New Devs, More Builds, and More!

Hey guys,

I've got some awesome news today.  Because of all of you wonderful people and your support, I'm now able to hire on a few people to help out with the House Party project!

It's kind of a big deal going from a sole developer to a team, but I've just about got all of the pieces in place.  I have a couple of other devs that are going to be helping out with the project, and I am also hiring on a Quality Assurance Manager, who will be the delegate between all of you, and us devs.  What that means, is that all of the bug reports, feature requests, etc.. are going to start getting cataloged into a backlog, and we will be prioritizing and assigning cases out to be worked on between the devs.

So what does this mean for you guys?  More builds!  Now, I will be able to shift my attention away from fixing bugs and adding fine-details to working on new content.  In the meantime, you will still get bug fixes and more beta builds from the other devs.  In fact, right now, we are working on 0.7.0 Alpha, and 0.6.5 Beta at the same time!  0.6.5 is days away from completion with a lot of bug fixes and performance updates and optimizations, and 0.7.0 is still a week or two off with fresh content.

This greatly improves the work-flow because previously, once I called a build finished and started working on new changes, I could no longer update that build or fix bugs because it was mixed up with the new content I was adding in.  The way things are now, if I am in the middle of new content, and we have a major bug in the latest version, it can easily be fixed and updated, and all the while I can continue to work on the new material.  Pretty exciting stuff!

Ok so I saved the best for last.  I've been talking to Take One Studios.  If you're not sure who they are, they are a mo-cap/animation studio, and they've worked on a couple of titles you might recognize, like Witcher 3,  Mirror's Edge Catalist, and many more!  We are going to put together a punch list to get custom animations made for House Party.  This means the characters will soon have animations tailored to their models, removing a lot of the clumsiness that exists in the game from the mis-matched animations.  Like I said, awesome stuff!  And you guys all helped make it happen with your support!

We've come a long way in the past year and a half, and I thank you guys so much, especially the ones who have been with me for the long haul.  We're making great progress.  Let's keep it rolling!