Despite the early access release of Skid Island, the main focus is still set on Therais Book.
However, I decided to reboot the project once again, for the last time. What that means and why I chose to do this will be discussed in this post.
Again?
When I started working on this project for the first time, the unity engine and the networking framework I used were very different from what they are today. Over the years I decided to start from scratch multiple times. Sometimes because I felt like I could do a lot better with the things I learned along the way and improve the core parts of the game, and other times because the engine and tools had significant updates that would require core changes that would take weeks or months anyway.
This time its a similar story: Unity decided to change for the worst going forward, and multiple frameworks had significant upgrades that would require, again, major changes in the core systems.
Why?
In case you missed it: Unity decided to change their pricing model. These changes were, after a two week long rebellion, changed to only affect versions from 2024 onward. That means that we are able upgrade to the newest LTS version for the last time if we don’t want to be affected by these changes.
The other, much more important reason is changes to different frameworks we use.
These changes allow us to use multiple servers for the same game world, and split one server into multiple instances, also called “sharding”. This will allow for highly improved multiplayer and server stability and scalability, as well as hosting instances like dungeons and event-regions in separate server-instances or even completely separate servers.
Combined, these changes have led me to the decision to reboot development on Therais Book for one last time; Upgrade to the newest available LTS version of Unity, and start fresh with the newly available tools and improvements.
I believe that this will allow the game to end up being more future proof and scalable, provide a better player experience and be more stable overall.