Hope everyone had a nice holiday and is recovering well. Time for a look back at 2018 and where Dust and Air is.
2018 for us had quite a few highs and lows. Getting one of the first story arcs into engine, starting the internship program in Asia, and expanding the team took the highlights. Unfortunately, there was low points. We missed our window in 2018. Real life hit our art and music team. Some of it expected due to college degrees finishing, however others, unexpected. Faith had a mess get tossed on her over the summer. Georgy had a medical operation in the fall on top of being worn out from university and working.
December wrapped up very well as we continued our momentum. Progress on the decals continued with Aoli's getting an update.
Small teaser to the left here.
Right now Aoli's looks quite good on most ships. We're looking at adjusting it to not have a border.
Faith's original designs had borders and looked quite good on paper. When translated to airships, we realized why Muse has most of the designs centered with the pattern in the middle.
The texture warping is real.
Aside from the decals, progress moved forward on the neutral arc. Updates to work happening on Day Three came in. Unfortunately we can't share them just yet.
Georgy also did concepts for one of the Cathedral Guards that will be seen in a few scenes. The remaining guards and other red shirt characters are also in early concept.
Then lastly Bayu turned in a near completed cityscape of Mole. With just some final tweaks to shading to do, and time of day adjustments, Mole is looking really good. A small teaser on the left.
Despite the holidays and family events happening, December turned out quite productive as well for the music team with Sean completing his trial month with quite a few tracks. His schedule is busy but we were quite impressed at how active he was involved. Even doing some playtest meetings up until the week before Christmas.
Writing has been working alongside music in getting some edits done on the neutral arc while it keeps development going on Abigail's major edit pass. While we hoped to get Abigail's edit pass done in December, the work hit some heavy patches as it entered into the final chapters. Which was part expected as her story is projected to hit over 100k word count and the latter portion of her story was known to require better pacing from it's original draft.
Then lastly for 2018, we signed on another intern late in December. However, this one is in a non-creative role. More data entry. For this role, David Gamboa, will be set to help bring more stories into the engine. We're looking to get him started in January. If all works out, he'll transition to more of a full time role of moving the story arcs into engine.
2019 is looking better than 2018. Of course it isn't where we want it but, our intern programs are growing and we're getting a better idea of how to structure them in the future. Unfortunately we had to let Thomas go as it became hard for him to maintain his schedule and work with us. We certainly wish him the best in future endeavors and we learned a bit from him in ways to improve the program.
Speaking of the program, Yohana is set to be stateside with her family in February and we'll be touching base with her while she is here. It will be her first trip into the west and should be a good one. Likely will be a partial Broken Hammer team meetup for our members close to LA.
That said, it'll be a busy year, much more than 2018. We're looking forward to it. We've got a lot of catching up to do. 2018 at times felt like struggling to keep footing but since August it's been the opposite.
We'll see you in the skies!