STATUS OF ALOG / Dev update 5/15/24

ABSENT LOG Dev Update 5/15/2024

Well. It’s been a week, hasn't it.

I’m sure you’re all wondering what had happened, and why we’ve been reluctant to disclose much about it until now.

But after triage, assessment, and recovery, we have a decent idea of what had happened and are confident enough in our plan moving forward that we can share.

WHAT HAPPENED?

From what we understand, Some time between the 14th and the 15th, our main development machine had downloaded a windows update in the background that we were unaware of.

On the 16th, we were prepping the demo build to be exported, and began packaging for play testing. After the initial export completed, we saved all our work and restarted our machine. (We often like to restart after a build as it can be memory intensive and it just keeps things moving smoothly and fresh.)

After the restart completed, the machine booted up to an unresponsive black screen. We immediately suspected some stealth OS update had occurred and we began troubleshooting and performed a boot repair. (Sometimes an update can change initializing or boot files).

This fixed the boot problem but we discovered the machine was now sluggish. We ran multiple deep and extensive security and malware checks which came back clean. We then performed a health check on all drives, and found that the hard drive containing our game files and assets was unresponsive. We had tried to perform permission and ownership changes which were unsuccessful, and various drive health checks.

It became apparent that the hard drive had completely failed, and needed to run through recovery software to salvage anything.

We believe, based on the timing, error reports from the drive checks, diagnostics on the drive, and similar issues that other developers were experiencing at the same time that this windows stealth update was the culprit, and had overwritten permissions, changed or edited registry or pathing structure to a degree that it corrupted files or access somehow.

We generally do a good job of keeping our files backed up, clean and secure, and we were already making plans to migrate all of our content and our project backups to a secure server away from this temporary drive the project was stored on, however we, or rather I Looming (and I take full responsibility here) simply did not move fast enough on this.

WHAT WAS RECOVERED?

We were able to recover most of our initial assets, such as characters, weapon meshes, some animations, sound files, raw art files, props, and a collection of scattered code and bulk files. Some assets will need to be rebuilt entirely, such as texture files, and even some meshes. It became clear as recovery was nearing completion that there was not enough salvage to rebuild the project from what was there, as there was still a good chunk of files, code, and reference points that were required.

DOES THIS MEAN ABSENT LOG IS OVER?

100%, unequivocally NOT.

We are choosing to be optimistic here and see the silver lining.

We’ve spent about 2 years in pre-development for the project, discussing ideas, drawing concepts, figuring out what kind of game we wanted to make, establishing characters, visuals, story, etc…

During those two years, we also studied development and Unreal engine, coding, learning the ins and outs of building a game, what is required, learning various software and going from a couple of guys who make pretty pictures, to actual game developers. I would say actual development of Absent Log as a “playable” game didn’t really start until about 6-7 months ago, so in terms of the technical side, we were very very early in development when this issue occurred.

WHAT IS THE PLAN NOW?

We are still recovering some assets, but development on the technical and game end will go through a soft “reboot”.

The truth is, the current build that’s out and playable is not very optimized, it was held together with very rough spaghetti code that was dirty, and we had to spend an excessive amount of time fixing a lot of core issues due to badly written code from when we first started.

It became very challenging to implement basic features like hotkey weapon swapping due to having to go through several layers of references and tangled variables in order to get it working.

So a fresh start from the technical side will allow us to utilize all that we have learned from this experience and more quickly and efficiently build a solid ground work that will be much easier for us to build and iterate upon.

Immediately our first step is to set up a new project and code base, organize and create a new structure for content and assets, and to secure all future build backups and updates via a cloud storage server that we have procured for the project.

WILL ALOG BE A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT GAME NOW?

Nope! We have an already established set of gameplay rules and style, characters, art direction, mechanics, and story elements that are already solid. TW will still be TW, Peris will still be Peris. And ALOG will still be a lite immersive sim with an emphasis on exploration, investigative gameplay, puzzle mechanics and storytelling. Obviously this new build will not be one-to-one what we have currently, and we have decided that we want this new build to be closer to our original idea of having combat be a bit more intimate and slower paced, so expect an emphasis on a more tactical combat style and heavier intractability with the world.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE DEV UPDATES AND DEMOS?

