Northern Shadow - Dev Blog #1

Chariots touches base with supporters of Northern Shadow with their first dev blog.

Back in March when Unreal Engine 4 was announced, we decided to stick with Unity, at that time the development cost of switching was too high, and we were still at that development sweet-spot that the Unity is at its best. As the issues accumulated, the cost of these workarounds started highly outweighing the cost of an engine switch. Which is why, even though after such a large amount of development, we decided to switch to Unreal Engine 4.

Unity is a great engine. And in fact, both 64-bit editor and level streaming issues have been fixed with the Unity 5, which became available for pre-orders a few weeks ago. Its just that for our specific situation, it was a few months late :)

That was a bit long, but after such a long silence, I think a more detailed explanation was needed. We couldn't talk much these last few months, because we were switching to a different engine, and didn't wanted to show it until was ready. But now we can talk about some of the new and exciting stuff!

We've completely redid the world. Originally we had 3 overworld zones that was 15sqkm big. We now have a single 103.4sqkm overworld zone that you can seamlessly travel. We've added seasons to the game, AI acts accordingly to them and your cities' requirements change over time. Switch also gave us a free boost to eye-candy department with better Post-Processing, GPU particles, dynamic global illumination, and better Anti-Aliasing.

More information.