Much Progress

We have been hard at work getting everything ready. We have made the three front page illustrations larger and have cleaned up our donation zombie which you can see to the right. The $30,000.00 figure is not set in stone at this time. We are still calculating expenses with some recent changes we have made to the core game. (Thanks Aidan and Den!)

We have been heavy at work coding on the back end of the website.

The game’s graphic theme will be a 2D based top down shooter. We have some really fun base game mechanics planned. The rest, YOU, the gaming community, will create!

We are creating an “asset pool” system, which will help keep this experiment from failing. Let us use monsters as an example:

We set aside $X.XX for monster graphic assets which covers the cost for X amount of monster graphics, say 30 monsters. These do not include different monster classes. For instance re-coloring a monster and it is harder to kill. You can find in the Diablo games.

So as we develop the game with the community, we count off the number of monster assets we have used. “Okay, we need a low level very common monster enemy, enemy fodder if you will.” that would be one monster graphic asset so the monster graphic pool count goes from 30 to 29. We will continue to refine these ideas.

I hope I have explained the above well enough. If anyone has questions please ask in the chat room or community forums.

We have a new programmer/designer on our team, Martijn Gerkes who is very familiar with the Unity engine and game development in general. He has already been a tremendous help!

We have a new writer to help develop the story and edit our materials. His name is Aaron Rosenberg and he is an icon in the Sci-Fi and Fantasy novel industry. Here is just a taste of what he has written:

Dungeons & Dragons: Races of Destiny
EverQuest: Realms of Norrath: Dagnor’s Cauln
Star Trek: Collective Hindsight – Psi Phi Hall of Fame Award
Starcraft: Queen of Blades
Warhammer: Hour of the Daemon
Warhammer: Lure of the Lich Lord – Gold ENnie, Best Adventure Award
World of Warcraft: Beyond the Dark Portal, Nominee, 2009 Scribe Award
World of Warcraft: Tides of Darkness

We are thrilled that Aaron contacted us and that he is excited to be involved!

We are speaking with the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research and have become a member of Team Fox, which is the underlying organization of the Fox Foundation. They will most likely be the beneficiary of our community’s good will.

While these numbers are not set in stone we are thinking that 25% of the funds raised and 25% of the revenue generated by the game will be given to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research / Team Fox. We will also be adding educational material to the game about Parkinson’s. This material will go into complex detail for those who are interested and we will make sure that it does not come off in a “cheesy” way.

Please forgive the long time between news updates, as you can tell we have been very busy with coding the back end on the website, setting up a few business things, setting up the Kickstarter page for future launch and building the game structure. Remember, we still have our day jobs. We are hoping for a late July launch as we want everything to be fully prepared.

I would like to thank everyone who is helping. This experiment is building good momentum and I believe there are many fun times to come!

- William Weaver