I am continuing to have some health issues that have limited my ability to focus on this development as much as I had planned and was able to previously. I have a fulltime job  and a family which must take all of the attention and energy I can muster. Unfortunately, I have only been opening up the project and making incremental development on the weekends for the past few months. Fortunately, I still remain passionate about this project. I still have (day)dreams about new features and ideas to implement, and even do the development in my head sometimes, but I simply can't get myself to focus on actually working on them actively.

I did manage to update the game from Unreal Engine 5.1.1 -> 5.3 last weekend, but there are a lot of little things that need to be done to complete the transition due to some changes to Nanite default settings on most of the meshes and some annoying Lumen lighting bugs that still have not been fixed; none of these break the game, they just result in annoying visual artifacts that bother me a lot. I am one of those people that will pause playing a released game when I see things like this and analyze what went wrong and how it could be fixed, thanks to my experience with finding and fixing very similar issues in my own game development.

The oven mini-game is roughly 69% complete. I implemented a cool randomized procedural-mesh garlic clove peeling game that needs to be completed, and got the ingredient chopping game done (it is surprisingly fun!). I just need to make a quick bread-slicing game, implement the baking timer process, and then finish tying it all together with the parsley-picking game for a complete garlic bread baking experience.

From there, I need to make the street-racing, drone-flying, space-flight, and underground mini-games, create a few more NPCs that are needed for a complete gaming experience, and finally tie more components of the game together. I have a full concept of what playing the game is like in my head (and mostly in writing), but I just need to finish developing it. Once I have that all together in a playable game-loop, I will be ready to release the Alpha version to our Alpha testers on Discord.

I also have some cool ideas for a short promotional video once I get to that point, which will be based on Doom (2016) promos. Should be fun to put together; I just need a few more pieces implemented in the game to get clips for the video.