HoloLens hardware

Hello everyone,

It's been a long time since our last update on IndieDB platform and to be honest we lost our place because we forgot where we started from. This platform helped us grow and receive a lot of help from you guys and we want to focus more on it. We will try to make here monthly updates so everyone can be updated with what we change, what we add and what we remove.

Our last update on IndieDB was at Dev Diary #8 on update 0.1.0.5Z Stage 2. Now we reached our last update of the 2018....v0.1.0.6Q.

We will not make a list of all of our changes because it will take too much to read ...but counted they are 86. We changed, improved and optimized our project 86 times in almost one year. And we are only 2 UE4 developers learning and working hard to make their projects come to life. Before we start making a rewind of what we did this year, i want to thank you all for your contribution. In 2018 we met a lot of new people we made friends who we worked side by side and we will still work because we all have the same objective, to make something beautiful that everyone can enjoy. I want to thank Math, our Senior UE4 developer and my dear friend, for staying up night after night working and improving a lot the vehicles and helping me fixing bugs that were critical for our project. I want to thank Bilbo, our Discord and Steam Moderator for responding and managing our Steam Page and our Discord Channel with an elegance that we never seen before. I want to thank Gabs (Ianache Gabriela), our Manager, because without her our project would be down at the bottom of the ocean because of me. I want to thank SickPlays (Sfetcu Cristi), our Senior Web Developer for helping me bring BackToNormal Studio website to life and taking from his free time to fix errors with me in it. And i want to thank to all of our testers who helped us testing again and again, build after build and update after update every meter of the project, without them we couldn't find every bug that's in our project and our final product would be a mess.

And we all thank to everyone who supported us by being a Patreon, by supporting us with donations, who joined our Discord Channel and the ones who bought our Early Stage project, without all of you, we couldn't continue this project. You will not be forgotten, everyone will have a special place in our project.

Now, let's see what we have done till our last Dev Diary from the first User Interaction to the last!

STEAM GAME LAUNCH!

The project startup is now 5% faster because of the compatibility optimization and startup memory reduction.

INTRO VIDEOS!

Videos now have a lower bit-rate without any significant quality reduction for faster load time.

MAIN MENU!

From Dev Diary #6 we changed the main menu completely and added a lot of new features and improved the UX.

SERVER!

Our logical servers now work at their maximum performance because of the technology from Unreal Engine 4. We reported 0 server crashes in 2018 and uptime of 89% (not including the servers offline because of the update)

OUR WORLD!

Our landscape now has a dimension of 32x32Km….in game. But developed we made over 1000x1000km of playable landscape that are ready to be added in the project. We planned to add them in Q2-2019 but first we need to fill the current world with….

BUILDINGS!

Because a player doesn’t want just to run around the world on foot or with a vehicle, we planned to add buildings in Early-2019 so everyone can have something to explore. We started placing PH’s (placeholders) where some buildings will be. Their place can be moved in the future.

CHARACTER!

For now, our character is based on the UE4 default mannequin. In Early-2019 Update that will change. We designed over 20 Male and Female base characters that we are choosing from and because we don’t have that much time to think of everything, we will let the community choose their names.

SURVIVAL SYSTEM!

Here we need to thank to Defuse Studio. His survival system if perfect for every developer who wants to create his own survival game and improve himself in developing in UE4. He provided monthly updates with bugs fixing and features that improved the survival feeling in our project.

VEHICLE SYSTEM!

Not all of you know but first time when vehicles met our servers it was a total game crash. We worked months trying to optimize the vehicles for our servers and after hard work 4 months we finally release the second prototype of our vehicles system (AKA-TheTruck) with a total success. (with some “shaking” bugs that will be fixed soon).

XP SYSTEM!

So we can make selective system we added XP (experience points) that can be acquired from crafting, killing and building. Some items will only be available to use after a required Level.

MINIMAP!

No, we didn’t forgot the Minimap. We have in plan to add it in Early-2019 update but it will be hard to update it because we don’t have a static landscape. Our landscape will get bigger and bigger so the Minimap will be more complex then we thought but it’s not impossible.

INVENTORY!

The inventory system will get a fully redesign in Earyl-2019 update. We will remove the movable windows and replace them with 1 main inventory window with better UI & UX.

PAUSE MENU!

We added a Pause Menu where you can change the settings and exit. That’s all. For now, nothing special.

AND MANY MORE!

We still have a lot of work, we have a lot of placeholders to change, we have bugs to fix and features to add. And we have time. Our team is getting bigger and bigger. As I said, in 2018 we made new friends and a lot of good and talented people joined our team. On paper we have a lot of ideas but we can’t post them all to get early hype, everything at it’s time.

For now, BackToNormal Team wishes you a Happy New Year and as always, see you in-game.