Hello fellow visionaries!

A lot has happened in the past two months and even though I've delayed posting this update for longer than I initially intended, I believe it's been worth it, so let's get into it. Today we're going to talk primarily about item management but first I'm going to showcase a little bit of what's been going on in the assets department.

As per usual, our TLDR youtube video is available at this location: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKQ9vVdZTNg

New assets

So Cymmy has been working on a brand new entity which among us is referred to as the "robot dog". She's sculpted this from scratch based on one of our original designs (thanks Kyle for the drawings!) and it's now in the process of being rigged and animated. The idea is heavily inspired by "Metal Head", a Black Mirror episode that I'd encourage you to check out if you haven't seen it yet.

Next up is a motorized skellie (which hasn't been motorized yet). For this one, we've decided to take a bit of a shortcut on the modeling and animating side and we're using a free asset as a base. However, we're going to customize it quite a bit. The idea I came up with to be able to introduce a skeleton that'd fit within our lore is to motorize it externally. So in one of the next updates, you should be able to see a motor box attached to the back of the skeleton, some wires running down the arms and legs and maybe some other mechanical or electrical parts.

On a side note, as some of you may be able to tell in these screenshots, we are currently using both Blender and Maya as well as a mixture of other software in order to get the job done. That's mostly due to the fact that we have a mixed bag of contributors who each have potentially different tools they like to work with. In some ways it adds more work to the pile but in others it makes us faster and more agile.

Item management

Let's get to the meat and potatoes of this update, at least when it comes to core development. There are 4 key aspects to the changes and additions I've made recently in this area, these are:

• Item loot: monsters and chests don't just drop gold now, they also drop legitimate, equipable items of varying quality

• Inventory & Equipment mechanics: items can now be picked up in the inventory, equipped or dropped back down to the ground

• Item equipping: equipped items are now visible on the character's sprite (the look of the character changes to reflect what's being equipped, and nearby players also see these changes)

• Persistency & Synchronization of all item entities: All of these actions and changes are immediately persisted on the server and state is properly synchronized across all players present in the area, which means that you can now change maps, log out, log back in and all of your stuff is still there

Even though most of the visuals are still very much just placeholders, I'm just really happy to have finally taken care of these interactions which are far from being trivial.

Do be sure to check out the full video update if you're interested in seeing more:

That's it for today, folks!