Happy Thursday everypony!

Novel here with something really cool.

Appleloosa Valley Worldspace Map

We’ve been cooking this up for a while now. Blue Nova has been slaving away at this for weeks and from what he told me, it was a bloody nightmare. Who knew that setting up a Fallout-style map would be so blasted hard? Well, it was, but Blue pulled it off with flying colors.

So I am thrilled to present to you the in-game map of Appleloosa Valley!

Now, I know that it looks like a fair amount of empty space on there, but there’s still a few adjustments we need to make to get it fully ready to use in-game. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks, you’ll be able to see it on the PipBuck itself!

And in case you’re curious, this was done by taking screenshots from within the GECK and then stitching them together by hand. Nightmare fuel. Seriously.

Here’s another version of it that’s much more like the classic New Vegas PipBuck Map, complete with roads and railways!

To mark a few highlights here, the large white mountain contains the massive structure of the Rock Farm South Complex. To the far northeast is the sheltered town of New Appleloosa, while the short road sticking out in the middle of the curve to the southwest of New Appleloosa is the Overlook. Finally, on the far west of the map is the Visionary stronghold of Topaz Lake and the Rock Farm Western Complex, which will be featured prominently in the first act of Gardens of Equestria: Dances of Light and Shadow.

But that’s not all I have for you today! No indeed! I am very proud to announce that we’ve had some promotions on the team!

Team Promotions

Blue Nova, the one behind that awesome map up there and so much of the cool custom artwork such as the Ministry of Peace and Steel Ranger poster, has generously agreed to become our new Creative Asset Director. He will now be leading the charge in making sure that our artwork and models are top-notch. His commitment to quality and drive will help tremendously and take an enormous load off of me.

In addition, EgoJonathon has agreed to take on the position of Technical Director and will be taking the lead of our scripting and technical aspects. With his extensive programming experience, Trench and I agreed he was a natural choice for the position.

Finally, everyone’s favorite Scripting Consultant, Red Kat, has taken up the mantle of QA Lead for still-forming QA Team. While she will not be doing any of the actual testing, she has a tremendous amount of experience in both active QA and managing QA tasks. This is in addition to her position as a consultant with the Manehattan Project.

In fact, it was her expertise that allowed me to finally break through the roadblocks that were preventing me from creating a unique vendor in GoE called the “Exchange Terminal.” The Exchange Terminal is based on the Lonesome Road Commissary, which allows players to repair gear and sell/buy items without having to leave the worldspace to find a NPC vendor. Makes a lot of sense because just about everything in the Divide is psychotically hostile. You aren’t going to find any shopkeepers in there. Just like that, the automated systems of the seemly deserted Rock Farm are still in effect…allowing you places to buy, sell and repair your gear (though you’ll always be able to ask Calamity for help repairing your gear. 😉 ). There may even be a way to hack the system to allow the terminals to store goodies that you don’t want to carry at the moment! (But I’m still working on that little trick). Oh, and don’t worry, you don’t need ED-E to unlock the terminals. 😉

But don’t worry, all this was done using scripting techniques, none of which were exclusive to Lonesome Road. So for now, the only DLC required remains Old World Blues (and that is not going to change. We’re simply using too many assets to make a non-DLC version).

QA Team

Thank you to everyone who’s applied for our newly forming QA Team. Red Kat will be with in the next several days and help you go through the “test experience.” If you’re interested in helping us out and getting to see the ever-evolving form of GoE, head on over to our new QA Team Recruitment Center!

YouTube Audiobook

Finally, I am so very happy to announce that we completed unlocking the last chapters of the Fallout: Equestria (The Manehattan Edition) audiobook on YouTube on Monday! You can now listen to the entire novel on YouTube!

That’s it for this week folks. Until next time, stay safe out there!

-Novel Idea