INSOMNIA: The Ark - Patch 1.5 News and Making of Video

INSOMNIA: The Ark has received a new update about patch 1.5. Also there is a bit about the making of INSOMNIA itself.

Patch v1.5 news + the making of INSOMNIA


Hello everyone! We know you are waiting for the next patch/update for INSOMNIA and news will be coming soon. As a reminder, this patch is expected to improve the performance in some of the larger locations, introduce DirectX 12 support and texture streaming which should fix the missing textures bug. We will have an updated list of improvements and patch notes when the process gets to its final stages.

Interestingly enough, this is not the first time we've been updating/switching technology that INSOMNIA utilizes in order to bring Object 6 to life. And since we still get questions along the lines of "what took you so long to deliver the game in the first place (around 8 years)?", we'd like to cover this question today. Sit down for some story time

The pre-production phase

It started with the simple idea of making a game that would continue the legacy of the classic "Golden Era of RPG" titles. Most ideas never find their physical form and keep haunting their authors forever after. Not in our case. INSOMNIA started to materialize on paper in the form of words and sketches almost immediately. This process continued for quite some time since no one on the team had any previous experience in coding games.

And while the team and the design document was growing, it was actually time to pick the engine and the technology so that we could finally start bringing INSOMNIA to life.


Ogre3D: real development begins
So the decision was made and Ogre3D, the open-source graphics rendering engine, was picked for the first version of the game that was proudly presented to the public back in 2013. At this point in time, INSOMNIA was presented as an isometric co-operative online role-playing game with tactical elements.

However, potential fans were clearly not interested in yet another online RPG. After some deliberation, we've made the decision to focus on single player elements instead. Developing the game in this direction took another year, and we came back with our first publicly available tech-demo in 2014.

This change made quite a few people happy and we were able to successfully kickstart INSOMNIA! The secured funds allowed us to expand the team, improve working conditions and continue the development more effectively. However, all the previous months spent working on the projects have shown us that the Ogre3D engine was severely limiting our capabilities. We had to spend more time on developing our own tools and improving the engine instead of working on the game itself. This is when the idea to move INSOMNIA to the Unreal Engine 4 had first popped up in our team meetings.

Unreal Engine 4: the way to go!

The UE4 engine seemed to include all of the tools our team wanted: incredible visuals, powerful development environment and detailed documentation. The downside was -- we had to transfer everything that had been done so far using Ogre3D to the new engine. This took quite a lot of time and resources, which pushed us to reach out to our Kickstarter community for their support once again. Thanks to their help, we were able to get additional funds and continued to breath life into INSOMNIA's world.

It's always hard to tell if the decisions that are being made at certain moments are right or wrong. Looking back, we still feel that switching to Unreal Engine 4 from Ogre3D was worth it in the end:

It took around 3 years for us to move from one engine to another and actually add all of the remaining content to the game. We also had to update the UE4 itself once in a while to stay up to date with the latest improvements to the engine, which also took time. At some point we had to stop this process, so that we could start locking down changes and wrapping up development.


Steam release: getting the necessary feedback
When INSOMNIA was released, our team was using the the 4.16.3 version of UE4 (with the current version being 4.21.2) which performed well on our in-house machines. However, the launch brought in thousands of people with all kinds of graphics cards, monitors and other computer hardware on which the game running on an outdated version of the engine did not always work as expected. The feedback you've been providing us for the past 3+ months resulted in 4 patches and our team realizing that we need to update our technology once again to fix the issues that can't be addressed otherwise (localizations being mixed up, optimization problems, missing textures etc.).

Since the difference between 4.16.3 and 4.21.2 is huge, we couldn't jump from the older version to the newest one in one go. We had to update the game step by step and this is why this has taken a few weeks of our time. Luckily, the hardest part of this transition is already behind us and we are in the middle of finalizing the build as we speak. There's still more testing to be done though.

Until next time

P.S. here's a little bonus for you: an old "The Making Of" video that we've never shown to our Steam crowd before:

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Thanks Farflame!

More information.

any one here that gave it a try?
Looks mighty interesting !

Yeah, I bought it - expecting to like it - but it never grabbed me. It's just a little too…. indie for what it's trying to do.

Maybe it's just me being too demanding. I hope to give it another shot down the line, once they properly fix it up. It was rather clunky and performance wasn't great.

Yeah, I played through. Its a decent, but not great game. Excellent and very unusual atmosphere, some interesting quests, but its very post modern in its feel. The writing and combat are only okay. Its about a 30 hour game.

So is the engine update and main bugs fixed complete yet? If not I'll still wait.

Originally Posted by Darth Tagnan
Yeah, I bought it - expecting to like it - but it never grabbed me. It's just a little too…. indie for what it's trying to do.

Maybe it's just me being too demanding. I hope to give it another shot down the line, once they properly fix it up. It was rather clunky and performance wasn't great.

Ah, thnx for your opinion!
guess it is what i was afraid of..

Originally Posted by forgottenlor
Yeah, I played through. Its a decent, but not great game. Excellent and very unusual atmosphere, some interesting quests, but its very post modern in its feel. The writing and combat are only okay. Its about a 30 hour game.

guess i might give it a try later on then, thnx for your opinion as well !

I would guess I'm about 1/2 way through. I like it, at least more than forgottenlor and Darth Tagnan seem to. As they said, world and atmosphere are really good. I don't mind the combat myself. It's a little easy but fun.

There are still a couple bugs but I haven't ran into any major ones yet myself. RPG elements could be balanced a little better. Ie I have spent zero points on combat and can still win most to all fights. There are not a lot of points to go around so I use them all on non combat so far. I would make the skills more necessary/useful and make combat tougher and give the players a few more points to spend if I was in charge.

Originally Posted by xenocide
There are still a couple bugs but I haven't ran into any major ones yet myself. RPG elements could be balanced a little better. Ie I have spent zero points on combat and can still win most to all fights. There are not a lot of points to go around so I use them all on non combat so far. I would make the skills more necessary/useful and make combat tougher and give the players a few more points to spend if I was in charge.

At least it sounds like there's some C&C when it comes to spending your skill points. I prefer having fewer points to having too many.

Not even a discount this sale; well see you in summer/winter sale

Originally Posted by JDR13
At least it sounds like there's some C&C when it comes to spending your skill points. I prefer having fewer points to having too many.

In principal I agree with you and most game now days give too many skill points.

I still think Insomnia goes a little too sparse. There are 6 non-combat skills and 6 combat skills each having 5 levels that cost one skill point each. That's 60 potential points. There are also 12 combat perks and 10 non-combat perks that each cost 3 skill points. Another potential 66. Together that's 126 spots to spend points.

You get 15.

Obviously I'm not done but everything I've read says you finish the game around level 15 and you get 1 skill point per level. I'm at level 10 so seems about right (slows down after 10 I've read also).

To do any exploring you need 2 lockpick and 2 mechanics and 1 or 2 computer, so that's at least 4 right there.

You don't have to give way more. Just up the combat enough that you need to spend 5-10 points on combat skills to survive and give people 25-30 points. Even that would be a small percentage of the total skills.

Yeah, that sounds like a ridiculously low amount of skill points compared to the total skills available. I wasn't aware of that since I've only briefly played the game a few times to get a taste of what it's like. I'm surprised I haven't seen complaints on the Steam forum.

I'm going to wait until after v1.5 at least before trying it again. Maybe they'll do some rebalancing as well. I won't hold my breath though.