Turns out, I’m absolutely terrible at publishing this blog on a specific day. Originally I was going to do this every Wednesday, but then I changed it to every Sunday because I usually do less on Sundays. This time the RNG that is my schedule decided we should do this on Tuesday for some reason (I may have been playing a game all day on Sunday instead cough). Anyways, I finally have a release date for Starwave Defender, which you’ll find out about towards the end of this blog.

In other news, I seriously cannot seem to escape the never-ending lack of drive space lately. I have two and a half terabytes of storage, and its never enough these days. Even if I go through and free up hundreds of gigabytes of space, I just fill it up again the next day. A good deal of my space is allocated for game development and games, but games and development tools keep getting bigger and bigger. For example, Battlefield 4 is currently taking up nearly 70GB of space on my SSD, alongside the 120GB that Unreal Engine and “Project Diaspora” are taking up.

Between Windows, Battlefield 4, and my Unreal Engine 4 projects I basically cannot fit anything else on my SSD. That kind of bothers me, considering that in the same amount of drive space I use on my SSD now I could fit dozens of games from even just 5 years ago. A lot of the size increase comes from higher quality assets for sure, however, a good deal of it is also just poorly stored data. I wish that Unreal Engine 4, and many other game engines, had better compressed assets. There are plenty of excellent open source technologies around that would easily cut the amount of space used by assets in half. An example of this is the extremely fast LZ4 compression algorithm.

Enough about drive space though, I’m sure most of the people who are going to read this are more interested in the release date for Starwave Defender. That date is probably closer to today than it should be, but whatever. I planned to release it last Friday, but that plan fell through because I was having trouble composing the primary music loop for the game. In the end I decided that I would rather use a royalty free piece from Kevin MacLeod than delay the game until I could get back into music production.

I am planning to release Starwave Defender this Saturday, or February 6th, 2016, if you’re reading this in the future. I haven’t yet informed Epic Games about this, which is a requirement for using the Unreal Engine, but that’s because I decided on the exact date while I was rambling on about drive space earlier. I would also like to mention that I am planning several post-release updates, which will be released in the weeks following the actual game release. The updates include things like adjustable key binds, new enemies, and new game modes.

For anyone interested in the game, I will likely be doing several streams prior to the release date. I’d also like to release the game during a stream, however, I won’t know if that will happen until later in the week as I have other things I need to work on. The initial version that I am releasing will primarily be a massively revamped version of the original game, which was going to be released for Android devices at the beginning of last year, featuring better graphics, sound, and music. The gameplay might feel a little bare-bones, but that is because I decided to focus on updating the original for PC first rather than adding new gameplay elements.

Alright now that I’ve got that out-of-the-way, time to go do some last-minute polishing for Starwave Defender. I’ll be doing my first stream either later tonight or tomorrow, so make sure you follow my twitter or my hitbox pages to know exactly when that happens.