happy Anniversary!

Hello, everyone!

Today is a very special day—this project was born exactly one year ago.

There I was, on Telegram, with a newly created channel where I was all alone. The intentions were good, but reality was a different story. We’re talking about a massive project, of biblical proportions.

Many people have come and gone, with very good intentions but not much perseverance. Fortunately, over the course of this year, we’ve managed to build a great team—one that’s truly persevering and has a clear vision.

Today we have 192 members in the channel (and counting!). 192 people united by a common passion: bringing La Prisión back to life.

We also have a very special person with us: SoNNy, or Juanga as he prefers to be called now. Aside from the incredible stories he tells us about the old prison, he’s giving us great advice on developing the project alongside Sobakus.

We assume you know them: SoNNy was in charge of client-side programming (among many other things), and Sobakus handled server-side programming (also among many other things). Therefore, everything they tell us is gold to us. Thank you!

What’s New

I won’t get too technical, but I’ll just say that we recently decided to migrate the project to Unreal Engine (we were previously using Unity). This change opens up a ton of possibilities for us and gives us a robust framework to work with.

We’ve made a lot of progress on all aspects of the game, so we can announce…

The surprise

You didn’t think I was going to leave without giving you a little surprise, did you?

Very soon we’ll be conducting a stress test. This test involves all of us connecting to a server, which will feature a prison cell (to help ease the withdrawal symptoms a bit), and we’ll verify the servers’ performance to get a thorough understanding of how they respond.

So we’ll see you very soon inside the future prison. We’ll only be able to move around one area, but I hope you like it and that it gives you a sense of what we’re preparing.

Stay tuned—we’ll announce it on all official channels, setting the date, time, and steps to follow so you can connect.

From here, I’d like to thank you all for your presence and comments on the channel and, above all, the Programming, Content, and Art teams who are working as if their lives depended on it. Without them, this would be impossible.

The technical side (DEV: Javier Castro)

I’m adding this section, from a more technical perspective, for those who want to understand a bit about the reasons behind some decisions, such as switching engines, what that means, and what it will bring us.

The first and most noticeable change has been switching engines, moving from Unity to Unreal Engine. The advantages are many; the disadvantages, few.

Among the advantages, we have an engine that is much more robust than Unity, designed and built for high-end PC video games, taking full advantage of the potential that today’s machines and graphics cards can offer.

We’ve also gained robustness in the most critical aspect of an MMO: networking.

However, these advantages, among others (better collaboration system, better materials system, better version control system, etc.), have come at the cost of starting from scratch, which, in short, means that all previous work has become invalid and obsolete.

Another technical change, due to the nature of the engine itself, has been the rendering system. The first proof of concept we’ve shown over the past few months on the blog was based on the same rendering system as the original game: pre-rendered backgrounds with 3D elements on top.

This caused multiple problems, one of the most significant being the resolution of today’s monitors. To prevent the backgrounds from looking “pixelated,” we had to create images of such large dimensions that they disproportionately multiplied the size of the final executable (.exe), while also consuming far more VRAM than desirable. In short: If we wanted it to look sharp, we needed a machine much more powerful than the original game ever required. It was either that, or lowering the resolution of the backgrounds.

The solution was to forget about pre-rendered backgrounds and opt for a fully 3D environment. I want to reassure readers that the essence of the game won’t be lost; the cameras will remain static, and the gameplay and movement will stay the same. The only change is that the backgrounds will now be fully dynamic, and where issues like implementing day-night cycles used to be a problem, they’re now a minor detail.

There’s still a lot to discuss, but this blog post has already gotten quite long, so, as they say, we’ll save the rest for another day.

Greetings to all!
— The new team at La Prisión.