Hey guys. 

As the title suggests, I'm back. 

It's been a LONG time since I've done an update about this game and the progress of the project as a whole.  I'm not really sure where to begin with it, so I may as well just go back to last year and start from there. 

So back at the tail end of last year, I started to really hit a brick wall when it came to motivation, ideas, and interest in making this project a reality. I was pushing myself to try and work on it when I didn't feel like it, trying to get a demo ready for people to try out. As I was doing this, I was facing more hurdles and more issues with the game engine I was originally using, that being Game Guru Max. As time passed by, trying to get a working demo ready seemed more and more impossible due to the severe constraints of the engine itself. It was near impossible to do anything and keep it working. Adding weapons was a process that took WAY too long to do and 9 times out of 10, didn't work. Adding enemies and allies was again, a task that shouldn't have been as difficult as it was. 

All of these things ended up just causing far too many issues and fights with the engine that it just killed any joy and motivation I had. 

To put it bluntly, Rising Darkness died at the beginning of 2024. I gave up. I'd poured 600+ hours into level design, story writing, etc, only to be met with 100s of hurdles to jump over. 

I've known since the beginning of this project that it was ambitious. I knew that no matter what, it was going to be one helluva task to complete, but using Game Guru was just a waste of time. I was great to get the concept and ideas down, but it was never going to be something I could rely on to make this dream of mine a reality. 

Which leads me to this next hopefully exciting bit of news...

I've decided to revive Rising Darkness. 

For the last Month or so, I've been working in the background to start recreating all my work from Game Guru Max on UNREAL ENGINE 4.27. 

This, for me, is truly exciting, because the difference in how the game looks is night and day. 

However, this means that I'm back to square one. Learning from the beginning and teaching myself the engine all over again. On the flip side, using this Engine means I can potentially release something great. 

In no way am I saying this is going to be the most amazing game on the planet, but I am going to try my best to make something fun to play, or at least make the game I wanted my younger self to play. 

I'm going to be eventually posting a comparison video or screenshots of the differences between the two engines, so keep an eye out for that! 

Cheers for now guys.

- WarPickles.