Developer Update #1 – Catching up with the Community
Hello Friends
Firstly we’d like to thank everyone for their passionate support so far. You may have noticed there hasn’t been a lot of public content from us lately. This is the first in a recurring segment to help keep the community up to date with our progress. This post is intended to explain what we’ve been up to and what we’re doing now.
What we’ve been doing for the past month
To cut a long story short, we’ve been doing Funding Grant Applications. To be clear these are not a guarantee, and they are asking for a very limited budget. In the past and near future this project has entirely been a volunteer effort by our team. Aside from the kind donations from our Patrons, we’ve received zero outside funding. Counterintuitively, some people may have noticed we’ve limited our Patreon donations to $3 USD for the moment.
We have already had a few questions about Kickstarter and crowdfunding. We see a future crowdfunding campaign as something that could be hugely beneficial to the success of the game. However given the nature of crowdfunding, we would prefer to keep that option in reserve till as late as possible, as the community grows and word of the project spreads. These Funding Grants give us an opportunity for some early stage funding, without us putting a drain on the kind folk in our community.
If you really want to help us, for the moment the best thing you can do is to share the project with everyone around you, be it gamers, family, or random strangers on the street. It might not seem like much but it's honest work, and it will hugely increase the chances of success for this project. The best way you could do this is by helping us grow the discord server: https://discord.gg/Tr2DxFh
What we’re doing right now
Combat is our number one priority at the moment. Given it is the capstone of our game, it’s the first area we want to get razor sharp and ready for the community to see. That said there is a lot that goes into a system of this nature.
Mr Z has already created a beautiful set of combat systems based around tried and true methods. However while the backend is looking very shiny, much of the bits you see as a player, still need work. For example, the combat animations are still using a quick dev placeholder. The animations are a priority area, given it basically bottlenecks showing off Mr.Z’s work to you.
Demonstrating the combat systems is our primary goal at the moment. Currently we’re tuning the animations for display but we plan on improving these further in the future.
On the art front KZ has been hard at work on Gore/Dismemberment, hopefully soon we can all watch the heads roll. Clan and heraldry work is well underway creating systems that allow for emblems and colour schemes.
Goremesh & Heraldry Examples
Sound effects, UI, Animations, Crafting, Inventory, Ui and Environment are among some of the other areas we have been spending some time on as of late, with examples of these to come in the following updates.
We plan on making these dev blogs biweekly to keep everyone up to date with our progress, of course as we are a small team and things can get in the way but this is the plan going forward.
Thank you very much for everyone's ongoing support.