Today’s Progress: Smoother Gameplay, Better Tools, and Finer Details

Today’s development focus brought meaningful improvements across gameplay, performance, and tooling—many of which you’ll feel in the next Chaos build.

We tackled a long-standing Unity editor drift issue, catching up on seven patch releases. Three previously workaround-able bugs are now fixed upstream, while four remain but are being tracked. Two new regressions were identified and addressed to keep our development pipeline stable.

Fishing got a significant refinement: the reel meter target zone is now one-third smaller, making it more challenging and responsive. Fish move twice as fast after being hooked, and the bobber now realistically dips underwater—adding tension and realism to every catch.

Mounts now lean naturally during movement. When riding, both mount and rider tilt forward when accelerating, rock back on stopping, and bank through turns. The rider’s upper body stays more upright than the animal beneath, creating a more immersive and dynamic riding experience—live for testers in the next Chaos build.

On Macs with 16 GB of RAM, textures were appearing blurry due to insufficient texture memory. We’ve increased the allocation from 1024 MB to 2048 MB, resolving the soft appearance and improving visual fidelity on these machines.

Unity’s latest update caused a massive ripple across our asset pipeline—15,980 model import settings were flagged as changed. We confirmed the rewrite is now byte-identical across all machines, eliminating merge conflicts and reducing deployment time.

Windowed mode now remembers its size and position between sessions—no more resizing every time you launch.

Finally, our QA process is now more secure and reliable. Builds now go to a QA shard first, only promoted to Chaos after approval. Four deployment errors that could have accidentally sent builds to Chaos are fixed, two silent QA failures are now properly flagged, and three new safeguards ensure only verified builds ship.

Summarized from Chris "Atos" Spears' work log at Catnip Games.