Afternoon Update – Friday, May 1st, 2015

Folks,

Happy Friday, all! Today’s update is chock-full of lots of information, goodness, and well, stuff. So, without further ado, let’s just get the party started.

First, the April newsletter went out today! It has all the usual suspects, and lots of other information as well. Make sure you check it out. If you haven’t gotten an email about it, make sure, as usual, to check your email program! If that fails, you can look at it here.

Secondly, as we have talked about the changes to the way we are going to report and show our progress on the game. Well, after no shortage of iteration and idears, we have come up with a methodology that we think will work really well for both the studio and our Backers. The concept is based on the “agile development” model, “user stories,” and “epics.” This method of reporting our progress makes it easier for everybody (Backers and other folks), to see and quickly get a handle on what we’re doing, easier than something such as the P.A.T. Checklist.

As the names imply, this approach centers around specific needs and wants from both our Backers and Developers on development, and updating progress on it. They are presented in a fun manner (much like baseball cards) where you can search through the stories, or do a “deep dive” on one in particular by clicking on the card. You can find the first iteration here(http://camelotunchained.com/v2/user-stories/).

We hope that you enjoy this presentation, and since we think this is pretty cool, we expect that this won’t be the last time a developer presents information in this manner, going forward. We will continue to iterate on the approach, so please drop by the Forums and let us know what you think. BTW, while we were writing the text for user stories, Dave, one of our programmers, showed us his chops for writing more than just code. When asked for a description of what he was working on, when Tyler had simply called it a “skybowl,” Dave replied, “if you want to call it something fancier then a skybowl, call it an icosphere, since that is what it is an icosahedron that is tesselated and refined along its faces producing a uniform distribution of triangles along the entire surface is called, compared to a UV Sphere where the polygons tend to bunch up at the poles of the sphere!”

Thirdly, as of today, we now have our own official Wiki! We have partnered with the good folks over at Curse to build our own entry on their Gamepedia! As you can imagine, there’s a lot of information there, but we are just getting started. So, please head over there(http://camelot.gamepedia.com/Camelot_Unchained_Wiki) and check the thing out! As always, we will welcome those who want to help us make it even better. A special shout-out goes to Foggye who totally kicked butt by earning over 2K points in helping build-out the first version of our Wiki. Way to go Foggye, that was an awesome job! Honorable mention also goes to SpykeDruid, Alianin, Ortu, Guiness and Okablade for also putting in a lot of time and effort. I also want to thank the other people who contributed too such as Mehuge, Raygar, JaironKalach, Hellraise and Linkbry for their help as well.

We’ve also updated our Fansite kit! For those who are interested in setting up a Fansite, here’s the download link (http://camelotunchained.com/upload/Community_Kit4.0.zip)!

If you missed any of our newsletters or would like to return to the days of yore (not pitch and/or roll though, no air-ships in Camelot Unchained yet…), you can check out all the old newsletters collectedhere, for your reading convenience.

For today’s dose of art, here’s some new concept art for our female Luchorpán, who will be making an appearance in a game build in the coming months.

Not bad eh? Pretty much what we’ve come to expect from our concept art team of Michelle and Sandra.

And since we recently completed another Stretch Goal, here’s a copy of our newest Stretch Duck as well! 🙂

That’s today’s update! From the new user story page, you can see the progress that we have begun to make on the current stories. We’ve had to spend a bit of time here moving to Git, Jira, and just getting some new tools in place, so between that and the grey world bug, we’ve been pretty tied up with more development related/bug hunting than new adds to the game. That has started to change, so the next few weeks should see a lot of new stuff going into the game.

Have a great weekend!

-Mark