Belfast beauty
Hi Noxcrew Community
I hope you all had a lovely week while I was away!
As you’ve probably seen on our social media, it wasn’t just me that was off on holiday, quite a few Noxcrew members were hanging out in Ireland too! It’s nice to get away with the team every once in a while, just as friends, and enjoy time away somewhere new!
As you can imagine, we got up to all sorts of shenanigans while we were away. We visited the beautiful Belfast Castle, had some rather wild and long nights out and visited a few escape rooms including a Titanic and Game of Thrones one! We also played a lot of board games (of course) where we learnt that Mewulf really likes the theatre (Who knew?!)
Half of the boys went traipsing off to the Giant’s Causeway to learn about how the giants of Ireland and Scotland fought that one time, while the rest of us when and did some more escape rooms! (We’re not obsessed, honest) We saved a creepy little girl from a dream demon (which I totally wasn’t freaked out by) and saved Not-Westros from an army of the undead by releasing a dragon! (What do you mean that sounds like Game of Thrones again, they’re nothing alike!)
It was lovely, as always, to relax with the rest of the Noxcrew team, but it was also nice to step back and look at things with fresh eyes. We have a lot of projects at the moment that have been dangling on the precipice of completion for a while but just don’t feel ready to be released.
So it was good to step back, assess what needs to be done and jump back in with vim and vigour!
There have already been lengthy discussions about DvD and what needs to be done to get it out of the mechanics phase and finally into testing and balancing, something we’ve wanted to do for months but, thanks to holidays and surprise trips, hasn’t quite happened yet.
There was a bit of a disagreement as the team debated over the order that things were being worked on and how best to get things moving towards a testable map, but everything seems to have worked itself out. While we’re still waiting on the tutorial and a few sequencing jobs before we’re ready for a full map run-through, there are parts of DvD that are now ready for initial testing and balancing, which will make the testing phase far smoother and faster in the long run (Fingers crossed)
In the meantime, Skyao jumped back into DvD to create some more world entities to make the place look pretty while Ruby got on with animating the ones we already had, complete with some amazing animation sounds from Oli! I don’t know when DvD will be ready to test now with all the different bits getting finished at different times but rest assured I will let you all know the second I do.
What I do know is that progress is being made on the technical and gameplay side of Codename:Cow!
With the build pretty much finished, besides a few conversion tests, and the entities all done (though we’re leaving space to fancy them up) all eyes have turned to Andrej and Avondale as they pin down the map’s world, the stories within it and the people you might encounter along the way. Meetings have been had, plans are all lined up, and we’re now in a great spot to get Codename:Cow into Bedrock and one step closer to completion.
And that’s your lot!
It’s been a shorter week than usual, with the team flying home midweek, but it's put us in great standing for the weeks to come. Hopefully, once we’re all back in our groove after the post-holiday blues, we can get these projects over the finishing line.
Until then, have a great week!
Noctis