Folks,

For those of you who may have missed out on our Monday livestream: we have officially announced the date for the opening of Beta 1, which will be this upcoming July 4th, 2018! Mark it on your calendars, folks! If you missed out on the stream with Mark and Andrew where they cover the details and plenty of questions, you can catch that HERE. The team here at CSE is very excited, not only to announce the date, but to deliver a solid experience for our Backers that is well worth the wait! Hop over to our homepage to check out our new countdown clock, courtesy of James!

Of course that was a hard act to follow, but we did our best, with a full week of testing with our IT and Alpha folks! Many thanks for helping us find and fix stability issues on this new build. We spent much of this week also working on the planning for our next sprint, which is just one step on the road to Beta 1. The next several weeks will partially focus on new gameplay mechanics and art for our next scenario! I, Tyler, am personally excited about this one, as I’ll have some time to get back into the zone’s art needs, and maybe do a little streaming!

Overall it’s been a steady week of progress, with everyone heads down working, or gathering for planning and design meetings. If you missed today’s livestream update with Tim and Ben, you can find that HERE.

For all the other highlights of the week, let’s hit our Top Tenish!

Top Tenish:

1. Production – Schedule and Planning: This week, Production has been busy planning our sprints leading to Beta 1 and planning out each step in delivering CU. Our next sprint focuses on Alpha delivery of the Scenario 2 map and mechanics, which should be a lot of fun to test!

2. Testing: Every day this week, we had playtests with our Alpha and IT backers to challenge our scenario system, proxy servers, and UI. Once this build is more stable, we’ll push it to Beta 1 testers.

3. Tech – Scenarios: Caleb has been working on stabilizing our scenarios, and adding UI for players. This will also allow us to help manage these from the back end.

4. Tech – Wip – Item Script support: Christina has completed the first pass of our Item script support. This will first be used in some of our upcoming scenarios, but will also give the game support for focus items and having items affect your character in cool new ways.

5. WIP – Building Mode and General Input: After the input refactor from George, we needed to update building mode. This week, Matt has re-enabled building mode, allowing the placing of blocks, as well as iterating on bug fixes. Additionally, he’s hit several other input bugs with camera movement near plots and chat window clicking.

6. WIP – Art – Characters 2.0: Jon finished off Viking armor updates this week, which was the third round of updates. Next, he’ll begin updating the Arthurian armors.

7. Art – 1 handed Spear Attack: Sandra finished off a new spear animation that will later be used when we add the weapon back into the game. This still needs more work to fill out all the movement animations and one-handed weapon combinations.

8. Art –  Race Specific Backgrounds and VFX concept: Michelle finished off the needed art for the character race backgrounds used during character creation. Today, she began work on VFX concepting, based off info provided by Ben. This work will be used to better define the look of our VFX for things such as more Realm-distinct visuals, better combat readability, and class and ability specific definitions.

9. Art – UI/UX: James finished off a couple of items this week, including 27 new status effect icons, and the new “countdown to beta” timer on our website. Currently, he’s finishing work on the new race backgrounds, previously shown in last week’s update from Michelle.

10. WIP – Art – Place of Power/Scenario 2: Dionne finished an improvement pass on several of the assets used in the new map, including new materials and geometry for the main wall rocks, general rock rubble, and the spike rock edging going around the pit of the first Place of Power. Our next sprint will focus on a solid first pass for art on the entire map.

11. WIP – VFX/SFX – New Status Effects: Mike and dB are both wrapping up the last of the 27 new status effects, which will later be hooked up and tested by Ben. Additionally, they are both focusing on re-hooking up their assets to abilities after our ability XML refactor, so players see and hear the correct assets when using abilities.

12. Art – Casting Animation Support for Melee Weapons: Previously, casting animations would remove your weapon during the cast. Scott is wrapping up an improvement by adding the generic cast animations into the weapon animations so characters will set their weapon to the side, and then cast.

For art this week, we first have some out-of-game renders of the updated Viking heavy armor from Jon. We’re getting far more detail out of our UV changes, as well as better mesh topology and silhouette from the geometry changes!

Below are three of the new race backgrounds, courtesy of Michelle. The first is the Tuatha human, second the Viking Valkyrie, and third, Arthurian Pict. The old character silhouettes will be replaced with new renders using Sandra’s poses, and the updated armor from Jon.

That wraps up art for this week from our talented artists!

We ended the week off on a sweet note today. Special thanks to Arrobee, Mydnitte, and Clan Sverker for the delivery of chocolates!

And more thanks go out to Ludovic for the very large box of Cadbury Cream Eggs! (A personal fav!)

That wraps up the week for us here at CSE. We’re getting lots of work done, and we’re all excited to meet our Backers on the battlefield in Beta 1! Thank you all so, so much for your patience, enthusiasm, and support for a project that we all believe in. Have a great weekend!

– t

P.S. Here’s some extra commas for Max, because he tells me I forget them often. ,,,,,