Production Update (Nathan):
Huzzah! We got to talk about the other things going on! I’ve spent a lot of time this week talking about simulator design and software design with James and Christine, in addition to getting ready for Season 2! Coming out today or tomorrow is our official announcement for season two, where we detail how our new interaction models will work and give you a glimpse into the story! We’re also getting ready for a couple of special season-wrap up videos, where we’ll talk in detail about how Shattered Sleep developed on our end, introduce and interview some of the actors, and prepare everybody for our exciting new season! This week we also cast for our next season. We had so many great auditions, and it was rather difficult to decide who to put where! I’m very excited for the new cast members who will be joining us. I’m looking forward to seeing how they’ll bring our new characters to life! Research this week has included kickstarter campaigns, YouTube algorithms, constitutional democracies, and gravity! As heard in my meetings this week, “What if we had zeppelins? Zeppelin’s in space?” ((answered by a collective, simultaneous “NO.”))
Animation Update (Brianne):
This past week was very un-exciting. It was spent with a pretty bad cold mixed with the worst air quality in the United States, so that’s how I’ve been doing. Outside of being sick as a dog, I’ve been working on re-organizing a lot of workflows to finish shattered sleep strong and integrate what we’ve learned along the way. Part of that is formalizing parts of our workflow, part is better file naming conventions, and another part is just ongoing conversations. Interestingly enough a lot of my research this week has been on puppetry and animatronics. Puppetry as an art form tends to be closer to live theater, since its able to capture the live energy of a performer much better than 2D or 3D animation can. I’ve also been excited to see a drop in graphics card pricing, since there’s been a GT 1030 in my render farm that I’d love to upgrade. I really hope that gamers and content creators everywhere can start getting access to the hardware they need!
Technology Update (James):
This week was spent making more progress on creating some prototype designs for our RPG software. Since we don’t have much manpower available to us for writing software, I want to make sure we are using the right tool for the job, so writing a few different prototypes will be worth the effort. Nothing huge to report yet, but I am very excited to make these ideas we have into a reality! There have been a few people that have reached out to us asking how they can help us create this software and I want to thank you all for the support! It has been much appreciated. To answer that question to anyone else who may be wondering the same thing, we aren’t currently planning on open-sourcing this software, so we can’t accept help actually writing the software. However, if you have experience with bridge simulators or ideas that you would like to share with us, feel free to contact me or any of the team on Discord! We would love to hear from you.
Community Update (Christine):
It’s been a really fun week for Celestial Horizons! As well as being in charge of community/marketing stuff, I’m in charge of everything regarding development of a simulator facility. We had a really good meeting this week where we really solidified what the atmosphere of our simulator should be like and a couple of design aspects to help us accomplish that atmosphere. We’re taking our idea of the simulator in a slightly different direction now than we originally had discussed. The original idea was to base the simulator on the way NASA has their control center. The problem was, using that idea was making it so that no matter how we designed the simulator it just felt like a fancy conference room. We came up with a solution however that will hopefully solve that issue, make it easier for everyone to communicate with each other without necessarily needing to face each other, and open up a lot of possibilities in terms of ship design. Research this week for me consisted of studying the intricacies of running a submarine. It’s been fascinating to learn about. Highly recommend. I’m so glad that we are finally able to at least mostly openly talk about the simulator facility and I’m really excited to see where it goes! Please remember to keep liking and sharing all of this with your friends because things like this facility will not be possible if we don’t have enough support. We’re counting on you!
BTS Pictures: A super official meeting discussing important aspects of Horizons RPG and simulator design.
