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Cytuj: The last six months since our Kickstarter campaign have been nothing short of a rollercoaster ride. From the highs of testing out exciting new middleware options and seeing our world starting to take shape, to the lows of health and personal issues, and challenges relating to middleware integration, it has been a crazy ride. It would be a lie to say we have made as much progress as we would have liked in the last six months, but while it has truly been a trial by fire, we are still as committed as ever to bring the world the greatest open-world medieval life-simulation game it has ever seen!
This is all very fluffy information though, and I am sure you all want to know what this means in terms of the actual progress with the game’s development. I will preface this with a reminder that we are still over a year away from our Alpha goal, and much of the development at this stage is merely prototyping systems, working on architectural designs, and laying the game’s foundations.
With all that in mind however, things are progressing well, so here’s a quick update:
The World
The continent of Aaldnarech is roughly completed. Ongoing work will be carried out finishing the hand-sculpting of the terrain, adding detail as well as rivers and streams etc. The bulk of the work is being carried out on Thaal and its surrounding area, which will be the focus of our prototype. The area is shaping up really well, but there is still plenty of work to do! Here is a screenshot showing the current state of the area:
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(click to enlarge)
Middleware
We are just working through our final issues with integrating SpeedTree 6, and Havok are being very helpful working with us to resolve our issues. The trees really are starting to look great though, and we are starting to look into some of the more interesting things we can do with the technology to really bring our game to life.
We have been testing out two options for weather simulation middleware: Truesky and Silverlining. Truesky has slightly better-looking clouds, but is much more expensive. Silverlining has much more detailed cloud simulations (with various cloud types), but seems limited in other areas. We are not sure at this time which we will use (if any), but both provide some exciting options for our weather simulation.
Art
The art team has been super busy, and we can honestly say our concept art team is now world-class. As you will have seen with our recent concept releases (and leaks... *looks at Lee*), the quality of the concept art they are currently churning out is amazing. All of the creatures we will be putting into the prototype are concepted, and the team is moving to work on structures and POI’s next. The modelling team is working to an equally high standard, with some really great models being created, and with some real magic being added by our animation team. We can’t wait until we get to the stage where we can show you it all come to life properly!
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(click to enlarge)
Programming
The programming team has been equally busy, working through engine updates, integrating new middleware, and prototyping critical systems. The foundations are almost complete for the client code, and the basic server. Once complete, there is a huge block of work relating to fleshing out the basic game server, and refining the game client. Right now though, you can’t imagine the excitement we felt when finally we had a couple of clients logged in and running around together on our test island (ok... sliding; we will hook up those animations soon ).
Sound
The sound team. They aren’t as in your face as the art team, nor as big a target as the programming team, but without them the game just wouldn’t feel right at all. We are blessed to have some simply astounding talent on that team. From the voice talents of Gabriel Wolf, to the composition magic of Miles Hancock, they are creating everything from beautiful music to terrifying creature sounds. Right now they are getting to grips with fmod, so we can start getting all of their fantastic work into the game.
Writing
As you will have seen in the recently-released lore pieces, the writing team is top of the game. They have been hard at work fleshing out the lore and backstory of the game, writing out descriptions for everything and anything that needs creating by the artists, editing documents and writing tasty little morsels to release to our ravenous fans. There are some really exciting things coming out of the writing team, and we can’t wait to share more with you over the coming months.
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