SlavicMagic updates the people on Manor Lords progress

Even though Manor Lords quickly became the most wishlisted game on Steam ever, I don't think Greg, aka SlavicMagic, at any point in the 7 year development cycle, ever thought his game would be as successful as Manor Lords is at the moment. 

The average wishlist to sales ratio predicted on Steam games is about 10-20% in week 1. Manor Lords hit that target incredibly fast and went up, up and away with the sales. 

It is no wonder. The game, even though in Early Access, works great. Sure, there are bugs. Sure, not all features you'd expect are implemented. But still, the state of the game is incredible. 

Even more so, the involvement of the lead developer with the community is great. Greg posts regular updates and polls in the Manor Lords Discord channel. Replies there are always aplenty, with often 30k or more replies to polls within the first 12 hours after posting.

Even a simple announcement gathers thousands of replies by the way of emoticons. It just goes to show how involved the community is as well. 

Migration to UE5

Recently, Greg posted a short report on how things are going on their side of the game. 

As you might know, Manor Lords has been in development for 7 years before it was released in Early Access. When development started, Unreal Engine 4 was the latest version of the engine available. 

Somewhere around april 2022, 5 years in the development roadmap, Unreal Engine 5 was released by Epic. Switching from one version of the engine to another can be a burden, especially when you're working (mostly) solo and are looking towards at least some sort of release. 

It was decided not to do the upgrade just yet, but focus on getting the game ready for Early Access in the Unreal Engine 4 version. With that hurdle out of the way, Greg is now focusing on an engine upgrade. 

At the moment, they're "about halfway there" with "just a few things to iron out". That sounds promising! 

After the upgrade to Unreal Engine 5, Manor Lords will once again have official engine support. And, according to Greg, "that includes the ability to simultaneously work on console ports without hitting blocks from obsolete console SDKs." 

If understood correctly, that means there will be ports to consoles like XBox and PlayStation, maybe? At some point publisher Hooded Horse declared that console versions were not a priority, but maybe the incredible success on PC has changed their mind.

Improvements in code

Such an engine upgrade means you probably have to touch your whole code base. While you're there anyway, you can pick up some things you've noticed over the past year but never got around to fixing, right? 

This is exactly what the developer has done. During the upgrade work, Greg has refactored and cleaned up old code, resulting in CPU optimizations and smoother late game framerate. This especially became an issue with multiple towns growing simultaneously and was a much heard complaint by Manor Lords games in the Discord channels. 

Apparently, "some nice progress" was made, whatever that might mean. Better performance is always a win, so let's wait for the next release to see what we can expect!

Teamwork makes the dream work?

Originally, SlavicMagic (Gregs online handle) was marketed as a 'solo developer'. Of course you can't do everything yourself and getting help from outside is not something to be ashamed for. After some backlash on the 'solo' part, (the game credits list a lot more people than just Greg), this was changed to 'lead developer'.

Which is still a great thing to be, if you ask me. Especially with a game as successful as Manor Lords. 

Getting to work with similar minded people is a bonus then. At the moment, collaboration with a game designer is leading to a policy system rework. They'll also be working on other game design items, like tooltips and tutorial phrasing.

Not only that, applicaions for an AI progammer are also considered to move things forward even more. 

Update

This was only a short update, but still a welcome one. Boiled down to the core, it means we won't expect a new patch anytime soon as the upgrade to Unreal Engine 5 has top priority now. 

That being said, the addition of multiple people to the development team will probably lead to a faster development cycle and possibly quicker releases or more content at a steady pace.

Let's see how it all turns out!