Anchorpoint for indie development - Midheimur

Project Midheimur was started by Lukas Kratky and Michael Mutnansky and is an open world role playing game that features the Slavic world between 5th and 6th century. You must protect the land from a god of war by solving various quests, such as unlocking caves and fighting manipulated tribes.

Lukas, could you tell us more about yourself?

Hello everyone! My name is Lukas Kratky, and I was born 33 years ago in Slovakia. From the beginning of my career in the electrical industry, later in the automotive quality, I felt that my destiny was not to follow the repetitive path of the consumer world, but to work on something where I could fully manage my imagination and storytelling, and I was not alone. This is where our story and our foundation was laid. Our legendary journey began, limited by finances, in our spare time. Me and my good friend Michael started working on a prototype of our own game.

Tell us about your project Midheimur

Project Midheimur is an open world, third person game with an authentic approach to Slavic and other cultures which were living in Central Europe between 5 and 6th century. We will play as Assar, a man without a clear past living near Slavic settlement. Slavic ancient gods begin to influence local people's minds. Forces of evil are crossing into our realm through a wall of giants. Assar solves quests, exploring caves, battling tribes controlled by the god of war, and aims to halt this intrusion into our lands

Where can we find it?

Right now the project is in the development phase, and we are considering where the best place to release it will be, at least as a free demo for everyone. Most information can be found on our official Discord channel.

Can you tell us about the technical side of things? What tools are you using?

The project itself runs on Epic Games' Unreal Engine 5.2. The whole development is supported by various editors, but the main ones are Visual Studio, Blender, Substance painter, Photoshop and everything is glued together through Anchorpoint to Azure DevOps. Landscape of the map is scanned by LIDAR in precious resolution, and it is the real location of the northwest Slovak Republic with a total area of 64 square kilometers.

When did you start using Anchorpoint?

We started using Anchorpoint about 3 or 4 months ago. During that time, we realized that it's impossible to work on such a big world with so many assets and functionalities in separate folders. We tried various source control systems, but they were too expensive, too complicated, or some of them did not work properly for large files like we use.

Was it easy to get started?

Simple? It was extremely easy compared to other more expensive products. There was only one problem for us, and that was resolving conflicts for some files in Unreal that remained locked for certain users. But Anchorpoint developers are very active, and they updated the source control and added a very simple conflict resolution management to Anchorpoint, where you just pick which version of the changed file you want to use in the merged project. No more conflict problems. Perfect work.

What problems does Anchorpoint solve for you?

No more SSDs hanging around the city on teammates' PCs. No more uploading to Google drives and then somehow merging it with my finger closed. Now we really have near real-time source control with clear controls.

Why is it a good choice for version control?

It solved all the problems of small indie developers who are not in the same office. It connected the whole project and improved the quality of our work. Clear history of changes and revisions. A big plus is that administrators have the right to set roles for team members for even better team control. Anchorpoint also gave us the Indie Game Developer price. It helps us keep the project alive because without this help this dream wouldn't be possible.

Thank you so much, Lukas for taking the time. Take a look at the Midheimur website.

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