Hey everyone! It's Luke, the lead developer writing this devlog. It's been about a year since I've last updated this game. I have absolutely been working on it this whole time, and it's been quite a journey. I'll go over the main 3 points that have been challenges that I've faced, and (mostly) overcome in putting out this major update.

1. Wrangling Wwise
This has been a real challenge, and I'm still in the process of solving all the major bugs and implementation needs of Wwise in Unity, but needless to say a big time chunk was simply the learning curve to understand this software, and convert all of our sound programming into this system for the long-term sake of the game! It's been tough figuring out how to debug issues with Wwise, but after the sounds started to work in a much more intuitive way for our sound designer and for me as well. As time continues, we're going to be implementing many bugfixes, spatialization features, and more sounds as we continue to work with this software, and I must say after learning the ins and outs of how it works, it's quite powerful (though I still have no idea how it really works haha).

2. Overhauling the AI, (also performance improvements)

I also implemented a totally new AI third party software that is (hopefully) more performant, easier to utilize and customize, and across the board just better from a behavior standpoint.  We've come a long way and there are definitely some more bugs to fix, but in general I'm really pleased with some of the performance gains we've been able to achieve with this system. 

3: Mental Health
Whooo boy. So a BIG reason I've taken a little while to get back on the horse so to speak is due to some mental health battles that I've had over the past year. We're not exactly sure what I have been struggling with, but needless to say, it's been tough. Mental health is a huge priority and is something I've just had to deal with for a while, so I've been prioritizing that, avoiding stigma, and trying to meet people who are understanding and kind about all of that stuff. It's been hard to open up about, but I've really been trying to do so, and as I've been recovering from some of the more severe challenges of it it's become easier to talk about openly. Maybe I'll make more posts about it here, but I'll just say that it's been really a big part of my life and has made it difficult to focus entirely on games, which is hard for me to accept but necessary for me to accept in order to move forward.

Lastly, I'll also be posting a list of changes that have been added to the game! Lots of new features are here, and we're very excited for them.
Thanks so much for reading this. It means a lot to me that you've shown any amount of interest in this world that I discovered, and I am so glad to share it with you all. 

Luke