Folks,

Another fine week nears its end here in beautiful, downtown Fairfax, Virginia. Well, at least if you don’t mind the heat, humidity, and pollen aggro! OTOH, work progressed really nicely on a lot of fronts. Before talking about the new stuff, let’s do a quick recap on some of what we’ve talked about earlier, for those who missed what happened last week.

We announced the Backer Rewards and Subscriber Rewards. While the latter is still far away (we don’t start subscriptions till we go LIVE), this plan reemphasizes just how grateful we are to those that have backed our game. We have never and will never forget that without you Backers, none of this would have been possible. These rewards are focused on those who have steadfastly backed us, whether those who were there from the beginning of the Kickstarter or those just hopping on board now. Loyalty should always be rewarded, and we are going to do exactly that.

We announced the current stretch goal, Stealth Unchained, with two (possibly three) new archetypes for our game, as well as laying out the basic vision for the camouflage system. The reaction to the stretch goal and the new archetypes has been outstanding. The stretch goal is moving along nicely, and the comments on the Forums have been heavily in favor of these additions, even from people who don’t normally play stealth-using characters. Personally, I think the addition of the Scouts is going to be great for RvR, and will inject some really unique and interesting gameplay into the game.

We also talked about our new terrain system/editor that Andrew has been working on for the last few weeks. In the short term, it really is a game-changer for us, as it dramatically reduces the amount of time that it will take us to create the world of Camelot Unchained. In the long term, the procedural nature of the system will help fulfill the vision we have had since the Kickstarter about how the land of the game will evolve over time.

Now, for this week’s update, we have more good news for our Backers. Let’s start with the latest addition to the CSE family, our character artist Jon Young. While Jon hasn’t had decades to fill out his resume yet, the work he has done so far shows his potential. For example, here’s a before and after look at our Frost Giant model.

Nice work, eh? Especially for the short amount of time he spent working on it. So, welcome aboard Jon! We can’t wait to see what he does next. As Backers, you can expect to see a lot of changes and additions to our models over the coming months. Good times!

Next up is a really fun announcement, one we hope will turn into something quite meaningful for our Backers. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been talking with the Backers on our Forums about an initiative that is aptly named “The Mod Squad”.

No, not this Mod Squad!

We’re not talking about the 1960s/1970s show, and especially not the 1999 reboot; instead, this is something far more useful for our game. As everybody who has been following our game from the beginning knows, one of our relatively unique features is how Andrew had the really cool idea of “building our entire UI out of the web” via Chromium, as he said here. And ever since then, we have been working with some of our Backers to help lay out a framework for current and future mods, while at the same time, helping them build some really useful mods for the game. Now that things are moving along nicely with other aspects of the game, it’s time to take this thing to the next level. So, to facilitate that, we are creating The Mod Squad for Camelot Unchained.

The Mod Squad, or TMS for short, is a joint developer and Backer effort, led by our lead spaceship engineer (he loves that title) JB to take modding to greater levels of awesome. While JB will be holding a live streaming session this weekend, the key things that our Backers need to know are: