Howdy!

I may go quiet sometimes, but I stay busy. Updates will be more regular in the future when I can delegate away some tasks, but for now I will at least try to cover everything that's been happening behind the scenes.

First of all I have been talent scouting for the team and getting things moving forward in that regard. I just about have all the roles filled with at least potential team members, some still need to be contacted. 

Next is the financing. Money is never the most fun thing to talk about, but it's all part of the process. I never ask for contracted work with the hopes of having money, but the guarantee. There is a full plan for this initial stage of the studio, and has been underway for some time. Meetings and paperwork galore, but the hard part is over and progress is certainly being made. Feels good to have things moving forward with this, there are many talented people I'd love to be part of this project as early in as possible. I'm at least at a stage now where I'm just a couple weeks away from being able to get a new work computer, so that's exciting too. A better computer means I can screen record my work and share updates in a more visual format.

As for art, the game has been going through some experiments in the art direction. I've been trying to find the balance between 2D and 3D, and through some fancy shader magic called SDF functions I can get pixel perfect fully-3D while still using my 2D art. Magic. I will be using this technique throughout the game, including all visual assets and the game backgrounds. I will still be using parallax layers for the background, but each layer will have heightmap information to make them full of 3D detail.

On the programming front things have been looking great. It will still be a couple months before I have a recreation of the game's mechanics running in a MVP / vertical-slice, but the underlying custom engine being developed atop Godot that will be used for this game and future projects is making strong progress on all the fundamentals.

I am also currently bringing in the very first member of the team (that isn't myself), who will be a core member of the studio itself, and will help specifically on the programming work to be done to get this demo out. He will get his own introduction post soon, but he's already being introduced to the project files, workflow, and general onboarding steps.

Cheers,

Leo J LeBlanc
Ivory Lion Studio