Rooted Weekly Dev Log: Week 26, 2026

This week started with moving the whole game onto the latest engine version, then went to a fresh pass on the build system and on the creatures and human enemies that fight you. None of this is in the public build.

On the latest engine version

The biggest single piece of the week, by volume, was moving Rooted onto Unreal Engine 5.8. After the move I went through a long series of checks to fix and adapt the game to the new engine version, the kind of pass that touches a lot of systems and makes sure everything still behaves the way it should. The character wardrobe was one of the things brought across and validated on both body types.

A fresh pass on building

After leaving the build system alone for a few weeks, I came back to it for a new pass on optimization and game feel. Placing pieces lines up and snaps to what is already there as you go, the preview shows what a piece costs before you commit, and the placement controls are cleaner. This pass was about how building runs and feels, not new pieces to build.

The bear actually commits now

I also spent a good chunk of the week on the bear's melee. Before, it would plant its feet and swing at the spot where you used to be, so sprinting away dodged most of its hits for free. Now it drives forward into its strikes and tracks you as you move, and it reads where you are going before committing, so sprinting away no longer gets you out of everything for free. The tuning is data-driven, so it can be adjusted per creature without touching code, and it is moddable.

Smarter human enemies

The other combat thread was the human enemies. I improved how they decide what to do in a fight, when to push in, when to hold, when to fall back, and pulled that decision into a cleaner, tested form.

• Behaviour that varies - different groups of enemies can fight differently, which is the groundwork for distinct personalities as the cast grows.
• Lighter to run - their decision-making costs less, which keeps things smooth when several of them are fighting at once.
• Tested - I added tests around the decision that surfaced a few cases which were silently wrong before.

Also this week

• Some internal tooling and cleanup, the kind of thing that only the development side ever sees.

That's the week from the development side!

Mat