Hello!

It has been so warming for the team here at Fallen Leaf + Black Drakkar Games to see so many enjoying our labor of love! As a small Indie studio looking to create an experience at times at odds with modern perception, we naturally were both excited and terrified to launch our game. Thank you for being so supportive in this moment and sharing some truly amazing reactions.

We wanted to put out an update and talk more about one of our more contentious challenges, the walking speed.

When creating an experience with such tension and narrative distribution, both the base and the scale is considered to mend with the audio exchanges and frequency of their delivery. At the core of this is the speed in which both cloth, suit and other physics are applied to the character. Working in tandem with brand new technology, the fantastic Unreal 5 engine, it was a great achievement for the team to ship the game on such a new engine.

Beyond the challenges of working within a new engine, to the level of immersion and cinematic presentation we desired, we knew our choices wouldn’t be for everyone and that’s perfectly ok. We wanted our players to enjoy the experience at the pace intended.

We are always evaluating and exploring ways in which to help add more choice to the play experience when it comes to how players wish to walk. We are considering a toggle speed for outside, looking at metrics in which areas perhaps need more speed and overall additions to the core systems. This requires every audio exchange, sequencer trigger placement and more to be revised.

Beyond our technical challenges we must remember that such a small development team only has so much bandwidth. We are working hard to react to the amazing feedback the community has already shown and we wanted to take this moment to thank each and every one of you for playing Fort Solis and sharing your experience with us!

- James