🛠️ Dev Update: Merging Worlds and Mastering Performance 

Hello everyone,

I apologize for not checking in for so long. I’ve spent almost all my free time working on the game over the past few months, and I think I’ve lost track of time. In my head, weeks have been passing like days, and I only just realized how long it’s been since my last update. Thank you for sticking with me!

🎨 Environments
In my last Discord update, I was working on the environments. Using assets from different packs made the world feel a bit disconnected. I’ve spent a significant amount of time customizing objects so that everything feels like it belongs to the same universe.

A bigger problem was that the “architecture” didn’t allow for what I have planned for the story. I decided to reformulate and rebuild some environments. It took time, but the story now has the physical space it needs to breathe.

🌿 Vegetation
I’ve also implemented a new asset for instancing vegetation. I’m still fine-tuning it, but it allows me to fill scenes like the campus courtyard and the park with trees and grass with a very minimal performance hit. As many of you know, grass is usually a performance killer, so this is a win.

⚡ Performance
During testing, I noticed that loading times between scenes were becoming a bottleneck—a problem that was already present in the demos but worsened as the maps grew. 

I decided to apply the same loading/unloading logic I used for the character's clothing system to the entire world. I can now dynamically load and unload parts of the environment to save performance, without having to load a new scene, avoiding pauses to load. I believe this will greatly improve the gaming experience.

🎮 Results
After reconfiguring the navigation for these new systems, I essentially have two "games" working:
1.  The Narrative Engine: A text-based experience where you follow the story, read dialogues, and scene descriptions.
2.  The Exploration Engine: A point-and-click system where you can navigate maps, interact with objects (drawers, doors), and collect items.

Now I have to combine these two games into one and make sure everything works properly, and then I’ll be able to move on to the next step.

🚀 What’s Next?
The navigation and map systems were the least tested parts of our demos. The next steps will focus on animation and movement mechanics that have already been thoroughly tested, so I don't anticipate any major hurdles there.

I promise to do my best to speed up the process. Thank you so much for your incredible patience and for believing in this project.

Onward!