It’s been a while since we came back and started sharing game related content with you, but we haven’t provided much of a clarification and insight into what’s been happening all this time, and a lot has been happening! If you’ve been wondering what we’ve been up to, then this blog post is definitely for you.
First of all, we’ve spent many months working on basically every aspect of the game - backend, frontend, infrastructure, UI/UX, 3D. These have been very productive months, but not without challenges, and there’s still a lot of work ahead of us despite all the effort we’ve put in up until this point.
UI/UX, 3D and recruiting artists
This has been our biggest pain point so far. First, we decided to have a 3D character in the game, one that would stand out and create a little bit of an immersion - make you feel like this is who you are in the game. However, our 3D skills aren’t there yet, so we had to outsource the work.
This kicked off our first recruitment process for a 3D designer, which led to multiple introduction calls, test tasks being carried out, and work scope being agreed. The whole process took a good few weeks, but eventually we found the right person and she’s been working on the 3D character for over 2 months now, basically creating everything from the scratch. Great progress has been made in this aspect, the 3D model is almost ready with rigging and clothing elements left to be done.
Further, we felt like the UI we have initially created wasn’t the best and more importantly it didn’t have that “game” vibe, so shortly after we started recruitment process for a 3D artist, we’ve also gone out to look for a UI/UX designer. This process went on for months, we talked to a lot of candidates, went through many test tasks, and even cooperated with a few designers for some time.
However, this process hasn’t been as fruitful as the recruitment for a 3D person. Part of the UI/UX designers we were interested in required a higher budget to complete all the work, they were simply out of our reach. On the other hand, the people we cooperated with for a period of time in the end didn’t produce the work we wanted, because either the quality we expected wasn’t there or we simply liked our new designs more.
After all the search, all the meets and all the conversations trying to find a perfect UI/UX person for us, we came to the conclusion that with the limit budget we have, we’ll achieve the best results if we create new designs ourselves. This is what we’ve been focusing on a lot in the past few weeks. We shared some of the concepts already in Discord and we’ll be continuing the work on designs.
What’s in store for the future?
Now, as we’ve just mentioned, one of the long term goals is to carry on with new UI/UX designs and complete them. However, we’re aware that the perfect designs will take months of work, so to avoid delaying alpha and official launch, we’ll have to make compromises when designing new interfaces and leave some room for improvements post game launch.
In the meantime, the plan is to carry on with testing everything internally, as well as making backend and frontend improvements, in readiness for alpha access. On top of that, we’re looking to implement sound effects in the game, but more on that specific subject will be shared in the next blog posts, in which we’ll also announce the roadmap.
Plenty of work ahead of us, but we’re motivated to launch alpha this year and let you enjoy everything the game has to offer as soon as possible. Stay tuned, follow us on all the socials: X, Facebook, Reddit, and join the community on Discord.