I want to start February’s (late) producer letter off on the right foot so to all of our supporters, Thank You!  Not only have we seen overwhelming support with our Builder’s and Founders Tiers but we had a very successful start to internal testing. This was of course supported by our internal testers who were not only available for our random “Hey are 25 of you available right now?” tests, but also made themselves available for several of our planned tests.

As of this writing, one of our tests had over 286 player connections running at 60FPS while all running around in a very small “battleground” environment hacking and slashing. Big hat’s off to Mark’s vision of focusing on massive realm on realm battles first and Andrew’s awesome coding and leadership of his engineering team for making it happen! Our Internal Testers also have seen improvement with the look of our models as we added other features to the rendering engine.

For what some of you don’t know, the start of Internal Testing, from my perspective, was the end of Milestone 1. We hit almost all of our goals and missed only a handful which we completed soon after. We’ve tried to be agile in our focus and balance construction of the game along with updates and treats for our backers and followers. Game development is always full of home runs, hits, misses and errors. Looking back over Milestone 1 I’m confident in saying we know why they happened and how to avoid and improve moving forward.

We also did a major overhaul of our website and added the Builder-level Tiers for those that missed the initial Kickstarter/PayPal campaign. Some of the Founders tiers are also back up with several hard to resist goodies! Of course this comes with some promises on our side. First among them is The Depths. The scary cool dungeon we’ve been concepting will finally be a reality. It’s something I personally am excited about as I will also be heavily involved in it’s creation as I also serve as the Lead Environmental Artist here as well being keeper of the spreadsheets and turtles. If any of you read Nuada’s tale you will know it’s not a happy place. As you may have seen we’ve begun work on the larger races of our world. The Giants! We have several more cool, and possibly surprising ideas up our collective sleeves for future stretch goals. Is there something you’d like to see? Make a pledge and get into our forums to have your voices heard.

Moving forward over the next month we’ll be focusing on continued server and client performance and stability. We hope to continue adding art to the client and recently added some simple combat. The big goal is even larger numbers of people in testing with a continued frame rate of 60fps. We hope to see you there!

P.S.  Apologies for the late update. Things have been moving fairly quickly and have required a lot of time on my end to not only push, but also to keep up. 🙂 I joked this morning I’ll be writing March’s letter next week.

– Tyler Rockwell

Producer and Artist