Hello everybody, Christoph here. I wanted to give you a small update on what's going on since we had no activity for quite some time.

(This update is focusing mostly on general development and a bit on our Projects Ascendance, Dystoa, and Essence)


In short, its nothing big to worry about. We are of course still working on our game projects. But in the last months, we have worked on many things under the hood and structural/management changes. So there was not much interesting stuff to tell or show you.

And in the last weeks, we also took a break for ourselves. Especially I myself needed to take a pause from game development at all to refill my creative energies and get a new focus on our games and current/upcoming design problems.


But still, we have made some other progress and small but impactful achievements. We have built better tools for our game projects that will now handle things way better than the ones we had in the first version of Essence and Ascendance. (this was really overdue)

For example, a new and more universal UI system that can be used across all our games. And also futureproof to support localisations. Besides, I took more time to further learn and master 3D modeling and sound design so that we can develop our style and express our vision for the games much better. This will be noticeable for you once we show you the new progress of Dystoa and the new version of Essence.


Tim has also further improved on tools that will better handle multiplatform support since we got now more experience in working with consoles and all their technical limitations and quirks. This is especially important since we will give our best to bring each of our upcoming games to PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. This new workflow will be a magnitude better to work with, our previous one was starting to get unbearable.

Another notable point is that we have finally solved all of the big porting problems we had on Playstation 4 (especially our save system and the trophies). That kept us guessing and tinkering for a long time and haltered progress. With Xbox and Nintendo Switch we have also a stable porting process now, but there is still much we can, and will improve.

With our game Ascendance coming to PS4 next it will be a solid test case for us and pave the way how we will deliver coherent experiences with Dystoa, Essence and other future games.

So, all in all, we are coming forward, more slowly and obscured this time, but breaking off more limitations on the technical and skill side. In the next updates, I try to get back into more into detail about what we are working on.


But our thoughts are also on the current events of the Covid-19 pandemic and if and how this could impact and change game releases, the game industry and the world in general. But for now, we will just keep on working and we hope and wish that every one of you and your relatives are healthy. After all, we want to still have you around after this difficult period to have you experience our games one day.

If any of you want to chat directly with us, we are also back at the discord server: https://discord.gg/gyAV35n

Stay save and see you next time,

Christoph & Tim from ONEVISION GAMES

Heyho fellow players,

just a reminder that we have started our huge Steam games giveaway. Starting with Race The Sun!

https://steamproxy.com/steamstore/app/253030/Race_The_Sun/

We will now give away a random Steam game every day, from games like ABZU to Zeno Clash. We have over 1000 Keys and therefore we will run this project over several years. Chances are that we even make more per day, but ultimately we just want to give you some awesome games while developing our own games.

Join us on Discord to participate: https://discord.gg/gyAV35n

We are happy to welcome everyone, so good luck and have fun. :)

Ck

Hello fellow community,

We just want to give you a small update on what we are currently working on and what's coming in 2019.





But first, we wish everyone a wonderful new year, full of fascinating experiences and new challenges! A new horizon is coming with many surprises and exciting projects.


We are currently working on our next game DYSTOA that marks the next entry in the ESSENCE UNIVERSE. We still don't have a detailed Release date but we are getting closer to find the right moment and also improve more on the game. We will try to post a dev update soon for dystoa where we talk more in-depth about it. Here a small glimpse of what will come...



When we are finished with Dystoa we will continue to work on ESSENCE and the big overhaul we have promised, expect nothing but an almost completely fresh new game, many things that where flawed will be improved, from a new and better player controller, options menu, UI, levels and much more.

Besides we are working on a big update for our game ASCENDANCE. It will also feature an all-new UI, options, a new player controller and new levels and a new mode.




Our community plans are now to extend our reach. What became clear to us is of course to make the games we dream of but making a good game is not enough anymore, it has to go hand in hand with the people behind these and the people passionate about it. More than ever its time to getting closer to each other and grow together. And therefore we are trying to build our community further via Discord to serve as a pivot point for getting in touch with us and receiving the latest update on what we are working on.
(don't worry that doesn't mean we will abandon our other platforms)

Here you can join our Discord channel: https://discord.gg/gyAV35n

And besides, it's time that we give something back while making games and you guys having to wait. :) We collected over 1000 unused Steam keys for games over the years. So we will try to make a giveaway for one Game every day. Everyone is welcome to join! The giveaway will probably start in the coming days. We can't wait to kick off...




Thank you for reading through all of this and as always thanks for your patience and see you hopefully in the gloomy cities of DYSTOA, the ethereal planes of ESSENCE or the enchanting skies of ASCENDANCE. :)

Ck from ONEVISION🧡

This update was posted on our Kickstarter page but we wanted to share it with you too.Original post PS: i have uploaded new WIP Pictures in the Artwork tab ;)

Greetings fellow Backers, Ck here. The months seem to just fly by so this update is again overdue. We have some good and bad news to tell, so let's dive in.



Since our last update, we were pretty confident to release DYSTOA this time on point but as the months shown new odds against us have been come up one by one and we had to shift our release several months. So I outright apologize for not keeping up with the info.

