Massive Customization Upgrade Live

Well it took longer than I'd hoped, but we're finally at the point where we can begin to show the fruits of the last several months of labor.
The speed of progress is directly linked to the fact that it's a constant struggle for me to hold onto reliable help, and that is directly linked to the fact that I can't pay them much.

So what am I doing to rectify the issue?

The goal has always bee a new crowdsourcing campaign, but when I brought it up in a poll on the website, the most vocal people not insisted, but demanded that I finish this leg of development with what was available, so that's what happened and this is the speed things get done without the financing the grease the wheels.

So you keep saying how you don't have money, but wasn't the kickstarter a success?
This is the common misconception that I fully admit to having misunderstood myself at the time. The goal of the kickstarter was a success, but how much did we actually clear out of it? Less than $11,000. No one explained to my the multitude of ways you can get cheated out of money with Kickstarter and everyone assumes (as I assumed) that "what you see is what you get", although the reality couldn't be further from the truth.

The result was, what most people perceived as a success, but the reality was I now had less than $11K to spend on the entirety of the game. This is less money in a year than the average person would make as a sandwhich artist at Subway, and yet i had to find some way of salvaging the situation. Undoubtedly, any other entrepreneur would have just declared the whole thing a flop and walked away at that moment, but that isn't a possibility for me. This game must happen. Not just for myself, but for there to be any hope for the mmorpg genre itself. That's what I believe.

So I started taking private contracts and dumping that money into the project. Thankfully I've built up enough of a positive reputation people are still willing to hire me to do custom assets, models, and other work for them, which has helped. Additionally, I opened up a web store on the website, while only making a few hundred dollars each month right now, again every bit helps when my ability to keep progress like this video going is directly related to when the two guys working for me perceive we're flat broke. It all helps. It's not enough, but at the very least it's a mechanism for helping us glide across the finish line of this milestone into a new financing campaign (you can bet your sweet ass we're going back to IndieGoGo) in the future. In the meantime, I'll be continuing to return emails and entertain all offers for independent work to keep these wheels turning. If Divergence needs blood, it'll be my blood that supplies it.

What is the technical state of the game?
The prototype has been online for a good long while now, free to play to all contributors past the $100 threshold and will remain to until it's no longer relevant. In addition, our current unity-powered incarnation of the game (that you see in the video) is also running nearly 24/7 on the same server, more or less solidly.

• The nice pile of clothing and armor models we have created need to be equippable to the character via inventory. The commands appear to be successfully being sent back and forth but the visual change is taking place. We need to find this bug and crush it.
• People don't see other people animate. Find bug. Crush it.
• The ocean creates a weird effect with the sky. Find. Crush.

These are the primary things I'm devoting myself to conquering with the help of a couple guys i've convinced to help finish this part of the game with the promise of future profits. As you can imagine, this is nearly impossible on it's own, so any and all revenue we can generate in the meantime will be immensely helpful in making this happen.