20K Milestone Crossed!

In the wake of Divergence crossing over the 20K contributions milestone I thought it prudent to take a few minutes away from development and spread a little news across the collective community bread so to speak.

Where is development at right now?

Right now we're focused solely on the features that form the core of the Divergence experience; The streaming, totally modifiable world. Fortunately, we aren't just starting this task and in fact we began it over a year ago, however completely flat broke at the time it was impossible to devote the time we wanted to it and  progress ground to a halt. This was the sole reason why I restarted the project with our first crowdsourcing campaign so that I personally could hire some full-time help to finish up what we started previously.

I've been blessed at cursed both as a result. A lot of people have emailed myself with programming skill available and we've made great progress. The flip side of that is, Divergence still does not have a Lead Programmer, it has several contributing individuals making considerable progress, but for all intents and purposes, we're still looking for a department lead who can devote at least 40 hours per week to organizing our individual contributors.

It isn't something I can do. I have a full team of artists, 2D and 3D and even two new animators to train and supervise every day, in addition to trying to get caught up on islands that people have ordered. It's 16-20 hour days for me just to keep my head above the water.

The good news is that every single day it's closer to being in a playable state than it was yesterday. The contributors coming in are a major major help in bolstering morale of the group. Everyone wants to be a part of something that is actually successful and moving.

Enough of this technical crap, what do you really mean about this progress? What is really going on right now?

Here is my best explanation of where Divergence is at right now, feature-wise.

The single biggest undertaking with this project, the one thing that sets it aside from all other mmorpgs is it's completely streamed and modifiable world.

But the videos of the world and islands already look great! What do you still have to do to it?

Well the world is awesome, don't get me wrong, but that world you see in the videos isn't directly modifiable by players yet, and that's the current push. Only areas created inside the game are modifiable and that isn't good enough. There are two game worlds... The first is the world you see in the videos; What I call "The Hard World" that is created from scratch. The second is "The Streamed World" which is what you get when you're actually playing the game. Once the world itself is updated/created on our end, it must be converted and compressed into a format that can be streamed over the internet as changes are made to it in real-time.

Nobody else that i'm aware of has this, which is why it's such a big deal.

How far along are we with it? Extremely.. ridiculously close. In fact the game already has the capability to create new area with all of those capabilities in real-time as-is. The work right now is to convert what we already have into that same format so that world artists such as myself can continue to build world in our advanced editors as opposed to "inside the game" which is much slower.

Will there be another crowdsourcing campaign?

Oh yes. There will most likely be a few more, each with their own new and unique perks as well as a few previous ones. I don't think we can pump out $50K to get this finished in just one push in under 30 days, so instead I'd like to do several of 10-20K each. It's must safer that way.

When will the next begin?

The next campaign will begin when we're able to show the progress we've made with proceeds from the first campaign. I'd love to be able to start the new one hot on the heels of the last, but more important than that is being able to show the work, and I can't start the new one without being able to demonstrate that in most likely a new really cool video. I'm hoping to begin the new campaign within a few weeks of the last, but again that's me saying "the major features will be ready to show in just a few weeks" which is a hard claim to make when I don't control how quickly those things are done (without tons of money of course).

You reached your $20K goal, what's up with this big secret feature?

You'll find that out in the video ;) The more financing the project pulls in, the more pull I have with game programmers in being able to prove it's worth their time to call in sick days, use up vacation and leave to get it done sooner rather than later.

What about the Factions video?!

I'll get to it when i damn well get to it! Honestly the truth is there is a good amount of new artwork involving that very subject as well as concepts for new armor and so on that I'd like to include in the presentation, so I guess it's more accurate to say, "I'll get to it when that stuff can be included in it for maximum effect".