June Producer’s Letter
Greetings Pantheon fans,
This month’s Producer’s letter will go over some changes to our content delivery and what has been going on in development.
On Content
As we head into the last half of 2023, we have decided to take some time to refine how we show Pantheon’s progress. For the months of July and August we will be pulling back from some of our content features to redefine their goals and create new assets. Below are a few of the plans we are working through and their goals.
Moving forward, live streaming on Twitch will be prioritized for gameplay events or larger events that tailor directly to being live with the community. We have found that the length of our live streams makes it difficult for a large part of our community to consume all the fine details of Pantheon or stay up-to-date, and we want to change that. We also understand that the delivery of this content could be more concise. As a result, video updates will be released on YouTube via YouTube Premieres. You can expect our monthly updates to go live at the same time we currently do now on Twitch, outlined in the content calendar below. These features will be more refined, more produced, and more cohesive to ensure we are focused on the “meat and potatoes” of our updates. YouTube Premieres also ensure we still have a way to gather as a community for updates.
Parting the Veil provides a lot of important key information about Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, while simultaneously offering an opportunity for Community and Visionary Realms to interact directly. However, much like our live development streams, the length of the content can be difficult to consume, or important details can be missed. We are reformatting how PtV works by condensing it down into several short videos on a single topic over the course of the month. This will be pre-produced content, while still tapping into the community for questions they want the answers to. Rather than one long live stream, you’ll get questions answered in smaller groupings, sprinkled throughout the month in an easy-to-consume format. We believe this will also make it possible to get more of the team involved in answering these community questions.
We understand that these are large changes as we step away from live streaming twice a month. That said, we believe the quality of the content will vastly increase as well as uniformity of delivery. It also requires less time from the game developers so they can stay focused on dev tasks. There is a lot of work done in the coming two months to prepare the new content format. We will come out roaring in September with the proper assets and tools in place to increase our efficiency in content creation, as well as the overall quality. So please bear with us as we prepare, resulting in a bit less content for July and August than in previous months this year.
The cadence of the producer’s letter along with our community-driven articles will not be affected by the upcoming format changes.
Roadmap to Alpha
We are reformatting this section of the Monthly Producer’s letter as well. Expect to see a new Roadmap design in September that will not only be easier to read but include more information. In the meantime, for June, July and August we will keep you updated with a simple list for easy-to-read information, like you see this month. Let’ s dive into some of what we’ve been up to this month:
• We are making some IT infrastructure changes that moves us away from our existing backend to one in support of more robust servers, forums, security and reliability.
• We are systematically removing store-bought NPCs and replacing them with in-house models. The common wolf has been concepted, model complete and animated with 3 variations. The pantheon common rat, bat and spider are in various stages of the process.
• We are undergoing major work on lighting and atmospherics, including work towards the return of our in-house day/night system.
• We are implementing fixes and improvements to grass and trees, both performance and aesthetics.
• We have made updates to lootable container code and how loot sets for those containers are generated.
• PvP has been enabled for internal testing.
• We have run initial tests on player customization, varying head styles, hair and facial hair for human male and female
• 4 existing armor set conversions are now complete with new textures and modeling
• We have performed update to Awareness and Concealment stats. Awareness determines how effective a player’s stealth detection is, and Concealment determines how effective a player’s stealth is.