Behind the Scenes 2/1/2024 (Patreon)

Hey, everyone!

Just wanted to check in and give you all a bit of an update on what's been happening behind the scenes. Things may appear to be moving at a slightly slower pace, but I assure you, progress isn't stalled. Rather, I'm juggling multiple balls simultaneously so that we can advance on several fronts.

At the suggestion of one of you to include wiki style documentation, I finally started working on it. The idea here is to include comprehensive summaries of our lore, a detailed look at our characters, and even walkthrough tips for players. After carefully considering a few options, I decided to go with a trusted old friend - Confluence. An Atlassian product, Confluence offers some incredibly robust capabilities for concise and precise documentation. It's user-friendly, packs all the essentials, but regrettably does come with a price for opening up to public access. However, the convenience and capabilities it offers, from organized content to embedded multimedia, will certainly be of invaluable help in keeping us in sync.

Simultaneously, I'm working on implementing scrum management in a more tractable manner. As many of you will recall, I made builds every three weeks with some success. Now, I want to integrate this with an ongoing task list, effectively creating a live feed of our developments. This way, everyone can stay up-to-date on the progress and know what to anticipate next. To streamline development process, I've decided to stick with Jira, a powerful tool for development management. Its functionalities, including task assignment, prioritization, and project status visibility, will hopefully pave the way for efficient team coordination and communication in future.

I must admit, this project is feeling the pinch financially, and I've been actively seeking additional funding channels. One strong option I'm considering is joining a software development company full-time. While this means that eight hours of my day would be spent away from our own project, it currently seems like a necessary sacrifice. Remember, the journey has been long, over five years now, and the dream of assembling a full-fledged development team remains unfulfilled. For now, our focus is to gather a small, dedicated group to help wrap up the first chapter.

On the brighter side, progress with our creature character design is coming along nicely. As shared in previous posts, the character is a composite of individual models - spines, torsos, heads, legs, hands, claws, horns, etc. My goal has been to optimize performance by merging some of these models and creating blendshapes. It was a painstaking task but seeing the resulting model is truly gratifying. As for the creature's genitalia, I've had to sift through the ring of possibilities that Smutbase offered and finally narrowed the options down to three possible matches. With the pre-selection phase done, we can now proceed to sculpt the chosen model in ZBrush. Be sure to check out the images I've shared to get a detailed look at the work so far.

As always, your patience and unwavering support are massively appreciated. Looking forward to sharing more updates soon. Keep tuned in!

Best,Alexandraus