The idea behind Zeds is not a new one. I’ve had it for years and I’ve started and scrapped the project more times than I would ever like to admit.  I’ll get to a certain point and look at my work and say “This is great, but if I want to move further, I really should have done it this other way.”  Then comes the inevitable tear down an rebuild.   In fact truth be told if you are reading this this isn’t even the first time I’ve started a development blog on this game. There used to be another one here before until I got sick of it and wiped it in order to start over again.

As destructive as this sounds I have to admit there has yet to be a subsequent version of the game that was worse than the previous one.   As Thomas Edison said ” I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Luckily each time I restart this project I feel like I’m getting closer and closer.

My most recent tear down came right after my Oculus Rift  Unity extended trial ran out.  I fully acknowledge that this is a terrible reason to restart the project.  I could have continued with the free version of Unity without real-time shadows, Oculus integration, or Coherent UI or I could have dished out the $75 dollars a month Unity wants for their software. Unfortunately money is tight (read non-existent), and I don’t want to cripple development with a restricted engine.  Not to mention that I’d still need funds for third party unity marketplace pieces to fill in the holes in the unity platform.  The final nail in the coffin of the last unity build was that a week previous to my trial running out was that Unreal had announced their new engine was available as a software as a service business model for only $20 a month.

So basically this is one long post just to say that I have restarted this project yet again. This time using the Unreal engine. More posts to follow soon.