Recap of October & November!

October and November were all about changing standing deficits in our pipeline, both technical and personal. 

For many years I'd lived in a tiny one room box out in the middle of nowhere in Catalina, AZ.

Catalina is a beautiful place, and the mountains especially have inspired a lot of my work, and featured in it too. 

We had our film & phhoto studio there that started Radian Helix.

I spent countless thousands of hours in that one room working on content.

That place had my computer, my bed, a bathroom, fridge -- all I needed to live, for a pittance of monthly costs.

This is the place where Fallout: New California and SOS2 were made, and Morningstar was conceptualized. 

I don't want to glamorize moving to the middle of nowhere and barely having to pay rent & utilities, and dropping all social media & contact with people as a good way of finishing projects and coping with ADHD. It is not a good idea! But for FNC and SOS, it worked. 

Now we're in a much better house where my baby daughter can grow up, my partner has the space to have her breathing room, and I have a new office dedicated just to work. 

This is going to be a good move for us, and it means going forward I can better focus on work and be more comfortable doing so.

Kent has also moved to a new Office in his home town not far from his condo, and can better focus on his tasks. 

While not yet visually striking, Kent has also made a set of utilities that will help us moving forward, including a visual tweening system we can ship with our future modding tools that will allow very sophisticated Tweening to take place, sharable with compressed xml binaries. 

This means any modder for Morningstar can quickly add new animations to the game with minimal hassle. New weapon animations, interactions between npcs, animal attacks, etc. 

Allegra was hard at work also, designing several faction buildings and our PENTA Stats's art, which I'll outline in an upcoming highlight post. 

Different factions will have visually different buildings that also corespond to differences in their stats. Some are cooler and better in the desert, for instance, like the Vyn. The Hethnn are better in cold climates. 

The player can meet and exceed these bonuses with the same material combinations, accounting for shortages in one material or another, like wood, stone, or metals. 

We needed to start getting looks established for these, and so Allegra was assigned to take a shot at the early kits.

https://youtu.be/KTuyyGkJ4D8

You can see a demo of the system we will use in the above video. 

Kent's build is not yet visually stunning, being code-centric and  prototype oriented, but the proof of concept is here. Lots of visual  improvements to be dialed in, but it's awesome to be able to construct  our towns and have the collision, dynamic navmesh, terrain, lighting layers, and walls all go up.  

You can enter these buildings dynamically as if they were 3D! But play  is if it's a 2D isometric strategy game with an action RPG navigation  and combat system.

I'm excited to show that off in a few weeks along with early combat. Again, Kent's build is not as pretty as mine, which is where the art and UI are being assembled, but when the two projects merge together it'll be a revolution. 

So many tools have been made, so many fundamental problems solved -- I'm really looking forward to 2022, which none of the life problems of living in poor housing, and all the power of these tools in our arsenal.