Surprise surprise, I'm announcing it so soon. And... speaking of which, why?

Well now my dear friend, I have quite the news for you.

SHOWMAN'S: The Shadow is going to be developed in Range Engine!

For those of you who may not know, Range Engine is basically Blender's game engine but with many improvements and optimizations. It has a fairly promising future, even if its development has been a little silent.

I threw together a scene in Range Engine, then copied it over to Blender 2.78 and ran it in its game engine, which is what SHOWMAN'S: The Awakening uses. Keep in mind that the models of Showman are much higher quality than what I normally limit myself to, even in the Blender screenshot.

Both of these screenshots were taken while the game engines were running. Right away you can see Range Engine has a pretty sweet ambient occlusion filter, which really helps keep things from looking flat (I had to use transparent PNGs in The Awakening to make the shading look nice in that game). It makes the shading look a lot more natural in Range Engine.

One of the biggest deals for me personally is Range Engine's performance compared to Blender's game engine. It can run this scene with multiple high-quality Showman models much better than what Blender can. This means I can make my character models have just a little more extra detail and look a little smoother than what I was limited to prior.

Range Engine also seems to have a much cleaner way of exporting games, allowing them to be exported in 64 bit and 32 bit, and also the game's icon can be changed as well, which is super nice. So this time around, you'll know you're opening the game and not a Blender file!

There's a lot of small and nice additions I absolutely love in Range Engine, such as a built-in sky, complete with a sun and stars, the ability to have particle effects like fire, falling snow, and smoke. There's more to it than that and I'm really excited to start using it!

Unfortunately, I can't seem to animate the emission / transparency of a material in Range Engine, but after some thinking and finding some work arounds, I realized it's actually not much of a big deal!

Back to the topic of SHOWMAN'S: The Shadow, yes, this game is the new "Long Hours". A lot of stuff is being worked on, and a there's still quite a bit to plan out, but all I can say right now is that I am absolutely thrilled to work on this game. It's far, far superior to what Phobia: Long Hours would've been and I'm so happy this is the version of the game I get to work on now.

There will no doubt be some hurdles but I'm hoping this one will have a much smoother development than SHOWMAN'S: The Awakening. Considering Range Engine is basically Blender's game engine (but again, much better), development should be a LOT faster than it would've been if I made it in UE4 or Godot.

It's still going to be some time until any super exciting teasers pop up, and I considered saving this announcement until I had more to share, but I figured it wouldn't be a bad idea since now I am pretty confident that I can get this game up and going. Also the Range Engine thing was rather exciting to me personally and I decided to add that to this post.

Stay tuned for updates! I am very excited for you all to see what I have in store for this one...