Hey everyone time for your weekly update. Last week Flavien and I switched places regarding available coding time. Flavien was busy getting ready to move into a new apartment which took up most of his time. I, however, was able to fix the last outstanding bugs with path rendering (that I’m currently aware of). There’s one remaining rendering feature concerning large shapes that I have to finish before I can start final testing and code cleanup but that shouldn’t take too long. After that it will be onto adding support for font rendering, text layout, and finally integration into the game.
On the art side Kristian continues his work on final land base geometry and Jan on the station material pass. Dan spent last week producing some short videos of extremely high quality 360 degree renders of the interceptor, corvette, and bomber. There’s still some on-going post-production work but we hope to release them in the next weekly update. Unfortunately they don’t include materials since we didn’t want to spend the time it would take to rebuild all of our materials in 3rd party rendering applications. That being said the detail work of the geometry really comes through and we’re looking forward to showing them to everyone.
More information on the state of the new networking code should come once Flavien gets everything sorted out with his new apartment. The networking code represents our largest blocker, it was our biggest risk item, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel and once we get past it we expect we’ll be able to move quickly on the rest of the Alpha to-do list.
It does feel like a long, slow slog through some heavy-duty coding and backend stuff the last few weeks. I’m sure it’ll all be worth it, but could @INovaeFlavien or @INovaeKeith give any indication of the overall progress of this phase? It’s hard to tell across weeks of updates that have recently all sounded quite similar.
Networking and UI are obviously essential to get functioning before gameplay testing can work, but it does feel like we’re having to wait a very long time to get to the exciting bit of development!
We don’t blame you for feeling that way. The last few months have been a bit slower than we would have preferred and that’s primarily due to 2 things:
What we’ve been working on is quite complicated. For the UI specifically it ended up being far more complicated than I had anticipated from my initial read-through of the paper.
There have been a number of things in our personal lives that have popped up with varying levels of disruption. Some of these were anticipated - such as Flavien moving into a new apartment sometime this spring - others were not.
It should be noted that at no point have I been paid a cent from any backer money. In fact I’ve been working without any source of income since the beginning of January. I was expecting a part-time contract to come through however after 3 months it ended up never materializing. Unfortunately we can’t afford to pay me enough to break even on my bills at the moment therefore the time I am able to devote to the game varies considerably week to week as I try to find paying work.
What this means is that by not paying me we’re financially in a good spot. Without raising another cent we can afford Flavien to continue working full-time for ~2 more years. The flip side is that development moves a fair bit slower and it’s likely that we won’t be ready to ship the game until late 2018. If I were to work full-time with pay we would run out of money by this time next year. We decided it’s better to ship the game late than risk never shipping it at all.
We only raised the minimum on Kickstarter and the reason we picked $300k is because it was quite literally the absolute minimum - with tremendous struggle - that we believed we could ship the game. Thus far that’s proven true. We’ll get the game done but due to the aforementioned “tremendous struggle” it will take longer than we had initially hoped.
As for my availability, it’s gone down mostly last week and partially this week as the new appartement I’m moving to is cheaper ( that’s the main reason for moving, my rent had inflated too quickly these last 5 years compared to its size ), but is also empty - everything has to be done from electricity to painting, so I’m off many hours a day just to get quotes from various people to do the remaining work. I’m staying in Brussels but at the other side, so I’ve got 2 hours of transportation per day for a round trip. Relocation itself is planned for end of may / first week of june.
I feel it goes without saying but I’m sure you don’t mind being reminded… I, and I’m sure all of the long-time die-hard community as well as the new backers who understand the situation, are tremendously appreciative of the sacrifices you are both making to bring this project to fruition and we hope it pays back in the long run!
Thank you both for the honest answers! This is why we love you guys! I am astounded at the personal sacrifices that have been made because of the passion for bringing this game to life.
@INovaeFlavien, good luck with the moving - I will be in a similar situation myself soon (moving because of rent vs size) so I sympathise greatly.
Great respect to all of you at INovae and keep up the good work
