Production Update (Nathan):
This week, we finished and started recording the final script for Shattered Sleep. Many of our actors actually weighed in on the finale, helping us find endings for these characters that felt appropriate. We’re excited to share it with you all! Additionally, we had lots of meetings about software design and Dissonant Echoes strategy among our team, but outside of our team, I met with several talented audio/video engineers about simulator system design and pricing. I also got to meet with the Infinite Silence Cast (who are going to KILL IT) and do a read-through of the script. I then discovered that we needed to have a few little revisions, which turned into a few large revisions, which turned into starting almost completely over, which then needed revising…. so after having gone through 8 different versions, the Infinite Silence script is finally ready to go (I hope…) It’s in a lot better place than it was before, and I got chills just working on it a couple of nights.
We also did our very first livestream! It was a bit of a disaster, with equipment melting down (literally, I burned myself,) buffering issues, camera problems, etc… but we got it done! You can’t have a second livestream until you have a first. We rolled a bunch of dice…to avoid spoilers, I’ll just tell you all to watch for the video we’ll release at the same time as the final episode, and enjoy the fact that apparently, in terms of Celestial Horizons stuff, I have a propensity for dramatic outcomes. Which is certainly encouraging.
Research this week has included such fun topics like domestic terrorism, cosmic horror, historical revisionism, Byzantine history, and the Black Plague. As heard in my meetings: “We just need them to send us an emoji that means ‘Hey! This is Hypatia!'”
Software Update (James):
I spent a bunch of time on our RPG software this week. There has been a lot of new things to learn but I’m excited about the technology stack I have chosen. I think it will support good development patterns that will make it easier for us to write this software quickly and manage the project as it grows. One of the things that I have thought a lot about is how to identify and solve bugs quickly, since I know how much time that can take up in a project of this scale. Selecting design patterns that help speed that process up is important and I think I have found a great solution. Of course, some of the tools and packages I am using are new to me so a lot of time has also been spent learning how to use them. Thankfully, the communities around these tools are very active and willing to help so there is a lot of support if I ever get stumped. I am very close to having a proof-of-concept that will let us do some initial testing. This doesn’t mean we will have any thing playable yet, but we will be able to test out networking and some other features that will stand as building blocks for the rest of this software.