Greetings! Founder and CEO here with last month's studio update.
It pains me a little that we had to push back the Indiegogo launch to the first weekend of August, but getting a better start by timing ours with Muse's next game update, was something I didn't want to pass up. Should give us an extra boost out of the gates that we could use.
Really we were ready to go in July and all our time tables were falling on July. The only variations were some last minute cross checking with Muse and finalizing the campaign images.
Which is what July was all about. Georgy was brilliant over the course of this month. We knew months back we wanted to make a special image for the campaign and Georgy not only pulled it off but then worked with me a lot on getting it ready for our physical goods. We tested and retested. Georgy giving me plenty of:
Whenever I'd mangle something a bit in Photoshop on my end.
I've got a folder on my hard drive right now with almost 900MB that is just full of images and .psd files that are from our weeks of work. One of these days I'll perhaps release a little slideshow of their progression from initial to final.
When the Indiegogo goes live, you'll see our more final images. Unfortunately the actual products they'll be going on, haven't been completed. We'll be waiting till the campaign concludes because we need to order in bulk and the producer has an art department that will be working with us on the goods. Getting all the files at once will be beneficial. Should we need to expand orders, we could then easily do that. I will be insisting on a sample to test, which I'll take pictures of and post to backers. But more importantly, to make sure the product quality is up to par before we ship items off.
Aside from all this work on the campaign, we've actually been continuing our work on the project.
Georgy in the midst of all his work getting our campaign image ready, finished a major background piece. Maybe not as big of a deal to some, but it was a big hurdle as it is in part of the game where there are time transitions. So the light shifts and shadows increase or decrease. Why that was so big for us was because there are many scenes in the main stories where similar transitions take place.
Getting set pieces to transition, without rebuilding them from scratch was something necessary for the long run. Figuring out how to do this took some time and effort. But it definitely has paid off.
Georgy is the kind of artist that just never ceases to amaze. His art just keeps getting better and when given a challenge, he just has this knack for finding a way to do it. As director of this project, I'm looking forward to seeing his future.
With that future and with the launch of this project coming, I've finally decided it's about time to update some of our social media assets. The first of which is our facebook cover image which I just recently updated to the one below:
The image above is actually one we got done earlier this year but never posted. In fact, what you are seeing is a cropped version of it to fit the facebook size requirements. It was one of Georgy's earlier attempts at working with lighting and shadow depths. The Broken Hammer logo I merely added so we could use it on our pages. When you see it in game, it won't have the logo.
You may recognize it from it's original concept that has been hanging on our social media wall for months. Naturally the logo wasn't part of the original:
The original concept was drawn by Conn Hughes. He's been a major concept artist with us since the beginning of the project who just graduated his university in June. Like Georgy, Conn is exceptionally talented, although much of his art is hand drawn with pencils first. His art has actually grown quite a bit since the early days of the project and you'll hopefully be seeing more of it come the main story arcs where he'll involved with key image production.
As for where that campfire scene takes place in the story...that's a secret!
So with that said, that's a wrap for the month of July. August is going to be busy for sure. Till then, we'll see you in the skies!