The last leg for New California is the first step for Project Morningstar

If you haven't been keeping up with the New California discord, facebook, moddb, or nexus pages, then you've probably missed the discussions of New California getting its 1.0 overhaul. 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qZGbmXQ1aqZO4RholmyO9dgPxULLJdRYvsTgUPD2jp0/edit

You can read all the design document here, in public, as I re-write the companions and expand on them in new ways that will ultimately make FNC's final revision the definitive final iteration of the mod we all wanted it to be. 

When you start a new project, every new project is your first project.

 It doesn't matter if it's your first or your tenth or your hundredth, you're always faced with the new challenges of setup and finding a new voice in a grey blank abyss. As they grow in scope and competence the work required gets easier, but there's always more of it, and you can rely on your peers less and less as your personal skill level starts to eclipse what they can produce without a budget. That's when you start to realize, "oh shit, we've outgrown the starting zone and leveled up. We're the boss fight now. The game is fighting us!"

You have to move past where you started eventually, but the bridge is hard fought. You may barely have survived the last one, and if it made no money, like FNC which was made and released for free, then you're in a situation where you still have to hold down a day job and you still have to just barely survive, when the kinds of challenges you face require you not just have what little is left at the end of your 9-5, but your total commitment. And not just from you, but from at minimum five of you.

Modding is a great way to make the impossible within reach and produce a massive role playing game like we did. We didn't have to make the base game from scratch, so clearing off the base game to its foundations and building it up from the base gameplay mechanics & UI takes away millions of dollars of startup issues and ten thousand + hours of labor right off the bat. You can just focus on telling a good story and making the worlds you're building compelling. New art assets, new story, new voices -- you are basically making a new game on the skeleton of the old one. 

Morningstar is starting from scratch. Utterly. It starts with almost nothing but the engine.

And man, is that an uphill slog in of itself. 

Games are not mods. You can't just make the image of a game and the story, it's dozens of disciplines all working together. If walking across the room is your current biggest hurdle, how can you expect to develop a game with moving character moments in dialogue? 

Without a large team of full time professionals, setting out to do something like this is suicidal. But it is possible, so long as you have the right help. The right plugins, and the right staff, can make all the difference. You have to leverage being small with the concept itself. 

And that's hard even when you get the formula right, if you're broke. 

Again, it takes tens of thousands of hours just to get set up. You need that time to make the basic game-play fun. If you can't make walking across the map fun, then nothing else is fun. Forget the story and the art. 

You can't do that unless it's your full time job.

So that's step one. Getting time. 

That means I've been saving money and working a lot so I can take time off again. Exhausting stuff, physically and mentally. Making huge sacrifices and doing nothing any normal human can do, like eat out or buy basic things. Everything gets put into buying the tools and items you need, and prepping to starve for a long period of time. 

While that's happening I'm writing. 

First, New California 1.0. It's not small, but it's achievable, and a great way to see what mistakes I made in the past, fix them, update them, and then ship them. That's a great landmark for 2019 when nothing else can possibly get done this year. 

Next, I got STAVE put together, so now we have a thoroughly tested and ready to play card game, and it's actually very fun. It's a complete thing. Tons of room to expand it and modify it and play it however you want. it's a very adaptable modular card game. I'm very proud of it. Just add marketing and sales and it's ready to go.

Then I get back to Morningstar. I've made a few art assets and planned out even more. It's got a loooong road to laying those foundations in the Unreal Engine, but the blueprints are doing good. 

So really this year is about looking at, financially, how do we go from a team with no profits, no ROI to show, to getting a toe hold on the next thing? Learning the tools also, as it's a new territory for me, as in the past I only ever provided my art assets to Unreal devs as a freelance dev through VPN, sometimes setting up my own shaders and some world / level edits to integrate to their pipeline, but I did not own the pipeline, i was just putting material into it. I can make the art assets for a game now, but to put them all into practice is the next step for me. I've done some of it before but not all of it. Gotta make this engine as intuitive to use as the last one, which is a perpetual practice. 

For now it's just getting through it, doing what we can, day by day. 

Getting FNC to 1.0 is important, but won't help that goal. It makes no money and never will, so what goes into it has to be minimal. It's kind of like your doctoral thesis in game design. you don't earn money getting your PhD nor publishing your Megamod. You just publish your first major thesis and hope the next one gets a grant to start the next one and the next one and the next one. :p 

So after I "graduate," I can move on. Because finishing the BETA was my first proposal and while it mostly passed, a lot of that feedback was a rejection. Getting to 1.0 is my final proof. 

Whether I graduate or not and get to be a game dev, that'll be decided at 1.0, by you. 

The one reading this. :p 

Because FNC 1.0 will pass the ball to Morningstar, and I get to take my Morningstar documents and pitch and go for enough money to work on it full time with an initial prototyping team. And then that has to get its publisher and we have to flesh it out into a game from that initial germ we build. 

This Patreon is for the future. It's for Morningstar. 

This Patreon is NOT, for FNC.

It's difficult to sell people on something they've never seen before. No one believes it until they see it. That's what I'm beginning to do, making things to be seen. 

Every new project is hard. Especially when you start with the disadvantage of not having a lot of money or time to work with. 

But it's also very exciting. 

So I hope you enjoy reading my writing as I put the old project to bed finally with a new coat of paint and new material fleshing it out to stand the test of time, and begin this new one over here. :)