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Studio Update Part 2: Unity Headaches
🕑 Added 2025-04-06 22:48:25 +0000 UTCHey everyone,
Welcome to Part 2 of our studio update series. In Part 1, I caught everyone up on the Flash-related issues that have delayed progress. Now, we’re digging into the equally gnarly (but necessary) challenges we’ve faced while transitioning into Unity.
Unity has opened up a lot of new possibilities—but it’s also introduced a ton of behind-the-scenes complications that have slowed us down. Here’s what’s been going on:
GUI Delays – The Biggest Setback So Far
The graphical user interface (GUI) overhaul has been, without question, the biggest hurdle in releasing a playable Unity build.
This includes:
Menus
Map overlays
Basic movement and navigation
UI-based systems tied to gameplay
So why has this been such a problem?
We inherited a multitude of cluttered assets from past developers—both hired help and third-party sources. Many of these assets were unknowingly changed, abandoned, or simply not cleared out properly.
→ This caused significant bloat and confusion.Thankfully, this has now been fully cleaned up, and things should be much more stable moving forward.
We were also dealing with two separate GUI systems that weren’t fully compatible.
→ Not by choice. One of our previous coders improperly removed critical connections between them, which led to instability and visual inconsistencies.We’ve now migrated everything to a unified third-party GUI suite, which has drastically improved things—but required a full overhaul and integration effort.
Code Delays – Massive but Foundational
This isn’t really an “issue” in the traditional sense—more like a gigantic undertaking with a lot of moving parts.
There’s a huge amount of work happening behind the scenes involving:
Dialogue systems
Character tracking
Core functionality that supports gameplay
This system isn’t just for this game—it’s being built to power all future games under our umbrella (i.e. RLD, Warrior Class, Structure One).
We’re not building every feature upfront, but we are testing everything extensively to ensure it can scale for future needs. That kind of long-term planning takes time, especially alongside the other delays mentioned in Part 1.
Build Delays – The Human Side
This one’s personal.
A major part of the slowdown on my end has come from a combination of:
Ongoing artist’s block
Creative frustration and burnout, which has hit in waves over the last couple of years
The upside? That frustration eventually led to a full replanning and re-optimization phase for major parts of New Cyana. The overall design hasn’t changed—but it’s being rebuilt to run more efficiently and more smoothly than ever before.
This optimization work is still ongoing, but we’re already seeing real performance improvements.
Wrapping Up Part 2
Unity has brought amazing possibilities—but also a huge pile of technical and creative challenges. From gutting our GUI systems, to future-proofing our core codebase, to reworking New Cyana for better performance—this has been a mountain of work.
But we’re climbing it.
We’ll be back soon with Part 3, where we’ll finally talk about the progress we have made, and where we’re heading next.
Thank you again for your patience and continued support during this long development stretch. It means a lot, and we’re determined to make it worth the wait.
We truly couldn’t do this without you.
Your love for this game gives us the energy to keep going, even when the problems feel insurmountable.
Thank you for continuing with us on this journey to keep HTH Games alive.
