Production Update (Nathan):
Season 2 is officially live! It was pretty crazy trying to get three different videos up and released in such a short time while balancing real life, but it has been so worth it. Episode 2 of Dissonant Echoes is nearly finished and will be releasing this Saturday, and we’re SUPER excited to continue the story! Things have been really busy, but we’re really happy with the way things are shaping up. Exciting things are coming so stay tuned!
As heard in my meetings this week: “In my defense, I was left unsupervised.”
Animation Update (Brianne):
This week has been crazy. Getting all of the animations for dissonant echoes and our first module was an interesting and experimental process. I learned a lot and how noise appears in telescope imagery, and I’ve started figuring out a consistent way to replicate the effect. Every noisy progress picture got a “fire” emoji from our astronomer friend, and I’m pretty proud of that.
The render farm has also had some serious work put into it. One of the main ways I’ve been trying to reduce technical debt is through increasing the automated test coverage of the main API server, with the worker client coming soon. Writing those tests helped me isolate a lot of bugs that have shown up in long running renders. Which is great, because I have one running right now that’s going to take pretty much all week. I’m excited for when more of those pre-made assets are all in the right place and I’ll be able to shift my focus exclusively from animation. Stay tuned! And if you haven’t already you can follow the progress of three render farm’s development by starring the project on gitlab here:
https://gitlab.com/ClassyPeters/suspended-animation
Community Update (Christine):
This week was pretty intense as we prepared for 3 different releases! It was the first time that we uploaded things to Patreon for early access. I don’t have a lot of experience on this side of using Patreon, so I spent a good amount of time this week figuring out the intricacies of Patreon. I’m feeling really confident about using it now, and I’m really excited to use the various parts to give our patrons a really interactive experience! I also spent time this week working with James on our Discord channel. With the changes for Season 2, there are certain Discord channels that are exclusive to particular tiers of our patrons. We had to make sure that those who were supposed to have access to those channels had access and set it up so that anyone else who joins Patreon will automatically have access to those channels as well.
One of the releases we had this week was the first briefing for the Council of Eberis! Since that release, our Council has been discussing in detail what they should do about the current situation. I didn’t realize how much I missed having such deep conversations happening over Discord! It’s been really fun to listen to all of the various ideas being discussed. We also released our first Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style video and it’s gotten a really good response! A HUGE thank you to those who have submitted your results of the video! We’ve been watching the results closely and we’re really looking forward to the direction things are going.
We’re gearing up now to the release of the second episode of the podcast! Keep an eye out for that! Thank you so much to all of those who have been participating so far!!