Hey Folks,

Steam Direct

In my last post I mentioned trying to decide between Steam Greenlight and Steam Direct.  Well since then the choice has been made for me.  Steam Direct opened up for developers and I’ve got it setup for Deadburg.  This will allow me to invite people to test the game on Steam, and they’ll be able to download the game like any other Steam game.  It will also automatically keep those testers updated with the latest build.  In short it’s a bit step forward towards a working test version.

I should note, at release Deadburg will require Steam to play.  This is mostly a matter of convenience for players and myself.  Steam gives me a friends list, server browser and supporting features similar to Xbox Live on the 360.  If Deadburg does well then having a Steam-less version of the game is something I might pursue, depending on whether enough people want it.

Performance

I’m beginning to add performance options to the game.  The goal is to let players on a wide variety of hardware play Deadburg at reasonable frame rates (60fps is my goal).  Right now the biggest perf issue appears to be the new shadows system, which isn’t particularly surprising.  So I’ve added options to tweak the detail of the shadows as well as how “soft” the shadows appear in game.  Doing so I was able to get my laptop to run the game at 1080p at 60fps with shadows enabled.  There’s likely more optimizations that can be done, but it’s good enough for testing.

That’s all for this month.  I had to do an update for another project that ate a good chunk of June.  But I’m back full time to Deadburg for July and the main goal right now is getting a version that can be tested by you folks.