Dev updates will continue on schedule, however, due to the necessity of getting our base mechanics and assets working again, they will be light in terms of big technical or game play updates, and will more so be focused on art, music and asset development for some time. We will be giving more regular free updates via the dev-progress channel in our discord, until we feel that the base of the game is at a solid enough state to move them over to the patreon dev updates.

As for demo builds, the link with the current build will remain up and accessible freely to everyone. Once we feel our mechanics and gameplay are at a presentable state for testing, we will resume monthly play test builds as part of our dev updates.

WHAT SHOULD I DO WITH THE OLD DEMOS?

Keep em!

You now have a rare, old alpha build of the game that is no longer available from the source, and is a little piece of ALOG’s history!

HOW IS THE TEAM FEELING?

We are doing good! Obviously we are disheartened about this event, and the significant loss of progress. However, as stated before, we are not giving up and are going to be optimistic about this, taking the opportunity to build from the ground up a better, more streamlined experience. We believe with our improved technical ability we can create solid, faster working systems without the burden of a large amount of experimental code, test objects, half implemented features, and significant bugs.

Our biggest thing right now, is just getting updates out and workflow back to normal as quickly as possible.

CONCLUSION

This sucks. Like, a lot.

But at the same time, this is the nature of this kind of project. Many games go through a full dev reboot sometimes for various reasons, like change of direction, technical issues, renewed vision, it just happens that in our case, the decision was made for us. But we are committed. 

Absent log will not stop development until a packaged, complete game is in your hands.

We would like to thank everyone, especially our supporters, for staying by our side in this journey, through the high and low points, our journey has really only just begun, and we are excited to move towards the future, and hope to have you guys there with us as we work to get this project towards the finish line.

ART ASSETS:

Dock Concourse Level Assets

“I’ve been experimenting with some ideas for modular level assets, as well as working on pinning down a general architectural style for the Worldship’s dock concourse.  This is currently planned as the game’s first explorable area outside of Huey’s and TW’s private ship, so I want to make sure that what we create will allow us to set the tone for traversal and exploration aboard the Worldship.

I started by creating a large bracing frame with some very deliberate cut-outs.  This is likely going to be a consistent design style throughout the Worldship’s interiors, and it’s not just a practical choice.  More on that in a moment.

I allowed the frame to dictate the basic shape of the spaces between the frames.  The dock complex has a sloping, tiered arrangement, so I’m making sure that everything stacks and interlocks neatly.  I also sandwiched some maintenance corridors between the main decks.  I’m going to be making sure that these have room to criss-cross with each other, with access hatches placed in the floors and ceilings of the main decks.



Back to what I was getting at with the cuts in the frame brace.  One of the motifs that sticks out in my memory as emblematic of “millennium” graphic style is the use of abstract geometric forms, repeated and layered to create a sense of depth.  It’s a style that’s always underpinned how I approach futuristic interiors, but here I’m very consciously leaning into it.  At Loom’s suggestion I’ve also been working to incorporate translucent panes, enhancing the depth effect.

I’ve also been thinking about that repetition and depth effect from a practical perspective.  By having the bracing frame impinge into the maintenance corridors in the same way as it does the larger open areas, it provides an intuitive cue for one’s place and orientation in the corridor relative to the main deck, despite being closed off and windowless.

The somewhat less-developed noodling for the main entry airlock is similarly designed to incorporate that millennium graphic style into its architecture.  Here the repeated struts are kept out of the traversable area, but are kept visible with translucent elements.

Once we have a fuller suite of these modular components mocked up, we can start experimenting with them in-engine to get an idea of how the “feel” to play within.  Scale is the biggest concern, but other considerations are bound to come up.”

-Tekka

AUDIO ASSETS:

https://on.soundcloud.com/icCjvFhHMD33JK4D6

"First official combat track for ALOG!

It took a couple tries to lock down the right aesthetic. There’s a few early versions of this that were too Y2K and didn’t have the right amount of grit, but this current iteration highlights what the tone of combat audio will feel like in ALOG.

The core of this track is an ethereal pad over aggressive drums. The contrast between those two layers is something I really wanted to highlight for tension cues in ALOG. I’m pretty happy with how the main padlayers turned out, it has a really interesting color to it. Around halfway through, there’s a DOOM-esque breakdown section that ups the intensity and that gets followed by more sci-fi breakbeats. Classic 303 acid bass towards the end.

Hope y’all enjoy it! More tracks are on the way. "

-Machine Ghost