June *Update* (Patreon)

Hey Gearheads!

May was pretty crazy.  We were unable to regain contact with a few of the people we lost contact with as part of the pandemic craziness, but we've established some new connections to keep things moving forward.

Among those are a couple animators we're trying to get setup with for custom animations.  These would be in SFM format, so they'd be going to the videos only, but once we get established with them we can start poles for characters and there's a huge library to choose from. 

Taxes

In case you haven't heard, Patreon is adding tax to pledges.  How the whole system works is a little confusing to me since there are tons of settings for the creator side that manage this, but I've set things as low as possible to try to lessen the blow.  Anyone super pissed about this, might be a good time to hop over to subscribestar.  You can read more about this HERE 

I've spent most of last month going back and forth with the developer of the patreon integration app and my webhost trying to figure out the connection issues.  Technically it works, but there are error messages and the way it's working isn't ideal for me or you guys.  So hopefully we'll get this sorted out soon and I can start funneling content through the website instead of directly on Patreon.  That'll free the reins a little on what content can be posted since you'd be going there for content instead of here.

We made some good progress with the Huntress Hole last month.  We made a big push on the interaction system which no consist of teleporting, controller walking, UI interaction, picking up items, force grabbing and item placement.

We also made some great progress in setting up the optimized version of the stage.  All the floors, ceilings, walls and wall items have been optimized for performance and the original props added back in place.  The props will need to be optimzed as well, but for now we'll leave them in as is.  We've done some testing with lighting and graphics and have made quite a bit of progress there to getting the characters to "fit" better in the environment.

The goal is still to have an update for the Huntress Hole at least once a month, so the next one will most likely be an exploration update with a few characters added in.

I know it prob seems like the POV series has been missing for a while, but it's more that it's shifted.  The frequent version is in the video content, which we've been consistently releasing week after week with a pretty good variety of characters, positions and situations.  Behind the scenes we've been working on the more in-depth story based ones.  We've been working on the piolet version of this new format i.e. The Azula Experience for a while now and we're very close to having one of the formats ready.

The goal was to prepare a VR video version and Unity version for manual control at the same time, but for time sake I'm starting to think it'd be better to release each part as it's ready starting with a 2D version, so you guys can track progress a lot easier.  We've got Naysayer gearing up to continue working on the second release in this new series and we have tons of content already done for a few others like scripts and voice acting.  I think they're going to be awesome and so much better than the previous POV format and if they bring in enough people we can ramp up the production and maybe get them coming out once a month too.

All in all it's been another great month.  We'll keep pushing forward and are super grateful to have you all sharing in the journey.  Your feedback, comments, suggestions and opinions are just as important as mine when it comes to planning things out and I look forward to future conversations over content and direction.

Thank you so much for the support and we'll make June a great month as well!