Devlog #4

It's been some time since I've done one of these! Even though I can no longer call myself a "Solo Dev" I still wear a lot of hats at Neolithic, and I don't mean just the animal hood cosmetics. 😅 Keeping up with game's development, testing, content, project management, finances, and everything else that comes with running an indie game studio has left me with not as much time in the day as I once thought I would have to maintain a regular blog schedule.

As I wait for yet another build to finish to find out how I managed to break the mirror renderer in the main menu (was my avatar really that ugly? 😭) , I figured its as good a time as any to acknowledge the substantial progress we've made since the last Devlog (posted sometime between 11,000 and 12,000 YBP). 💀

NEOLITHIC DAWN Enters Early Access - June 27, 2025

First it was the Pre-Alpha demo, then Campfire Hangout, then the semi-open Beta, but this was the day we finally went live on the Meta Quest Store.

Isn't she beautiful? 🥹

And while most people had enjoyed it for what it was, there is no denying it was a rocky couple weeks after launch! Lots of bugs, especially in co-op, and an accidental Day 1 patch sent by yours truly accidentally pushed us directly out of Early Access and as a full launch title. Oops. 😐 Thankfully after a bit of a headache the kind folks over at Meta were actually able to restore this and put us back in our rightful place!

After receiving a TON of feedback and some much needed tough love from fans who found the experience did not meet their expectations we got together as a team and created a priority list from the worst bugs affecting the most players to the least mission-critical and the work really began. Bit of a personal side note, to add insult to literal injury, I had broken my right hand a few days before our EA launch. Don't forget to set your guardian, kids!🗿Which definitely didn't help my words-per-minute while digging through our spaghetti code to fix bugs. But when it comes to the community and what the people want, for the most part it was things we either already had planned for future updates, something we temporarily had to cut to make the game possible on Quest 2, or something that we were actively working to fix / improve on. Which means we are all on the same page, which is awesome! So to leave you with a few final goals to close out this Devlog, here is what I personally think would take Neolithic Dawn to the next level.

1. Base Building / Chopping Down Trees - Quite a few players expressed dismay at swinging their axe into a pine tree and not being able to cut it down. Probably especially disappointing if you've been following development for a long time, because you would know I posted videos over 2 years ago chopping into a tree. This was one of those things we built in PCVR in the early days when I was experimenting with everything under the sun on what was essentially a movie set, but not a real map, and running on the quantum computer in my underground bunker. The team had so much to build already with the 5 open world maps, the story, the NPCs, the animals, and multiplayer systems we simply didn't have the manpower to get this done. We knew it wouldn't make sense to cut trees unless you could use them, and due to time constraints and simplifications to the camp building section of the game we put the logs in directly. But all the bones are there, the shader effects, the actual logs themselves that players find conveniently 6 feet from where they need to be placed, and the actual structures themselves. Its just a matter of buckling down and making that feature a priority, and of course making sure your Quest 2 doesn't spontaneously combust like the fires players will likely start once they can destroy the whole forest.

2. Realism / Burning Vegetation - Speaking of starting a forest fire, this was another feature we had in early PC-only builds that simply didn't make the cut because other systems took priority. It was a glorified shader effect, with no real practical use. So while it looked super cool in videos, it was both visual-only and extremely expensive, even on PC. Unfortunately because of this we had to cut it. But I am a highly motivated individual, and when I get tired of refactoring the multiplayer backend and need a break, I have a little shader programming as a treat. I figured out a significantly cheaper way to make an almost identical effect, one that should even work on Quest 2. Now before I get ahead of myself, our performance is already hanging on by a thread especially on last gen consoles. So I will need to optimize a bit further so we can afford this in our budget, just saying it could be possible in a future update to scorch the grass like in Zelda BoTW or ToTK. 👀

3. Quickplay Survival Mode - This has been the most highly requested feature. And it should have been obvious. When I set out to build Neolithic Dawn, I wanted to create a game that was a "full package", like the games I used to play as a kid. Back then a good game would have a thought out story mode / campaign, a multiplayer mode, and a quick play mode to jump in for short sessions without having to think about what you were doing in your last save. At the time I though Campfire Hangout would be this mode, but its not. Its a social lobby and doesn't satisfy this desire. A true pick a map and drop-in-anywhere to start surviving mode is in order. Maybe we can call it Survival Mode, maybe Sandbox, either way its an idea thats so obvious I can't believe we didn't have it on launch. Sometimes the obvious things slip past you when you're too deep in it!

And that concludes Devlog 4. I hope you enjoy this book I wrote for you full of run-on sentences and poor grammar - the build is done I gotta get back to work! As always thanks for your support, and I'll see YOU in the Megafaunaverse! 💪

-James