Hi there,
You are right with the optimisation part. The game was part of our learning process, there are a lot of things that we wish we know at the start of the development. The biggest issue right now is not having soft references. In summary loading the player loads the entire game and this drastically increase the Rig requirement.
If you can get past loading the main map and have decent FPS, you should still be able to play the game. Having a low ram unfortunately pose an issue with what I mention earlier.
A black screen is an indication that the system is running out of memory. With how our project is setup, it demands a lot of space in memory.
It will still take a long time before Project Ark can be marked as complete. We hope that you can play the game with System that meet the game requirement by then