2 this will allow us to do more in less time meaning we could potentially finish upgrading the map fully in less than a month even with minimal time. With college we've had other projects we've been making and we plan on releasing them, Mine is more finished which is why recently I've had a lot more spare time and have been trying to get things done, it's nothing massive so it's not going to cost much but will help us financially to earn a bit of extra money to continue work and possibly get some more people on board, we have some ideas of how we're going to expand. [h1] Next Update [/h1] I'm hoping to have the update ready next week but should be done before the end of the month, we're sorry that it's taken quite some time but hopefully you'll enjoy this update!