Pantheon Update! 6/3/14
Building up the team continues to be a very successful endeavor. We have more talented people willing to help out and dedicate themselves to the project than I would have ever imagined. We continue to be a bit overwhelmed, but this is a good problem to have. As you can see from the team roster (below), critical positions are being filled.
We are back in full development mode. The programmers have assimilated the project and are both cleaning things up and beginning work on the client/server network code. Laurene & I are getting daily (and even more frequently) builds. The Lore team is meeting tomorrow to work on the initial continent and to begin laying out where the various zones, outdoors, cities, and dungeons are going to be. The big challenge right now is ‘how big should a zone be?’ Unity is allowing us to create absolutely huge zones right now, but we need to scale that back a little bit. We need to make sure the servers can handle all of the mobs in a zone as well as a bunch of players who decide to meet in one area.
The Programmer’s efforts with the new network code are essential. Within 1-2 weeks we will be able to (internally) create accounts, create characters, and then log into one of the game’s zones. This requires the client to be able to connect to the servers, and the server code to be able to talk to the database. The good news is that we had some of this working before, so we can reference that.
We also want to make a commitment to all of you in the Pantheon community. We will be doing weekly updates to www.pantheonrotf.com and Pantheon’s Facebook page. It will likely be mostly small updates, but we feel we owe it to you all to keep you up to date and able to watch our progress. One week it may just be a few new screenshots, where other weeks we may be able to share something more significant. The important thing, I think, is consistently updating you so you can see measurable forward progress, even if the update isn’t a huge deal each and every time.
Ok, here comes the plug: crowd-funding has predictably died down since a few weeks after we launched www.pantheonrotf.com. This was expected, but we still do need your help, especially with full development underway again. With the weekly updates so you can monitor our progress, our hope is that some of you will be able to send some more money our way. In addition to paying the volunteer team as much as possible, we are at a point now where we need to buy hardware & software. One of our team members has fiber to their house, so we won’t need to rent out server racks for quite a while during pre-alpha. But that does mean we need to purchase a couple of computer servers. We also have licensing costs, like Unity. We are also interviewing character artists, and once they are brought on board they will need licenses to Photoshop, Maya, and other art programs, as well as drawing tablets (likely Wacom Cintiqs or similar). The programmers also have some software they need (thank you BizSpark!), and we continue to download assets and packages from the Unity store to save us time and make sure nobody on the team is gated.
Regardless of whether you can help out financially, we deeply appreciate your interest in Pantheon and your desire to be part of our growing community. You can help the project grow by sharing the screenshots we post and talking about our progress to your friends and posting about Pantheon in social media. We are also making some changes to the website and opening up at least one forum that will be accessible to all, not just subscribers. Becoming an Apprentice Developer still has a monthly fee associated with it, but we’re going to try out an open forum and see how that goes.
If you can help out, please head to www.pantheonrotf.com and make a donation or add to an existing donation. Doing so will help us get this project to the next stage we are calling pre-alpha. The idea behind pre-alpha is to be able to show the community and potential investors the progress we’ve made with this new team. It’s important to everyone that there is measurable forward progress and that the team is working hard and producing some exciting results. Once we can internally create accounts and log into a server that is always up, we can then also return to combat and start refining and tuning it. Then comes inventory, grouping, etc.
Also, if you somehow missed it, we posted a metric ton of screenshots and a quickie movie a few weeks back at https://www.facebook.com/pantheonrotf . This was long over due and is meant to show all of you the progress we made since October or so of last year. We’re still working on 1-2 more movies (these ones a little more professional) that we’ll post soon. The great news is that now, going forward, we have a foundation the developers can build upon, and we have more people involved in the project. This should mean some exciting progress depicted in our weekly updates!
Ultimately, the most important thing from a community standpoint is that we consistently reveal this weekly progress and give you all increased confidence that Pantheon is alive and well and moving forward!
Thanks,
-Brad “Aradune” McQuaid
6/3/2014
p.s. We are looking for several positions that will be revealed soon. One of those positions is a CEO. I want to focus on being Chief Creative Officer, involved with design and the overall Vision of the game. I don’t want to run the company day by day if at all possible, bogged down by the business side of things. We have sent out a few emails to people we are interested in recruiting for this role, but are also interested in opening the door to other applicants until the right person for this very sensitive and important role is found. If you have anybody you know who might be both qualified and interested, please email me at brad@pantheonrotf.com. Thanks!
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The (rapidly growing) Pantheon Team
Brad McQuaid (Aradune) - Chairman and Chief Creative Officer
Tom Sampson (Wryshu) - COO & CIO
Laurene Wells (Sparkling) – Producer & Lore Master
Ron Wells (Tandarin) – Operations & IT Manager
Branden Snowberger (Radash) – Lead Programmer
Corey Fleming – Programmer
John Diasparra (Montreseur) – Associate Artist, World Builder, Composer
Rivan Wells (Liaku) – Associate Artist & World Builder
Mark Hamilton (Burdock) – Associate Designer, Lore Team
Toni Wright (Istariel) -- Associate Designer, Lore Team
Josh Endries (FzZzT) – Web Server Administrator
Dave Weinberg (Multisync) – Lead Moderator, Associate Designer, Lore
Matt Davis (Kyndread) – Lead Moderator, Web Server Administrator
Gerrie Bligh-Shuck (Canadina) – Marketing/PR Assistant
Other Web Site Moderators:
Max63, BlueEyedGator, & Nirrtix.
J.P. Targete – Contract Artist
