Hi, everyone!

As with my previous update, I’m sharing this as official spokesperson of the board as a whole. I hope you find it interesting and encouraging. Questions and comments are most welcome.


We had our second board meeting last week and covered the following:


BOARD RESTRUCTURING

Kevin Manning has decided to leave the board, and we wish him well on his new ventures.

We identified a need to have someone overseeing and directing development explicitly.

Ian Bolton has become Director of Development, which is an expanded Board role covering all aspects of development, from design to story to coding to releases.


REVIEW OF AUGUST PROJECTS

The Community and Operations projects completed in August. The Single-Player project continues, and we have identified and fixed a long-standing AI bug which was hampering progress of some missions. The fix is prioritized for the next update.


REVIEW OF VOLUNTEER WORK

The game has always been blessed by contributions from the community, especially from your own initiatives and volunteer work. We are pleased to see this has continued since the new organisation has been formed and are very appreciative of that. Thank you!

In terms of volunteer work we have defined explicitly, we’re pleased to report that good progress has been made in the areas of Support and with the Volunteer Design Team and expect this to continue. Support tickets have been answered in a timely manner and we will be adding new moderators for the global in-game chat.


DEVELOPMENT

The current state of the Single-Player campaign is not where we would like it to be, and community feedback matches up with this, so development work has been approved to announce and then deliver improvements in a more transparent and effective way.

In light of this, we can confirm that completing the 1-star dialogue for Missions 1-10 for each of the Human heroes from Call of the Crystals is our top priority and will be delivered by the end of September. This is intended to deliver a better experience for new players starting out with one of those heroes as well as sharing the early stories of our oldest ten Human Heroes.

The other main development priority is on completing the technical/development handover from Kyle, who has been server administrator and lead developer for Shadow Era as a whole since he created the game seven years ago.

In terms of other contract work, we have commissioned artwork for the 28 spoiled Lost Lands Part 2 cards (Warrior, Mage, Hunter, Rogue), so there are no blockages to releasing them when we wish to do so.

The below four images are by Alex Hurtado. See if you can work out which cards they are for!





DATA-MINING

To help us make more informed decisions when directing the company, or even lower-level decisions, we approved the creation of a second (slave) server. We can generate all manner of useful information from this, to feed into balance decisions, financial decisions, marketing decisions, etc, etc. As of today, the slave server is already working and has given us some useful insights.


INCOME GENERATION

We identified some ways to increase our income from the game, which will then allow us to accelerate our development and invest in other areas. We will be putting these into action during September and beyond, beginning with some new player and booster box bundle deals in the next update.


If you have any comments or questions on this update, please reply below or send direct to me or other board members.

Thanks for reading and thanks for your patience while we've made it through our first five weeks.