Progress on all fronts--I’m feeling good about the momentum we’re generating!

Cloud Development

Good news, everyone! The servers are back up, which means we can resume work on persistent connections and begin work on continuous delivery--which I’ll talk more about in a future monthly.

The issue turned out to be a couple issues. Firstly, due to the addition of stateful services our hardware demands increased. We needed our VMs to have fast hard disk access available for rapid data storage and retrieval of our reliable collections. We also had a bug that found its way in during the conversion, causing a couple of our services to steal more processor than they needed. This made troubleshooting them difficult, as even the cluster manager page couldn’t secure enough processor to load.

Upon resolution our services started working flawlessly. Both of these issues would have been much more easily identifiable had our changes been done in smaller increments. Let this be a warning to other developers out there: Hubris will take its toll.

World Building

This month we were able to kick off world building! Up until now the rest of the team has been very mechanics focused, ensuring gameplay and our tech stack were solid. With Devon’s addition we’ve been able to start building out the soul of Project Lilith. Specifically Devon has been working on our class backstories. These will help inform the design of the class, including it’s weaponry, abilities, particle effects, animations and sound effects--all to bring life to the imaginations of our worldsmiths.

Animations

Roy worked on some animation polish this month, but instead of outlining it I’ll just let him share:

Art

Will has been busy iterating on our art style and educating me along the way. :) Firstly, doing some sketch work before beginning work on a 3D diorama that will be iterated on. Once completed, the scene will become a reference for all future art assets--Indispensable! This diorama will be made up of a single tileset, likely a ruined cityscape with a character in the scene. Here's a sneak peek of that work in progress:

'til next time Daemons,
Trey