(article first posted by Misotsune at https://misotsune.substack.com/p/production-setbacks-perseverance?s=r)

“Greetings Pilots!

 

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

A lot has happened in the past month; some good, some bad, some neutral and while I wish I’d only ever have great news to share, I feel it’s necessary to be fully transparent with our community on what’s happening behind the scenes.

 

Let’s start with the bad to end things on a bright note.

 

Setbacks

In the original planning for the MVP, we’ve allowed ourselves a buffer of around 2 weeks, meaning that we’ve planned it in a way where the MVP should be shippable 2 weeks prior to launch. This is a fairly common practice to allow for development snags and blockers along the way, which are almost always unavoidable. It’s impossible to plan every eventuality, after all.

However, we didn’t anticipate 5 key team members getting infected with Covid-19 and suffering fairly strong symptoms for almost a month (including a hospitalisation at one point) from January to now.

Luckily nearly everyone has recovered fairly well, except for one still ongoing case.

For those of you who know our team size, you will know that this is a massive blow to productivity as we most certainly don’t want anyone with a high fever to continue working, potentially exacerbating the issue. Health always comes first.

This of course means that the delivery of the MVP will be delayed due to the missed weeks and increased scope, the extent of the delay is currently being planned around. Though I do not anticipate a longer delay than ~6 weeks, we will keep an open communications channel for this and most certainly will be showing you the current status and what has been done so far over the course of the next weeks.

 

Production

Building a project that is Game-First differentiates from the workload and scope of other crypto games that mostly focus on getting basic gameplay (or lack thereof) shipped as early as possible to kickstart the economy posthaste.

We’re not interested in being just another “click map to enter level, fight, go back to map, repeat” type of mobile game and as such the MVP features a story introduction, cutscenes, 5 different musical pieces, as well as combat. With 4-directional movement, extra story content and dialogues following in an update a few weeks later.

At the same time, we’re working on an animated trailer for which we have finished recording the voice-over together with the amazingly skilled Robyn Addison (you may know her as Y’Shtola in Final Fantasy 14) who will be lending her voice to Princess Yani Sarh.

Let me tease this a little bit with the first part of the Storyboard for the trailer:

 

Since we’re building more than just combat, there is a ton of detail work required for the capital cities, such as buildings, background elements, flora and fauna, background layers, movement scripts, interaction scripts, etc.

(example of background element in capital cities)

 

It also means a rethinking of scaling. If it were just combat, the size of Solarbots and enemies would be much more lenient, but once you add buildings and humans, we have to make sure that the scale remains both sensible and consistent:

 

We’re also putting a lot of thought into the various different animation styles for combat itself. The animations we’ve shown you so far are all very fluent and very human-like in movement, which is something we specifically chose for certain Solarbots and abilities, however we also want to have more rigid, robot-like movement such as:

Perseverance

During all the production and the setbacks, we’ve continued onboarding people at a steady pace. Since the last update on this, we’ve grown by two artists (with one additional artist currently being talked to), an infrastructure engineer as well as a game developer.

The onboarding phase will likely continue until May or June which is the projected time frame for us reaching the team-size we initially planned for in the first growth phase.

 

Upcoming Sales

I know you’re looking forward to the Player Housing and Guild Hall sale, but considering the fact that we have to delay the MVP launch a bit, we do not want to ship a sale before as it simply doesn’t feel right so please bear with us a bit.

While we don’t want to hold the sales yet, there is some information around the Guild Halls especially that I would like to share in order to dispel some of the confusion.

 

Guild Halls will, for the most part, not be a simple public sale. Instead, we have opened an E-Mail account for Guild Hall applications. We won’t ask you to write us a dissertation on why you deserve to be greenlit for the Guild Hall sale, but we don’t want the majority of Guild Halls to fall into hands that use them for nothing but speculation and profit extraction prior to the game launching. The details of this will be announced in a future blogpost and announcement very soon.

 

Thank you so much for your understanding and we’re looking forward to continue working as hard as we can for an exciting, fun and deep future for all of us. At the end of the day, we want to navigate Eld as Pilots with you ourselves!”