Hello everyone,

It’s been a while since I last shared an update. After releasing the demo for Not Us, life pulled me away from development for a time. Now that I’ve had a chance to revisit the project, I want to share where things currently stand.

To put it simply: while some parts were improved, much more ended up broken, and the workload quickly snowballed beyond reason.

The core issue was a critical design decision early in development—I heavily relied on third-party assets, systems, and frameworks from a wide range of sources. While that allowed me to rapidly prototype and get things working, it came at the cost of stability, maintainability, and scalability. I invested countless hours stitching together incompatible systems and adapting tools that were never designed to work together.

When I recently returned to optimize the project, I ended up breaking hidden dependencies, damaging logic I’d forgotten I’d implemented, and unraveling far more than I could patch. In short: I created a mess too complex to salvage efficiently.

That said, my original goal with Not Us was to build something that is playable and release it—in that regard, I succeeded. The demo has been live for nearly two years, and I’m proud of what I learned through it.

My focus going forward is to catch up on the current state of Unreal Engine and the broader game development landscape. More importantly, I’m using this experience to refine my workflow—prioritizing modular design, performance optimization, and long-term scalability.

Thank you to everyone who supported the project along the way. I’m looking forward to building something better, cleaner, and far more sustainable.

— Anthony
(Studio Squires)