I like using an iterative corner approach to vertical slice, meaning we would work on a small section of the vertical slice content, iterate and refine it until we were happy with the end result (typically finding problems and correcting them, tweaking things here and there, etc). This is essentially for the 'Vertical Slice' phase, but the early stages. January: The next step before being ready to reveal our efforts was to establish a proper level using everything everyone had built up for Unreal. Couple that with the lengthy time recruiting/onboarding takes and we were steadily making progress towards our goal by the end of December. Around the end of October, we were confident Unreal was the right way to go, but we didn't want to announce the change just yet, since we wanted to prove to our backers (and ourselves) that we could deliver a slice of the game in Unreal with the updated visual direction. October-December: During this time we focused on getting the nuts and bolts of the content inside of Unreal. Most of the folks we selected were developers I had worked with on Fallout: New Vegas, so it made getting them up to speed on things pretty quick. I think we went through about 30+ interviews for various candidates from Sept-Dec. Recruiting takes time (actually, a lot of time, especially for the senior positions).

Around the same time, we needed to fill critical spots for the leads team. September: After the engine research and evaluating feedback on our visual style, we decided to try out Unreal and see what it had to offer. We took a few weeks to research various engines (mainly Lumberyard and Unreal). While Unity is a great engine, it was clear that we needed to use an engine that fit our project goals more closely. We took a hard look at what Unity could do on consoles, and what we wanted to achieve for both visual quality and performance. To shed more light on how we reached this decision, I'll need to go over a timeline.Īugust: After listening to everyone during the Kickstarter campaign, it became clear that console support was very important to a lot of you. I know this seems like a risky move, and in some ways it is, but we've mitigated that risk by switching over early. As some of you may have heard ( ), we have officially switched our engine for System Shock to Unreal Engine 4.

Hi everyone! Jason here this time to share some really important news.

System shock kickstarter forum