June was the busiest month I've had in recent memory.

It kicked off with Kybolt co-founder DarnYak hopping on a plane from San Francisco to come visit Ireland! Long-term we want to set up an office here and transfer him over on a more permanent basis (right now we work remotely), so this was a nice trip for scoping out a few cities (yes, he got the tour) and generally hanging out. A well-deserved break given that we've been at this for over four years now...

That weekend, I headed to Estonia/Finland to catching up with some friends, before getting home and diving straight into character design . As the art guidelines might suggest, a lot of thinking has gone into visuals and we really want our characters to be memorable. The process didn't go as smoothly as I'd like; we have a great artist on board but it's taking a lot more research than expected to get satisfactory results.

The following two weeks were filled with character design explorations, and welcoming a variety of friends as they visited Dublin (including long-time RoW player Gahn!). I managed to squeeze in some networking as well, including speaking at the Irish Game-based Learning Conference.

Days later, I learned to condense this entire project into a 10-minute business pitch, and delivered that to a panel from Enterprise Ireland's New Frontiers programme. (This comes after many long nights of preparing and passing a written application.) We didn't manage to snag the funding+supports this time, but it was a valuable learning experience and sets the groundwork for approaching publishers and other sources of funding in the future.

Yesterday we started a new community-involvement initiative called live game development , where we'll figure out actual design issues in a public channel on our discord. Walk right into the conversation (our current topic is character design), or grab some popcorn and watch us go from the sidelines!

In short: we're working hard: sorting out residual issues with Lumberyard so we can finally put all our tech to use, getting better at the business side of things, and hopefully doing an okay job of keeping people in the loop. If you got questions, comments, or other stuff in your pocket: reach out anytime.

Softmints