Dear ‘83 Community!

We’re excited to bring you our first development update of the new year.

Thanks to the feedback from the 8 playtests we’ve held so far, we’ve been able to make significant strides in server performance. Our code team "assaulted" these challenges head-on, and we’re now able to support sufficient player counts to start showing the fun aspects of the game to testers!

Overall, these tests have been invaluable in helping us debug several critical issues, and it's been great to see players not just fill, and stress test the servers, but also enjoy the game as it’s meant to be played with 75 players running!

Looking ahead, we’re now turning our focus towards weapons and animations. This is no small task, as we've essentially had to recreate the animation framework from the ground up.

Without being too specific (to manage expectations), we also want to give you a look at our overarching production plan for the next two months. Here’s what the team is focused on delivering:

• Rollout of an all-new animation framework
  
• Significant progress on weapons systems

• Continued optimization along with key additions and tweaks to core gameplay systems
  
• Full Integration of Unreal Engine 5 features like Nanite and Virtual Shadow Maps for visually stunning environments with a manageable GPU load
  
• Deeper exploration of UE5's IRIS networking architecture, which we aim to leverage for smoother, large-scale multiplayer performance

By the end of February, we’re aiming to achieve a critical milestone of the ’83 project: the vertical slice build. We’ve had many of you asking what specifically that means – roughly, this is the gist of it:

1. "Show the Fun in ‘83": A showcase of one example map where core gameplay loop of ’83 shows its main fun element
   
2. Core Gameplay Systems: Demonstrate most of the core systems that define the ‘83 experience
   
3. Graphics Optimizations: We’re aiming to implement Nanites and Virtual Shadow Maps to deliver the best possible visuals along with scalable performance
   
4. Server Stability: Further optimize the game to support for 80-player servers without server CPU or network hiccups
   
5. Gather more HW spec data: Collection of data to define accurate minimum and recommended system requirements.

The year is off to a great start, and we’d like to thank all of you for your continued support and enthusiasm. Your feedback and participation in playtests have helped shape the game into what it is today, and we can’t wait to show you what we’ve been building as we move closer to our vertical slice goals.

We’re also excited to report that we’re putting additional focus on the marketing side of things – and we want to deliver a proper update to our Steam page in January, including new screenshots and a trailer.

Stay tuned for more updates!

The 83 Development Team

We're excited to update you on '83's development journey. Our team is working hard on our current primary objective: to get a stable build ready for closed community playtests, with the main hurdle so far being sub-par network performance.

Fortunately, running the game on a powerful bare metal Windows server (as opposed to the standard, more cost effective cloud-powered virtual machine we aim to use) offers acceptable performance and enables us to begin some level of testing – as we proved in a short, closed test earlier this weekend.

Our progress in net code optimization is now driven by a talented duo of experienced programmers, which marks a significant improvement from a few months ago when we solely relied on volunteers. The development ultimately moved from a slow crawl to a steady jog and we are continuously gaining momentum!

Thank you for your ongoing support and patience as we continue to bring '83 to life. Your feedback is invaluable, so stay tuned for more updates!