Illuvium Dev Blog — May 2022

Intro

As‌ ‌we continue to push toward being the first AAA NFT game, we are confident that we will achieve that goal. ‌The last few months have seen no new products announced. Those who keep up to date with the project know this is deliberate. ‌Our goal is to make each team shine by focusing on fewer things at a time. ‌Before starting anything new, we’ll deliver what we’ve already announced. ‌After we are in a more manageable state, we will work‌ ‌with‌ ‌the‌ ‌community‌ ‌to‌ ‌determine‌ ‌what‌ ‌to‌ ‌deliver‌ ‌next.

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Upgrade to Unreal Engine 5

We finished the upgrade to Unreal Engine 5. We finalised this in June, but since the work has been ongoing for months, we can include it in the May Dev Blog. We debated for over a year if we should release it on Unreal Engine 4 or 5. When we started the project, UE5 didn’t exist, and after we began, they released the Alpha, putting us in limbo. Our choice, as always, came down to our desire to deliver on the promise of making the best game possible.

Note: The art style of Illuvium is vastly different to what you will see out of most UE5 games, which go for the easy option of using default Megascans assets. Since we started in UE4, we decided to use a semi-stylised approach which we believe will keep the game looking iconic for years to come. Nothing you play will look like Illuvium, and you’ll instantly recognise any Illuvium game. It is truly one-of-a-kind.

While Nanite and Lumen will be a boost to the project, our main reasons for upgrading were mostly around other core systems:

• Temporal Super Resolution
• World Partition and One File Per Actor
• IK Rig and Retargeter
• Motion Warping
• Pose Warping
• Full Body Auto IK

and many other improvements for animation, sound, and VFX.

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Illuvium: Arena

More complexities with the game engine were found, which set us back. Sometimes that is the case with cutting-edge game development. Our commitment to being an entirely data-driven, deterministic Autobattler has always been due to our desire to give back to the community. Storage of every game ever, high-quality replays, low upkeep costs, and (most importantly) the ability to generate new combat units quickly are the main benefits of this system. The downside is that nobody has done what we are doing before, and some challenges are more complicated than others, making them difficult to estimate.

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Highlights

• UX work finished.
• UI underway.

General Updates

Story

• A new writer will join the team soon.
• Many more Illuvial bios completed.
• Cinematic and Motion Comic story complete.
• In-game dialogue for the Rangers and Drones continues.
• Chapter Z, aka Illuvium Zero tutorial, is complete.
• A renewed look at the overall story and the best methods to share it.

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Infrastructure

• Our infrastructure continues to mature, which helps the entire dev team.
• The robustness of our systems is now much higher than much larger projects. (not just in the blockchain space, but game studios and other tech startups)

Summary

Even though the market is well down, we are still confident in our abilities. We have the path in front of us and need to walk it. The Land Sale showed what we are capable of compared to the rest of DeFi, and our game betas show how much further we are ahead than any other NFT game. People are impatient for everything all at once and set-in-stone deadlines; unfortunately, we cannot give that. Nor have we ever promised it. We have said, and continue to say, that our aggressive deadlines allow us to push harder than anyone else, but that quality will always be our goal.

We feel this is the only way to pull NFT gaming out of the current slump. Hundreds of other terrible games have done nothing to grow the space. We’re going to make ours great, and we’re going to release it as soon as we can and keep you up to date as we always have.