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We are back and we have some good news for you... First, we have released update 1.5.2 for SALVATIONLAND, which includes both various technical changes, as well as a very important improvement. And this improvement requires an advanced description. This month marks 6 years since the team and I launched Leadwerks Game Engine for the first time and started working on it. It's been a long time, isn't it? And during this time, we had a chance to conduct a lot of experiments and face both the pleasant sides of the engine and the very unpleasant ones (such as, for example, disappointingly unstable implementation of the Newton physics engine - but let's not talk about sad things now). Let's put it this way: Leadwerks knows how to surprise, and this is his feature of character, so to speak. And now I will tell you about one of those things that surprised us completely unexpectedly and... even too late. About the specific of Field of View parameter. The fact is that the engine has its own rules of the game in everything. And it is have his own measurements and proportions parameters. For example, we are used to the fact that FOV set to 70 in games is... FOV 70. And here it turned out, suddenly, that the engine value of 70 is equal to about 85 in other games. This is higher than any norm of any another First Person Shooter title, which FOV 70 or 80 (maximum) used as a standard! And it gives a lot of inconvenience to the player. In addition to the obvious fisheye effect at any 16:9 screen resolution and a too stretched image on the corners that breaks the feeling of immersion, we even have a performance loss as a result of a "stretched" frame with a lot of extra objects in it. In the course of finding a suitable smaller value, we found that the parameter 55 is approximately equal to the parameter 70 in other games (visually, at least). Having set this value, we were simply amazed: the game has changed significantly! Just compare two frames - the original Leadwerks FOV and FOV 55: The FPS count also increased noticeably, by about 2-3 frames on average. Of course, we hurried to add our find to update 1.5.2, which was already released at that time - we had to work its second revision. Of course, changing the FOV value caused the need to reconfigure the offset parameters for all weapons on the screen (which is always done in a rather uncomfortable way, through a boring reconfiguration and resaving the prefab many times) - but it was worth it! And it only took a couple of hours, after all. Another important innovation of this patch is that we have finally completed and translated the game manual into English. We cannot vouch for the quality of the translation as we are not native speakers, but we tried as well as possible. Apart from the information about the new patch additions (and our discoveries while working on it), the second news for today is that we have opened a page on the IndieDB website. Here's the link for our blog: https://www.indiedb.com/games/salvationland In the "Files" section you can find both manuals from the game and also a game soundtrack. All this is available absolutely free of charge and ready for download. I would also like to remind you that SALVATIONLAND is now on sale at a 50% discount as part of the Summer Sale on Steam. Hurry up to buy at a low price! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1807590/SALVATIONLAND/ Well, the last news for today: we are developing something new. And the new something is... a sequel to SALVATIONLAND! This is not an official announcement yet, because we cannot show you frames from the prototype and share more information - the work on the early access version is in full swing now, any game aspect is still far from complete and can change at any time. Early Access, did I say?.. Oh yeah, we remain committed to this distribution model: you'll have the ability to buy the game ahead of full release and help develop it through testing! And, of course, we will continue to distribute our games through Steam. All links will be available later, the announcement will be soon. Stay in touch and thank you for your attention

Hi guys, this time I have something special for you. A video containing some real "ingame" footage, so you can finally see how the things, I am writing and talking about, actually look like. This is also the last blog entry for this devblog (I may just rename it/reuse it for the next project, because it will build upon the PHFW). Find out more by watching the video. Enjoy it and of course tell me your thoughts! For those of you, now wondering, if the Framework will ever be available for public, or what will happen with it, I first recommend you reading my last blog entry. There you can see, whats happening, actually is not to far away from, what the actual plan was. I am just cutting off some features, focusing on the strengths of the framework (which are first person, rpg like games) and just start creating a game with it, to test it in practice, as explained in the said blog post. So to nail it down, this means, if the Framework success in delivering an cool tool for creating my game and I can see value for others in it, I will come back thinking about publishing it and I actually see no reason, the Framework should fail :). Game Dev Tip #4: Regarding what I said in the video, I give you the advice to take a close look on what you are doing at the moment. Keep in mind how important it is to focus on the essential things. Focus on what you are best in, not on fixing what you are bad in. Do your projects go in the direction you want them to go? Really sit down, take your time and seriously think about it. It can be amazing what results you can get afterwards. The Game Dev Tip series will most likely continue as the new blog starts. Stay cool and be excited! Markus from Phodex