Hello everyone! As always I need to say a massive thank you to our amazing backers. The recent Kickstarter campaign is just the thing we needed to keep us in the game. This dev blog is more of a general update to let you know our broad plans for Renown in the next few months. We’ll also be going over wrapping up the Kickstarter campaign. [b]What’s the plan for Renown going forward? [/b] With a combination of the Kickstarter funding, the ongoing feedback from our backers and the recent demos, we feel we’re in a very good place to move forward. The next steps for Renown are not very sexy, but they’re super important. We’ve identified these as the primary areas that need improvement: · Improvements to server infrastructure to reduce crashing. - Server browser needs to be more consistent and streamlined · Anti Cheat Implementation and improvements to Admin Tools · Building optimization and Fixes – Allow for more player buildings and fix building exploits (Floating bases, double walling etc) · Key UI changes primarily focused on the Tech Tree · Ongoing Bug Fixing · Combat Animation Overhaul Effectively, if we can help alleviate the exploits and cheating, improve the overall server stability and building optimisation, the game will be in a very playable state. Alongside this we’re working on some key UI changes. The major example being an overhaul of the Tech Tree to make it much more usable. Another major area we want to address is Combat Animation. Almost all the animations specifically relating to combat are still place-holders from our earliest version of Renown. The issue we ran into with the Mocap animation, is that Mr. Z is still needed for the extremely high level implementation of the attacks. Due to the high precision nature of melee games, a key amount of “design programming” is required. Mr. Z will no doubt have a more high level explanation of this process in the future for you. We’ve also begun work on the stretch goal inclusions from the Kickstarter. The first area we’ve started on is the Sound Overhaul given how important hearing is in a survival setting. We’ll have more from our expert MattGibsonMusic in the next update. Thank you to everyone who’s taken the time to report bugs. We’ve got a very detailed log to work through. This will be an ongoing process as more pop up, and other ones get squashed. [b]The End of our Kickstarter Campaign – Thank you so much to all Backers![/b] Another bit of news to announce is that we’ll be ending our Fundraising efforts for the time being. Steam has a limit of 5,000 “Default Release Steam Keys”. These are the full game steam keys we’ll be sending out as part of the crowdfunding perks when we hit Early Access. Currently we’re standing at just under 4,500 backers so we’re effectively forced to end the campaign. For this reason, (and because it just seems unethical) we didn’t want to announce early and create a sense of FOMO or some other bad sales tactic. Steam is very strict with Key rules. We’ve been trying for a month to get more “Testing Keys” but they won't budge, so we don’t want to risk going over the Release Key limit. This means if you’ve already backed, you’re right as rain for continued testing all the way till we get the game onto steam Early Access. If you’ve missed out, don’t fear, we’ll still be doing “Steam Demos” in the future to help stress test the game. We can’t make any promises right now when the next one of these will be that said. Again, a massive thank you from our entire team for anyone who’s helped support our work, either in the past or the recent Kickstarter. We are super excited for the future of Renown, and it thanks to you folks we can keep working at it. Stay tuned in the next couple of weeks for another update from our team relating to our progress and future plans. Till next time.