Sorry we haven’t posted a blog for a while, but the truth is, we’ve just been nose to the grindstone. So rather than say nothing at all, leaving you wondering if we’re just twiddling our thumbs, here’s a quick update.
Val and John are working on the village of Animata. It’s a steampunk-y place, and will be the setting of our next video on assembling and animating objects we call “artefactums.” Among other things, they can be used as the “breadcrumb” sources you saw in the world-building video.
We posted one screenshot of the Animata skyline earlier this week, and we’ll post a few more before we release the video. As you will see, it has a very different aesthetic than the other villages you’ve seen so far. It has a grungier, Victorian industrial feel. It is still beautiful, just in a different way.
Gordon has been working on some user interface features, so you lovely mages don’t have to put up with the developer-y interface Val and John have been dealing with. I’ve been bulletproofing the network message handling–the stuff that lets you watch other people doing magic.
And both Gordon and I have had to deal with some particularly tricky bugs this week. How crazy is it that showing some special effects would cause the code to crash when you do a particular sequence of steps an hour later?
We’ve also been working with our attorney on the terms of service and privacy policy. We can’t really move on to alpha without it.
Our web developer has installed the software to run our alpha questionnaire. We still have to get the questions in there, and generate the invitations, but it’s a step forward.
And finally, we need to migrate our mailing list to new service. Back in December, when all you folks started flocking to us and signing up for our mailing lists, we maxed out our allowed outgoing messages. I contacted our hosting service, and they bumped us up to the maximum they ever allow, and we’ve been OK for a while. But guess what? If just ten more people sign up, we’ll be maxed out again! Hence, the new service that will allow us to continue to grow.
Well that’s it for now. Nose back to the grindstone!
