Hello, Bloodhunt Community!
As you may have seen hidden in our Valentine’s Day greeting, we are planning a closed PC playtest with the community in March.
We wanted to outline some of the information we’re able to share with you about the playtest and explain the more technical details about what you can expect when you play our updated game.
As we work our way towards this playtest, we will continue to share insights about the various changes we have made since Early Access ended.
We can’t wait to play Bloodhunt together with you again!
What About the Playtest Next Month?
The playtest will be open to everyone who previously created a Sharkmob account that is in good standing.
During the playtest, we are looking to receive your input on the performance and visual quality of the game, but all feedback on the added features and content is welcome.
You can expect the playtest to run for a day or two. This will allow us to gather enough information to understand the remaining work needed before we can launch Bloodhunt.
We will announce the dates and times and more practical information about the playtest next week, so stay tuned.
Let’s Get Technical
We heard from many of you last year that game performance was something you really wanted us to focus on. During this “offline” period we have been working on better hardware compatibility and finding more ways to fully utilize the CPU and GPU, to create a smoother experience.
During this playtest, we want to confirm that players that had issues with performance during early access are now able to play the game without any game interrupting stutters.
This is, of course, a work in progress, as work will continue post-launch. The focus for now has been on finding a good balance between visual fidelity and performance and delivering an experience that is more stable on a wider range of PC hardware configurations.
We believe that we will be able to achieve this not only by optimizing our code, but by also improving some aspects of the game, such as the art, sound and user interface.
PROTIP: USE DX12!
When you play Bloodhunt, we strongly recommend using DX12 as our game is designed to utilize that render path. We do, however, support DX11 for wider compatibility.
When you start the game for the very first time, you will notice that we need to compile your shaders and this will take a bit of time.
On subsequent game start-ups, the initial loading will be much faster, as the shaders you have compiled will then only need to be loaded.
The reason we chose to compile them at the start of the game is that DX12 lets us front-load as much compilation as we can, to reduce stuttering during actual gameplay.
In the case of the user skipping the process, we have implemented a fall-back where the game will compile these shaders in real-time during gameplay, which will result in possible stutter when it occurs. To make you aware of this process, an icon will appear on-screen. We understand that having satisfactory performance on a wide range of hardware configurations is important in a game like Bloodhunt, which has a high skill ceiling, so we look forward to hearing your feedback in this upcoming playtest.
In the future, when we add more content into the game, it will end up taking more space and memory, which will put more stress on your hardware. This means that our journey does not end here when it comes to optimizing the game. We will continuously examine the state of the game and keep improving it.
See you soon!
We look forward to welcoming you back to Prague next month and we will be sharing more details about the upcoming playtest very soon.
Until next time, see you at dusk!
/Sharkmob
