I was brought on to this project in March 2025 with the goal of helping to bring the game to full early access status by July 2025. This was a big ask – we were a team of about 5 people, spanned across the globe,on a shoe string budget from multiple publisher fallouts.
The game was ALSO in the middle of an engine change- Unity, for multiple reasons, was dropped and everything was ported over instead to work in Godot with C#.
I was given a list of tasks that I would be brought on to accomplish, all targeting different aspects of game development- some I had experience in, and a good many that I definitely did not.
After a hectic couple months, a 4 day delay, and a busy final week, the game finally released to early access on July 25. From there, another hectic week was spent ensuring the game was free of the worst bugs we couldn’t catch in time, and that the community that had supported us through it all knew that we were on top of getting fixes for any problems they faced as soon as possible.
Now that early access has released, and the worst of the bugs are out of the way, I thought I’d break down a few of my more interesting tasks leading up to release- namely:
– How we render the terrain
– How we render walls for cutaway effects, and deal with mouse selection
– How we tested performance, and the fixes for the worst issues with GPU, CPU, and memory usage