A Gaze into the Future - V (Patreon)

Time sure does fly. It's already time for the 5th full blown Gaze since I started writing these. As I wrote earlier with the weeklies; We've been working on Showroom "quality of life" -improvements, like proper color picker, and pattern sorting, so let's show and talk about something else in this one x)

First up, the basics; How did we fare this month? I personally feel like we're quite a bit behind in schedule, I'm definitely trying to catch up, but I'm currently running sick for the third week in a row, which slows me down a lot more than I like. Progress is still happening at a fairly constant rate, I just hate losing parts of day to being ill. It's nothing serious, don't worry, and I'm sure it will go away soon and I can finally focus 115.75% on Hunt and Snare ^^ ...speaks volumes that I haven't had time to switch to my new computer (which I bought a month ago), and I'm still using my own computer that I fixed xD

I think the latest build was pretty good though, with an actual full act and showroom stage, and we got 2100 downloads for it. It's not the highest we've got, but it's still a really nice figure. I think splitting the release into two parts works great; Initially we got huge bursts each release, but it died down very fast, now traffic is pretty even all around, no rough spikes either way. Steady is better in a long run :3

I have rewritten our goals, instead of being "specie gated" as it was before, it now has something a bit more substantial, and I don't want to lock species out, because I want a lot of species and I am sure you do too! New goals are more "progressive" and feature focused. A lot of those are great suggestions from you folks that I'd definitely love doing, but it all depends on how high we can climb. The higher we go, the more people I can bring onboard, the cooler things we can do! ^^

Also I added three Maecenas tiers, basically they are super patron tiers whom get special content made for them monthly. They're not intended as actual tiers every new (or old) patron would consider, but rather just options for those who wish to support us. The Bronze, Silver, and Gold tiers are basically the mainstay, the main tiers to consider for pledges. Iron, the new early access and developer post tier, was dropped to 1 USD to make it a bit more enticing and easy to access, but it's function is less access to Patreon build, and more just act as a bridge between public and patrons ^^

So what happens next month, you ask. Thank you for asking! I'm going to spend most of the next month working on the first head (you can check the Sketchfab embed on top for the sculpted head. Note: the body doesn't have any textures on it), but we have at least one build, hopefully two, coming too! The next build should be ready in couple of days, it mostly contains what mentioned in the beginning and several new stages for Showroom. The first "official" build for September, it will come somewhere in middle of the month, will be a small build only. I'm hoping to have Faelain heads replaced in game by the end of the September and ready for testing ^^

There's a lot of work I need to do for the heads, as I need to redo parts of the body to fit the "wider throat" of certain species (Scalies :3) and rewrite parts of the animation system to support loading different races into animations, and Hareress will have to redo all the head patterns and go through every single animation to fix the muzzles. September will be a pretty busy month for us all x) I'm also aiming to do the fur shaders for the heads, but I'm not sure yet. The current model has "hard sculpted" fur, it might be temporary, or it might not be... depends on how it turns out and how good the fur shaders work :3

After we're done with the heads update (I'm calling it R4, because it's a big turner <3) we'll start working on R5 which is currently planned to be a bigger gameplay push! Focus on R5 is a new movement system, gunplay, basic conversation and inventory systems. I can't give any estimates on R5 though and it might be split to smaller releases too. I'll update on that later ^^

That's all for now, you pretties!

Best regards,
Ruffleneck