Daemon Monthly #1

Daemons,

I present to you the first Daemon Monthly: a monthly newsletter about what is happening in Daemon Games. The intent of this letter is to make sure everyone internally is aware of what each other are up to and where we are headed! however, we have also decided to make as much of it public as possible!

Despite the Valentine's week being a bit of a vacation for many, we've still managed to get a lot accomplished this last month.

Starting with the game itself,

Project Lilith

Changes:

• With the objective of bringing people into the world, instead of staring at UI, and adding clarity to combat we have:
  • Added seven new user interface variations, each iterating on the last. We intend to seek feedback from these UIs in a future play-test session.
  • Having witnessed many players attempt to do so we've added tapping on characters for selection and targeting. They also bounce and make a noise, so that you get feedback to acknowledge your action.
  • We've ordered combatants on the HUD to be based on their visible order according to the camera, left to right. This makes matching the character to their associated HUD easier.
  • We now track and display what ability each character is currently casting, so that you can confirm through icons on their HUD.
  • We now show targeting indication for active abilities through arrows on the ground, colored to match the ability school for which they belong.
    
• UI Improvements:
  • We no longer require targeting for abilities whose targeting has no choice (Self, Enemy Team, Own Team, and All).
  • We've added support for UI scaling for dynamically create UIs, so they work on all devices.
  • Cleaned up to character management screen.
  • Added a Back/Concede button. This'll allow players to try out different UI types quickly
• Smarter camera that keeps people on screen at all times.
• We've added character models from the unity asset store to help us improve the look and feel of the game, while letting us test our animations, and give us just enough of a polished look to allow us to begin our initial marketing:
  
• Established a settings service server side, and describe changed settings to clients. This allows us to tweak gameplay from a database without having to rebuild any code. Right now, all it requires is for you to restart the client. Eventually we want this to work in real time even against live matches.
• Asynchronous resource loading, to improve the resource loading experience.
• Reduced bandwidth usage by simplifying DTOs.
• Added character introductions allowing you to identify your opponent's chosen weapons and characters prior to starting the match:
  
• During loading we now drift the camera around the level, breathing more life into the game.
• General refactoring and bug fixes.

Major Milestone Completed: Prototype!

We've completed our second major milestone: The Prototype. This marks us as having our business formally established, validated our technology stack, and established a design sandbox for us to create content in. This is essentially the foundation from which we'll grow!

We have now officially began work on our Vertical Slice. The focus of this milestone is to create a polished slice of the game that will convey our vision for the product as a whole. With this we can appeal to prospective team members or investors. Additionally we can use it to amp up our marketing efforts. Another benefit will be that we'll be creating release quality content, giving us familiarity with the resource needs to meet our desired scope. All of this is extremely beneficial; this milestone should be as challenging as it is exciting!

Game Jam:

We held our second game jam. This month it was heavy on design. During which we identified what our core classes would be for the Vertical Slice:

• Swordsman: A versatile and reactive fighter that wrecks havoc while in close quarters.
• Defender: A durable protector bearing a shield to ward off attacks or deliver crushing blows of disorientation.
• Illusionist: Surrounded by crystals of immense power, a magician of the mind, using deceit to trick his opponents into futile advances from which he can capitalize.
• Chancellor: Dawning a vambrace imbued with an empowered gem, she wields the sanctioned gift of life. A battle without her is simply a race to against death.
• Flamekeeper: A powerful wizard relying on the destructive will of fire to burn down those who stand in the way, leaving only ash in his wake.

Each class has 4 abilities designed for them, making 20 class specific abilities. We'll also have an additional 2 per combination of classes; adding an additional 30 abilities.

As characters can only equip 5 abilities at any one time, each combination will have a variety of configurations with 10 abilities to choose from.

We've already designed and captured animations for the abilities, so we're off to a great start!

Up Next for Development:

Over the coming month we'll be adding these new abilities in under new weapon groupings. We will support the existing abilities for as long as we can, but won't go significantly out of our way to. The new abilities will be built one weapon at a time and polished to release quality.

In addition, on Tuesday evenings I'll now be working on an web app for Daemon Games contributors to manage ability values, review logs, view server statuses, post blogs, review build and unit test statuses, and much more.

Business

Having finalized the Operating Agreement, Bud and I are finishing the SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) document for hiring. Once this is complete we'll be all set to officially add Katia and Bud as full members. We want to complete the official process first, and use them to test the process. This will leave us ready to add additional members as we see fit!

Roy and I completed a review of Hack N' Plan and Bud and I will be moving Daemon Games over to it for our task tracking needs.

After the conversion we will begin reviewing the Independent Contractor Agreement. This will help us prepare for contracted art assets. Which we'll likely want to do during this milestone to get our feet wet for when our asset needs balloon with Alpha!

Accounting

We've filed our federal taxes for the 2016 year and distributed K-1s to members. We've completed, but still need to submit, our state taxes and annual report.

We've been using QuickBooks online to track and manage our expenses and capital accounts. It has shown itself to be quite valuable in this. It will help us answer the outstanding question of how we reward and track ongoing service from existing members. I'm thinking we'll allocate membership on a quarterly basis and track it in this software. It also synchronizes with our bank account and allows us to track and categorize expenses as well as adjust capital accounts accordingly.

Marketing

Katia and I have wrapped up the technical rewrite of DaemonGames.com. While it looks the same, we converted it to MVC from AngularJS. This allows us to integrate with social media and SEO more efficiently due to JavaScript not being needed. Katia is working on a reskin of the UI to be more aesthetically pleasing, modern, and reactive. She has put her commitment on hold however, as she recently purchased a house in Olathe. Congrats Katia! :D She intends to return in April, once things have settled.

As we market Project Lilith more, we'll need to give it a public name. There has been some discussion and the running title is [REDACTED] ;)

Thank you Daemons,

Trey

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