News

We've all been very busy but I thought you might enjoy hearing about what each person has been working on lately in our journey towards TSD! I will do a different Team Dragon Member every few days.

I'm starting with Gar because while he often helps us out in his spare time, right now he is between jobs so he's been volunteering a lot. Gar is a professional Game Designer, working at game studios in San Francisco and Las Vegas. As many of you know he worked for DEP for over 10 years before he moved on to work at companies that actually have funding to pay him what he's worth! Primes know we could use him full time!

Gar is very versatile even for a Game Designer! Since he's been here more he's been helping Ciro and I to design and write sales and ads, as well as other bits of needed writing. He also has been helping me with the lighting effects for the Winter Festival and Snow Maps! (Be sure to check out the contests!) The lighting feature is still super buggy and Treeki had to come help us figure out ways around the bugs so we could make Christmas lights and a really cool frost effect in the dream! You can see what the frost effect does to the roads in the screenshot. It also frosts furres!

The big jobs we need Gar to do are all Second Dreaming though. Gar has the ability to work with the Coders, Artists, Community Staff and Administration, helping everyone to understand each other. As a designer this is hugely important! As Dewi and Treeki are working on the new editors and new Fox format implementation, Gar works with them on the design of the editors and helps make user friendly layouts. He's also helping with the designs of the interfaces for the Clients, Character Create, Dream Editor and any others that come up.

Besides all of that, he also helps with the move of the art to 32-bit that Rat, Majas and the Pixels are working so hard on. Right now he is developing an automated process to get all the avatars double sized, in 32-but shading and remapping. With about 100 avatars all with at least 20 frames each, this is a huge amount of work and his automated process will get the avatars most the way there. He also helps with avatar construction and critique, as well as doing things like helping Sync make the Vinca symbol portal piece for the amazing new Dream Portals she is making!

Gar does a lot more than this but it is a nice round sampling of his awesome help! If you see him around, be sure to thank Gar for working on The Second Dreaming to make Furcadia better for us all!