Pocket Towne

Weekly Developer Update 5.24.22

Hello to all the Cardano and Pocket Towne community that happen to read our weekly updates! We really need some distractions from the realities of the world we live in right now. Give me the magical fast-forward time remote so that Pocket Towne is fully released right now. You will read below regarding our delays in converting to Unreal Engine 5, but there is plenty of other work to do so this will not cause delays in our overall roadmap. We have story, NPC dialogue, music, and sound to make progress on and that is quite an enormous amount of content. Especially since I plan on all game music and much of the sound being completely original. We will shift some of our concentration to fleshing those areas out while we wait on various elements that are in the works to come to completion.

Updates on Previous Weekly Goals

• Seek an addition to our marketing team

We have had no progress on this front, this goal will remain open until we find at least one team member to add who is specifically oriented towards marketing. If you are interested in helping to run any of our socials, reach out to us please https://twitter.com/PocketTowne.

• Provide short video of animated player character

Gloria has gotten into our project now and begun work. She already made some corrections and pushed some of those fixes. That said, her work is not complete and it wouldn’t be fair to share an incomplete representation of her work. She already discovered and corrected the collapsing spine_03 which was really messing up the animations. Her work will be ongoing in the project, after completing the mesh fixes she will begin making custom animations for us.

• Project moved to Unreal Engine 5 (delayed)

Regretfully, the full transition to UE5 will not happen until mid-July more than likely. We have done all the preparations for this transition that we can at this time. This was due to the latest update from a primary module of game functionality we purchased and started building from early on. They had previously said that they were close, and our understanding of that timeline was not complete. This will mean slightly less world building, although the play area Into the Sky will continue being lain out. In general, structures and objects will have few issues converting over. Programming and adding functionality is going to be on pause until we convert to avoid double work.

• Show samples of customized hair modeling

We worked with our modeler, H, to ensure the way he wants to design our hair will work in game. During our last team meeting on Thursday we tested 100–400 ‘players’ in the same area with the hair and without, and the impact to frame rate was minimal. We also worked the facial hair into the work contract with H, and we just paid the bill for the complete modeling of all of our hair and facial hair. The contract allows for 3–4 months for the work to be complete, although I’m sure we will have hair to share along the way.

Game Development

In our last meeting, we did a stress test on the system to ensure it could handle 100–200 players in close proximity without taxing frame rate too much. The results were very good overall, and we expect that from our relatively low poly design that most computers will perform well playing Pocket Towne. We officially began working on writing story line and NPC dialogue, which is an enormous task in and of itself. With us delaying converting to UE5 until July(ish), sound and music design also seem a good way to fill the waiting period.

Community

Pudgy cat put out a great promotion giving away a Pocket Towne estate as well as a fat bag of $Pudgy! SO generous of them. Show them some love if you don’t know about them. We set up our trading pair with WOLF on https://app.minswap.org/ also, so swap ’em tokens to your hearts content! We have more great stuff in the works, and we are so thankful for the communities that love to collaborate. This is how we all succeed!

Weekly Goals

• Seek an addition to our marketing team
• Provide short video of animated player character
• Provide updates on Nikos’ (full stack dev) and his assignments
• Provide in-game music sample