Lore-Writer's Blog: Goodbye 2020! (Patreon)

With this being the last Lore-Writer's blog of the year, I thought it'd be appropriate to just reflect on 2020, and give you an idea of our plans going into 2021. 

As 2020 comes to a close, all I can say is, "Good riddance!" 2020 has been a really rough year for everyone, including game developers. But despite the difficulty, we still managed to make progress on Day of Dragons as seen in our Holiday Open Test Event, and for that I am thankful. 

Looking back on 2020, the beginning was really hard for us, the drama we were still dealing post launch of our Alpha, and then covid happened, and then shutdowns and masks and fear and sickness and people losing their jobs and just so many things, but we managed to keep working on our game. In the early months of 2020, we were hard at work designing the dragons via 3D Concepts, figuring out what they will sound like, and rebuilding the game code from scratch. The old code had a lot of flaws and bugs and was using a buggy version of UE4 and so it was best to just start from scratch using the alpha as a reference. Designing the dragons was a team effort where we took the designs that were in my head, concepted them, corrected their anatomy, and finalized them. Sometimes this took as few as 3 weeks, sometimes as long as 12 weeks per dragon, it just depended on when we got it to where we were happy with it. We received a lot of criticism for concepting the dragons, but it is a process that had to be done before we could begin modeling as we needed to know what they'd look like before we began sculpting them. Once the concepts were done, we started the process of modeling, UV's, texturing, and then rigging, weighting, and animating. And then testing. And then sending them back for geo/poly/uv/texture/rig/weight/animation fixes. All in all, it was a very lengthy process where our fledgling studio had a large learning curve to overcome since these things don't come with a manual. But learn we did and the more we learned the more we improved. Now we are able to make new models in much less time that it took because of experience. That's part of making a game. Overcoming challenges and getting better at what you do. 2020 was our trial by fire, 2021 will be our "day" of dragons and we hope you're as excited as we are.

Looking at 2021 (after we get off our much needed holiday vacation) we will start working on implementing AI into the closed test, the 2 AI models which will be coming to Genesis 1.0 are finished and 1/2 are animated. These 2 AI will provide players with a non-player food source which is important for game balance and since these are our models, we don't need any placeholders (yay). In January the Inferno Ravager texture and polish should be done and then he will be ready for rigging and animation. But he is in line as the Shadow Scale will be first, before finishing the Magma & Flame Stalker. Concepts will also begin again in February, as we will be going back to the drawing board on the Bioluminescent Dragon and starting from scratch. We know how important this dragon is for backers and we want to get it right. Once that is done we will begin on the Behemoth Ice Drake, the Micro Feathered, and the Behemoth Fire Dragon. Following those will be Glacier and Thunder, the Ice and Lightning Elemental concepts. As for modeling, we have the Healer and Nurse starting in January/February, followed by the Ice Wyvern, Hybrid, Blitz, and Sandslayer Worm. Following those will be the Bio, the 2 Behemoths, and the Micro. 

2021 is looking really good for Day of Dragons development, by the end of the year, all the Kickstarter concepts will be done, Genesis will be released, the Alpha (and drama) will be just a memory, several of the Kickstarter dragons will be in the game, and the game will be feature complete with just polish and visual patches needed between content updates. That is, unless 2021 is even worse than 20... ehh.. I'm not going to say it, let's just hope for the best. ;)

On behalf of everyone of us here at Beawesome Games, thank you for your support and may each of you have a BEAWESOME New Year!