May 2024 Update

Hey everyone! Feidry here again. I’ve got some exciting news for you this month. This will be the largest edition of the newsletter yet! Let’s get to it!

Alex Returns

As these things tend to happen, the day the last newsletter went out, Alex reached out to me via private message. He had been busy at his day job and just didn’t have time to work on the project for a while. But that’s been cleared up and he’s been back on the project basically all month.

Sorry for the false alarm in the last newsletter.

New Members

I got a few emails back from the last edition of this newsletter. 4 new team members have joined the ranks.

• John, aka Phileosophos, holds a PhD and has 35 years software development experience. He has joined the team, funnily enough, to create music and sound effects. Look for samples in future editions of this newsletter.

• Kartikay, aka DrVader, has 8 years programming experience as well as some hobbyist writing skills and has taken on some of the lore writing duties.

• Lewis, aka Zygosaur, is a computer science student who is about to graduate from a top-ranked university.

• olive helped out by creating an SVG version of the logo for us. They also have programming experience and an interest in writing so they’ve joined the team to help out in those areas as well.

We’re still a little short on modelling skills on the team. If you’ve got a few hours in Blender, Maya or Photoshop, and some free time, reach out. All contributors will be credited.

Development Progress

Alex has been hard at work bringing models in from the existing version to our Unity project. The images in this newsletter are from that work.

We had 4 all-hands meetings this month, bringing new members up to speed and delegating tasks. Our primary focus at the moment is preliminary work on a display API for the ship systems so you can see what the various systems on the ship are doing.

Once this is complete, the big push will be towards getting a video put together to share with everyone. I will also be creating a dedicated Rogue System Reboot YouTube channel where the videos will live.

Some progress has been made on both the Lore and Audio aspects of the project, thanks to John, Kartikay, and olive. Keep an eye out in future editions of this newsletter for samples of that work.

News from Michael

I finally worked up the courage to text Michael at the number he called me from. I didn’t really expect a response from him. I was wrong. He responded quite a bit. I wrote some about it in this post. In short, we have received a project from Michael, made in Unity, including features such as universe generation, docking, comms, player inventory, some rudimentary ROVER!! code, and more. Its not a complete game and there are many stubbed in systems, just like our own version. This is huge news!

Personal Update

If you’re on the Discord, this won’t come as a surprise but, my fiancee and I got married on the 26th of last month, which was our anniversary. I never really believed in “soulmates”, and then I found mine. <3

Closing Thoughts

I feel a little sheepish now that Alex has resurfaced but all in all, I think it was actually something that has made the project stronger. It made me realize that I can accept more help and also got me thinking about possible weaknesses that could be introduced into the project by accepting outside, volunteer help. So far, all new team members have informally agreed that any work they do on the project stays with the project when they move on. Not that I’m trying to drive anyone away, but I’m literally asking people to work for free. There will naturally be some team attrition. But if I have to go into the project and cut out all the work a departing team member did, there’s no way this project would ever cross the finish line. If you have thoughts about this, reply to this email. It comes directly to my inbox, I even have it on my phone.

If you have a few bucks to spare, consider signing up for a monthly or one-time donation on Ko-fi. We don’t need money to work on this game, but it sure doesn’t hurt. All donors, monthly or otherwise, will be credited in the game. Also I created a super secret supporter channel in our team Discord, so if you want early access to news and more direct contact with the team, donate today! So far, the donations have paid for the website, GitHub data pack and several energy drinks (one of which fueled the writing of this newsletter). Thanks to everyone who supports us!