The game itself still has still plenty of things we have to finish or improve and also remade some aspects of the game while we dove deeper what technical requirements and tradeoffs are needed for a multi-platform title. This is unfortunately very time consuming, you have to learn every step by yourself and things are sometimes completely out of your own control and schedule. But since we are again full on Track we are working as hard as we can until the end of November and see if we can narrow down on a Release date while we are on it.



Now to clarify what's going on. We are currently mostly on PC and heavily rely on platforms like Steam. The last months have shown that not only are more games releasing, decreasing visibility and therefore the survival as an Indie developer but also some heavy changes that make it even harder to be discovered. A few Weeks ago revenue dropped out of nowhere for us but also many other PC developers we had contact with. There are reports of developers who actually had a revenue drop of up to 90%.

Hope you can bear with me but the huge problem is that it can be absolutely terrible to launch a game now since it could just make a small portion of what it could be (as the first weeks are generally most profitable). So since we still have some work to finish we wait a bit longer and see how this situation will continue.



So it's honestly looking pretty grim to be an indie dev right now. But in the meantime, we are prioritizing some alternatives to keep us at least alive.

We (mostly our programmer Tim) are currently porting ASCENDANCE to the consoles because it's smaller and therefore a better field test, and since we have finished this porting procedure once it will be faster and more efficient to port DYSTOA. This will ensure a bit more revenue for us and keeping us going to port DYSTOA and also help to keep our game ESSENCE going.

But as you can see there is only so much work that can be done by 2 people and we now realize more and more the importance of having a platform of our own, not of games but people...



While we try to communicate on social media platforms we now see that most of that will mostly be not seen here and vice versa because the coverage is too widely scattered. So the idea is to try to centralize our presence for people interested in our games or development and never miss anything from us. So we decided to build up a closer community with the help of Discord since it seems to be the perfect candidate to fulfill this role. It's a popular chat based program and shows great potential for small developers and could help us a lot to overcome situations like these in the future as it has already for others.

If you don't know it, take a look and get it here: https://discordapp.com/



Our community plans are now to extend our reach, not by classic advertisement as this does not work in our spectrum very well (we already tried it)... What matters to us is of course to make the games we dream of but making a good game is not enough anymore, it has to go hand in hand with the people behind these and the people following it, getting closer to each other and not becoming more alienating like bigger companies.

And besides, it's time that we give something back while making games and you guys having to wait. :) We collected over 1000 unused Steam keys for games over the years. So we will try to make a giveaway for one Game every day. (probably starting when we have a handful of members)

And for you guys we will also have a dedicated channel that only you can see and enter, there you can request anything related to Kickstarter and our games and we will give our best to help you or answer your questions.



I know this update got a bit out of hand and away from the game but we wanted that you at least know the general situation, our upcoming changes (community wise) and what we will try to do better. Some other questions might be not answered, so just ask. :)

Here you can join our Discord channel: https://discord.gg/gyAV35n

Thank you for reading through all of this and as always thanks for your patience, brave travelers. And hopefully, we will see you on Discord. :)

Ck 🧡

This update was posted on our Kickstarter page but we wanted to share it with you too. Original post

As promised we are giving our best to keep you updated and to let you know our development and progress more frequently. Therefore, we would like to use this update to kickstart this small series of updates until release and tell you what we are working. And yes, we should have done it earlier... but here we go! :)




While working on the game we had to overhaul some aspects of the game, updated the project with a newer Unity Engine version, changed the Style of the game a bit and reworked assets and the Story of the game. That took a little bit longer than expected but will ensure a better game and hopefully a good release.

Therefore we will aim for a release window in AUGUST 2018. We are not sure about the exact day yet, still figuring out whats best for it. (not that easy as it seems because you have to be careful what games are coming out too)

This will leave us also more time to eventually put some more quality of life changes and other features like voice over and other languages into the game. We will tell you more in the next update.




Since the funding, we have worked a lot on the core systems and graphics of the game to make it more efficient and ensure a better workflow for the console versions. Especially on the Nintendo Switch, the game could get some heavy performance problems.

With our first steps and working with consoles, we learned that we have to test DYSTOA as early as possible to not get stopped with game-breaking problems. So far we could get early builds to run on XBOX ONE and the Nintendo Switch. The builds were not running smoothly as we wish, with frames between 30-10 fps but we are sure we will figure it out. Luckily it seems we did not have any major problems with the graphics since we are using a quite unusual fog system to achieve this style. Our biggest fear was that this simply won't work on consoles because of their different graphics API.




Of course, finishing the game without more major delay and with a polished feel and quality is the highest priority, and we are giving our best to ensure a solid performance since our previous works suffered from past mistakes in optimizing games. So we are currently aiming to have the finished game running on medium to high-end PC's on 60-90 Fps, XBOX and PS4 on 60fps and on Switch probably 30 FPS.

We would like to know what your thoughts and expectations are and what performance do you wish for your system?

Thank you for reading through all of this and as always thanks for your patience, brave travelers, see you on the next update!

ONEVISION🧡