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>>> Submit to the will of Dogar and Kazon, vile Earthlings, or else you will never lay eyes upon your most beloved of sacred artifacts – the World’s Largest Rocking Chair of Casey, Illinois – ever again!

Carol, knock that off!

Ahem, excuse me. Our resident Umgah got ahold of the transmitter again. We’re still working on our security measures. Who’s Carol? Oh, never mind that. It’s a long story.

Greetings friends, supporters, and other many-appendaged creatures! Dan here, and I wanted to share an update on our progress, advancements, and learnings in the past 6 months, our trajectory for the near future, and really just say hi because I miss ‘seeing’ you on stream. Carol wants me to say hi and thanks for all the fish, too. Also, please stop sending us fish.

Tl;dr

If you just want the short version, here it is:

• Pre-production – which you can think of as scoping and exploring the size of the box – has ended.
• Production – which is filling the box – has started!
• Our twice-weekly dev stream will be pausing for now.
• We have some more people working with us and are doing some new kinds of work.
• We have a plan for the fall which involves sharing a lot more content we think you’ll be excited to finally see. Because we’re producing it!

Pre-Production to Production

This week, we were able to put together our first production kickoff (see above slide from that meeting)! If you’re not familiar with this kind of creative & technical development, a framing mechanism we use to separate the kinds of work we do is grouping it into pre-production and production. In broad terms:

• Pre-production is when we are still making decisions about what we want to be making and how we should be making it. We prioritize that exploration and optimize for being able to grow, learn, and make good decisions in the future.
• Production is when we have a firm enough idea of what to make and how to make it. We prioritize streamlining the process of getting all our creative contributions being made and woven into the actual game alongside a schedule.

That is a somewhat simplistic representation of the difference between the two, but UQM2 is more than one single piece. There are parts of our game which can be in pre-production longer or production longer, based on dependencies and schedules. The end result looks less like a clean break and more like a dovetail, sawtooth, or kraken wrestling a wooden tall ship as the dread pirate captain seeks to maintain control.

Does that make sense? I hope so. I spent, like… 5 minutes on that drawing! That takes us to the next change.

Development Streams on Pause

If you’ve been following our live development streams, you may have noticed we’ve been unable to do them for several weeks. I love being able to share live development on stream and interact with everyone who attends, but, for the (hopefully short) time being, I have to pause them. 

First and foremost, I have lately been knee-deep in highly sensitive material that we don’t want to show you yet. Not because we don’t like it or want you to see it, but because we care about how you get to receive it. An important part of UQM2 is going to be exploration and discovery, and there are elements that we will want you to actually have fun exploring, discovering, and experiencing interactively as a player, not just as an observer. From things like the overall story to the starmap, I’m now inundated with parts of UQM2 coming to life that reach far beyond the narrow bits of work you’ve seen me do. It’s great to have them shape up and become part of the game, but it also means it’s not as easy to conceal them as I have in the past.

Secondly, since we’ve entered production, I’ve been taking on more responsibilities as what we call in games a producer. That means I’ve become responsible for getting everyone on the team what they need to make forward progress and helping prepare for the deluge of content which will be filling up our game. It’s a little bit like a project manager, but with cool mutant powers and a confusing name. I also have someone else taking on some of those design & scripting responsibilities, but more on that in a moment.

To cap it off, the plan is to pause – not stop – development streams for the near future. It’s possible I’ll be able to come out of the woodwork to do a one-off here and there if the no-spoiler stars align, but the plan is to find a way to resume once a few more cats are out of their proverbial bags. Don’t ask me where the cats came from or who even put them in the bag. I’m still trying to determine the ideal cat-bagging material.

This trade-off on streaming is coming with some more goodies for you, though. More on that at the end of this post.

Team Additions

To help us get some of this very important production work done and support development, we have a couple new members of the UQM2 who have come on board. Our friend Danny is joining us with experience in the music industry, helping us with both audio and business development. Another former Toys for Bob-ite, Jesse Browne, is also joining to take on design and scripting responsibilities after working across many technical fields.

We’re really excited to have them on board, and they’ve already been doing some awesome work to make UQM2 even better. I’m looking forward to showcasing their work too!

Funding Updates

In our end of year update from 2022, I detailed the work ahead of us for 2023 and included funding as part of it. This is still an essential part of taking UQM2 to completion, but it deserves its own blog post describing the process, what we learned, and where we’re going. Needless to say, the same sentiment as last year is still true. We are incredibly grateful to our amazing Patreon supporters who have helped us get this far. This wouldn’t be possible – much less enjoyable – without all of you. One of the reasons we’ve been able to move into production has simply been because we can utilize all of your support to work with some amazing artists helping us! Your support goes almost entirely to funding this process.

What’s Coming Next?

We are really excited to move into production, and the other half of what we’re gearing up is our community building endeavor. We have already established an incredible community of people here who believe in us, are excited for the game, or maybe just want to see my birds and hear bad jokes. Whatever reason everyone is here so far, we don’t take that for granted. Seriously, this is the kind of thing so many artists wish for! Few things are more encouraging to me, personally, than being able to create a virtuous cycle of everyone cheering each other on.

To that end, we are going to be ramping up our own endeavors to give everyone something to get excited about this fall. We appreciate that we’ve gotten enough people here on what seems like pure enthusiasm so far, but it’s time to roll up our sleeves, unfurl our tendrils, and deliver more than just hope and imagination. We’re getting ready to show you much more, especially on the visual and world-building side. We can’t wait to show you in much more vivid detail just where we’re headed as we create an even more inclusive and enthused community.

Though I won’t be streaming, you can look forward to much more frequent communication from us, starting with posts like this but ramping up to even more of the real game content.

Thank you for being on the journey with us so far, and an extra special thank you to our generous Patreon supporters. It’s only going to get better from here on out.

If you want to keep in touch more often, please join our Discord where the team and community keeps the *party* going and will welcome you with open claws.