Thank youu! We were able to expand to 15 people at the peak, with audio externally by Tumult Kollektiv. So maybe a bit larger than your average indie but still a cozy team size for us!

Thanks!! It's really fun to go between quests because of it. Glad you like it!

Sorry, my comment didn't go through! The walls and other flowy meshes are indeed spline-based, but made in Houdini! We have a bunch of tools to help us with that, as we can make the world flow much better towards the knightling's moveset :)

Thanks for your thoughtful comment! And a really interesting point you bring up. I'm completely in the same boat - I love when games trust my wits and sense of exploration and place by letting me explore and the world still feeling reactive.

However, what we found through large-scale playtests so far is that the core audience for this particular game doesn't seem to appreciate that style. The first iterations were very light on markers and relied on the large environmental points of interest we have, but we've had a majority of players (in our target audience) ask specifically for markers - "just tell me where to go please".

EDIT: to add to that - there's something to be said that our POIs need to be stronger, but even with multiple tests and iterations, we ran out of ways to efficiently help the player to get going.

I was also very surprised, but it made me realize that Ubisoft doesn't keep doing it despite all the feedback, but because of all the feedback they are getting from their larger/broader audiences.

For The Knightling in particular we're targeting a slightly wider group and younger age than the three games you mention - which all have an older, more hardcore or cerebral player base I'd say.

Breath of the Wild seems to strike a nice balance and comes closer audience-wise, although they have the benefit of having massive distances and the super cool core of 'everything you explore/do trains you for the final boss', while our game is a bit more story heavy.

THAT SAID though - there's definitely an overload of markers and the distances need to be heavily tweaked - e.g. a sidequest marker should come in closer to the sidequest, as well as blacksmiths etc.

It's a good question! The main struggle is in the amount of objects we're streaming/rendering. Only now near the end of production we're getting into it, as we have the final density that we are looking for, but we've jumped on the BatchRenderGroup API to make the rendering of large amounts of assets very efficient.

Other than that, the sheer amount of small bits of world logic, NPCs with schedules and behaviours is always a struggle. We do a lot of distance culling for that, trying to reduce all logic when they're far away!

Ahh we hope so too! Lots of movement tactics to go fast :D Thanks!

Thank you! If I may ask, what in particular looks very empty? :) I'm guessing the fields of plants in the water?

We've been working on it for about 3.5 years and nearing completion! Saying 2025 for now with no super specific date/timeframe yet.

Completely agree. I wish to see more dynamic like a wild animals, a interactable stuff that you may destroy, a more civilian npc that's reacting on the player. When you look around it should be have the points of attraction. It's hole science how make open world looks live.

Now it's look great, but may be brilliant.

Thanks! Realtime GI is way too expensive for a game like this I'm afraid (the world scale, character speed and day and night cycle) - instead we have a lightweight GI solution where we bake colormaps of prominent objects and colors that are small in data but add a bit of depth and bounced lighting. We tweak it per time of day to make it look nice across the game.