Shadowpool‘s founder,CEO and lead designer Don Danielson discusses in-game crafting and development progress on the Trials of Ascension forums.

It looks like I�ve been volunteered to do a dev journal! Hello. My name is Don Danielson (a.k.a. Brax) and I am Shadowpool�s founder, CEO and lead designer. I would use the more colorful terms that some of my fellow developers have used at my expense but I dare not scare the children away.

In this dev journal I�m coming to you as the lead designer and not the CEO so my focus is going to be heavily geared towards design. I know many of you want a progress report on the development of ToA so I�m going to give a brief overview of that first. Afterwards I�m going to put my designer hat back on and let go of some information regarding a particular feature that I think you�ll find most interesting.

Hmm, where to start? Let�s go with programming and work our way around the team from there.

[*] Programming has been thrown back into the midst of a terrain issue that has reared its ugly head yet again. Preparing the terrain for structure placement and tunneling is no easy feat! They are also working on database issues as it relates to how object properties in the game can be manipulated, both by the players as well as Shadowpool staff. Last but not least, lots of squishing of thy bugs.

[*] QA has found a number of bugs, including a major crash bug, and continues to hunt them down like the pests they are! I�m happy to say that our approach of �QA early, QA often� has been paying off significantly.

[*] Animation is busy with animation blending for the human. Modeling is working on the clothing for the humans as well as perfecting a few normal mapping tricks we�re trying out. Texturing is slapping paint on the female human hair styles and hats. Concepting just completed the orthos of the catapult and is working on redoing the minotaur. Yes, you heard me right � the mino is getting a serious make-over so keep an eye out! :p

[*] Audio is slaving away at the Caduceas themes that will be heard while in her temple within the Pantheon.

[*] Design recently gave the religion system a major overhaul as many of you are aware. We�ve also decided to shrink the pixies hands back down to what would be a normal size. The art team should make that a reality in the near future. Scrollspires continue to be churned out at a jaw dropping rate. The lore history timelines are updated (bet you didn�t even know that, did you? ;) ) to include more details that have been released since they were written many moons ago.

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