Fantasci: One task down, Another few to go

Here we are as the contest strikes 13 months, another 5 days and its pens down for the judges to take the next 2 months to evaluate and sift through the contestants entries. We have learned alot, had some up times and some down times, infact lets go through some of them shall we... Nice dissolve...

Lets Start with the fun stuff the cons of the contest and Fantasci.
Cons
Individuals that dont know how to communicate and follow through with tasks. Now we arent talking about folks that say i dont know how to do this. Im talking folks that say they will do something, and after several weeks of proding they come back with a hours worth of work and say this is all we can get done in a month, even though they know that the week before when they were talking about going out with friends or claim they simply didnt have time. I want to note that in every single case, i have offered to pay for the work, in most cases it was full professional rates or similar. Why dont they finish? I chock it up to laziness and a lack of work ethic. But i digress.

Second item was some of the contests most frustrating moments, with the several occurances of the arcanoria phiasco, the point judgement issue with another, and a small host of folks that had a wall of solitude around their games. Most or all of these games have pulled out, But they are worth noting as the definite down sides of this contest.
A general lack of support from any sponsors and such. in general other then CVSDUDE (which btw we will be buying another year of, great service) I would have expected more sponsorship support. From anyone. We have alot of folks that i know that little extra incentive might have made a difference to produce some great ideas. In the end, we got what we got. And here we are.

PROS
We succeeded, we are at the finish line, this is the first stage of my final reports, its not the end of Fantasci, No sir, we are well into our alpha development, with a host of features just now entering their prime.
We are starting to shape up Fantasci into what it was meant to be. Sure we have had to down size some. Its no longer a MMO, its no longer a skimpy rag of a idea. Its a solid framework thats being built up. Piece by piece.
We have gone with the single player mode, in fact, one thing i have to do, is go over our Design document and get that final draft out to you all. Thats right. a Public release of our Contest Design document. It wont be today, but It will be before next wednsday, the contest cut off. We believe in building a community.
We have one of the largest viewing rates in the mydreamrpg contest. And i dont believe to be bots either, its pretty steady, with 80-100 hits per posting. we have a currently at a 81% view to post ratio, one of the largest on the site. We hope that attests to the popularity
We have one of the most original and ambitios projects still in the contest, and we havent used a Kit, We were originally using the mmokit, but after the gryphon development went to Torque school, i made the call to move to a clean engine (AFX 1.5.2 and to start building our frame work, using pieces from the old mmokit, and around the net) We have finally gotten some of our large milestones out of the way. Merchants, Inventory, AI placement, Dialogue, Racing.
What Racing? you mentioned racing, Yes, we finally got racing in and its awesome. We have a choice of 3 vehicles currently to ride. The Dranix, our newest addition, the Horse, and the GG buggy. Just go to the training area and look at for the green console screen. Its to the left.
We have a great Team, folks that have joined and understood what im looking for, have thrived and seen some improvement, in most cases daily a little it gets done. on some days particularly early on, entire maps were drawn up.
I am currently unware of any team that has such as large world design, and i might note that it is possible to walk from the start of the game.. to almost all the maps... thats right. walk, via zoning. not using ashort cut, but if you can find your way back to the original alien research starter zone. all the major zones will be unlocked.
Well so thats a few points to note. There is a lot of stuff to note, and some of its trivial, some of its pretty important, but for this post i wanted to just glance over some of the high and lows. We want folks to know that Fantasci isnt going away. We are just starting to dig into the meat of the work, and some of our contracts are just starting to finish up some of the best work. Namely our comic, Keycon is coming up. We expect some additional interest there. So much to do, so little time.

So what have we been up to this last month since we posted here? for those that know, we have a weekly blog that we have been keeping, We try to digest alot of that here, so that those that have very busy days can either see one of the other. We do occassionally try to sneak some new stuff in once in a while.







One of our new mounts from concept to finish




A view of our current models for players, were slowly phasing out the orcs and elves, but you might notice, these are all customs and even a few of the orcs have a few custom skins(thanks GG) :) not as pretty as some, but very functional.


So where do we go from here, the contest is wrapping up, we still dont know a winner, but we have decided to continue development of Fantasci, We have strong core team, a strong sense of direction and a lot of steam, We aim to create one of the most indepth storylines that can be made with the torque engine. Its a high aim, but we hope that after its all wrapped up we can be proud of the work we have accomplished.