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!