Preparing Ascendant Dawn for an alpha/pre-alpha on itch required a bit of work. This is a combination of fixing bugs and stripping out unfinished features. Firstly the main part of the game would require removing as it was unfinished and I’m only trying to release a demo not a full game.

Firstly I had to grey out a large number of buttons on the main menu and pause menu. I removed anything that lead to the main map along with the showroom feature. I also had to remove the intro video because I don’t have permission from Epic Games to use the Unreal Logo and the video contains it. Though the intro movie is fairly useless so not having it might be beneficial as you can get into the game quicker.

The bulk of the changes were removing certain features in the game especially debug information. For instance armies would display a load of information about where they were going in their UI element which I removed to make the screen less cluttered.  Other things I removed include the ability for the player to build a monument or to change their tribe’s traditions. I’ve still allowed the player to see the options just not pick them.

In addition, to constraining features I also did some work on things such as performance and file size. Itch.io requires files to be under 1GB and I didn’t want the download size to be too large for people. The game’s performance can also be somewhat variable in the build version so I’ve streamlined the game a little to improve performance. Currently the game is 800MB which I can't really get any smaller since unreal projects tend to be at least 600MB or so. 

I also fixed some of the bugs in the game especially some of the game breaking ones such as problems with resource exploitation.

Settings are also something I had to implement more of. The settings in Ascendant Dawn are currently mainly graphical with only two gameplay settings, an fps counter and a slider to let the player control the number of random events. Graphical settings are everything you would expect allowing sliders between low and high settings. In addition there’s also stuff like HDR and vsync. Finally there’s also color blindness settings.

I’m going to be releasing Ascendant Dawn for free here in a pre-alphla/alpha state fairly soon, if you’re interested in the game join the discord https://discord.gg/WKjbCR9Q38 where you can follow it more closely.