Anduo Report October 31st, 2025

Cleanse thyselves with news from the creators. This week is a bit ominous.

PMPerfect:

Hello there, gamers!
To start this update - cloud experiment that turned out into Erokin Halloween Illustration:)

Night version

As for what has been done, there are a lot - a big chunk of it was focused on optimization:
Breaking area into smaller levels, figuring out the best way to stream said levels to deliver the pleasant experience.
Also we decided to stick to night time for the first chapter of the game with just a minor change between starting area and ruins.

Another big chunk of work was done on polishing the pathway - blocking unintended pathways, adding death colliders here and there( :P), adding smaller details, tweaking the combat areas, placing some loot and etc., polished both Ruin’s cutscene.

Invisible cubes with orange lines are a part of those streaming volumes that helps with optimization:)

Oh we also are having interactable doors for Tavern area

In the end I'm quite happy with what we’ve managed to achieve

Still some more experiments are in order to make sure we manage to make it fun to roam,fight and explore!

We finally connected it to Gateston, there are some really old elements we are eager to update to our new level :) so gonna keep you all posted,

Cya around, lovely gamers!
Wish you all a happy spooky halloween :D

Jugger:

Jugger is baking all the gobbo girl garments:

Done with outfit textures, hair right now without textures

Hair UV is done

Gobbo girl completed:

Very WIP Dullahan test animation:

Merc:

Images of the new hammer Merc is working on for the blacksmith:

Vils:

We’ve been talking about how to split up the level into loading zones and for that we needed to have some sort of naming for the bits. So we decided to come up with some!

Bear:

Added a ton of polish to the starting area

• More vegetation

• SFX for wind, leaves and cave, water

• Audio Volumes with different reverb presets for the forest and tunnel areas

• Health Gems that can be picked up and used to restore some health

• Wind source for the initial vista moment so the cloak moves in the wind

• "Shrine Unlocked" popup when using a shrine for the first time

• Enemies drop "souls". Weakling 12, Scout 24 and so on. They can be used for leveling up health, stamina and damage. 

• Invisible colliders all around the playable area

• Locked off most of the mud-huts

• Added vegetation to the top of the mud-huts

• Cleaned up the path in the burnt down village to have less spots where you get stuck. There's still some left tho

  

 Improved the shrine unlock sequence

Quick & dirty UI for levelling:

I’ve been working a loooooooooooooooot on optimization. I managed to find the biggest bottle necks we had in the big new level we’re working on. One was particle effects with values that were bumped up so high, that it would spawn thousands of fog sprites per frame. Fixing that alone gave us back a lot of performance lol.

The biggest performance bottleneck however, was shadow cache invalidations triggered by the trees flowing in the wind. Basically Unreal’s shadow system can remember a shadow once it has been calculated and store it, instead of re-calculating the shadows every frame.

That can of course only work though, if the shadows do not change from frame to frame. To achieve this, I have disabled the vertex deformation shader that makes the trees move in the wind for now. I’m hoping I can use a shadowpass to have the trees visually move but the shadow to remain static. That way we’d have the amazing performance gain from static shadow and also the nice visuals of moving trees.

Gray = cached shadow

Blue = dynamic shadow

By optimizing all sorts of things in the level, I eventually got the framerate to go up to over 400 fps when I turn off all the fancy features! :D

Soon we will be able to run Erokin on a calculator 😎

Next, I wanted to improve the mood of the “open world” a bit by adding zone transitions. Now we can simply add a trigger box with this component to add music to an area transition:

I also added an invisible performance benchmark when you first open the game to find out good settings for your computer as default settings.

Outsourced:

ToughTwinklies:

Spider Lady (Drider) Animations

Loud Luna:

Goblin Scout + Shaman + Alda Sex Animation

Thank you for attending the vigil, it would not be the same without thy presence.