3 Months until completion. Then playtesting beings!

Hey there. It’s been a minute. So, what’s been going on in the world of Ira?

Let's start off with the teaser of the main menu. The orange glow of the sun cascading around Mount Azimuth as it looms over the town of pilgrimage. This is it! This is the menu you will see when you startup Ira for the first time! Many of you have probably seen a version of this at some point. Well, now you know it's part of the intro and main menu. Listen to the music, the dust blowing in the wind! Pretty soon you will get to see where the road to Pilgrimage leads.

This is how the journey begins, on a dusty road right outside of Pilgrimage.

Completion date?

What? A completion date? This cant be real right? Well it is! We will be doing final playtests in July! 3 months out! That's right. That's the hard deadline! No more delays. Playtesting begins

Technical Stuff

The last six months have been slower than I would have liked. In full candor I have had freelance clients off and on and it's the primary way I make my income and survive. That being said, I have been splitting my time between Ira and clients; hence the slow down. Most of my weeks are about 75 hours, but I’m not complaining as I love what I do. Things may have been slower than I would have liked but don’t take that the wrong way. I have been doing a lot.

• The entire project has been gutted of years of old unused content and systems, in order to be ready for the final builds. Anything that was created by members from years past have been rebuilt or cut, etc. The game has been rebuilt from the ground up by me. The entire stylization system has been overhauled to be as performative as possible with the help of a wonderful plugin called Extended Shading Pro by a gentleman named Nikolay Prudnikov. Nikolay has been instrumental in transferring Ira’s style over to the new shading system. Now, things run flawlessly and will run that way on any platform including mobile. I know this is more on the techy side of things but it’s made a world of difference. Thank you Nikolay Prudnikov!

• I unified all Ira actions into something called Ira’s action system V3. It makes it so any action I’d want to use in my development work can be called from a localized place. I’m systematically replacing the old logic. This way, play testing and modifying character actions and future acts will be easy.

• Updated a few tools that I use in my process as well.

• I upgraded the character locomotion system to an advanced locomotion system that makes character movements natural and now characters can be controlled by A.I. This might not sound like much but it's huge, as I can have characters climb ladders and perform all sorts of actions with ease. That makes handling gameplay much easier on my end. No more one-off scenes that take days or weeks to make as you just have to tell the character what to do and they will do it! I’m in this for the long run and I plan to continue making new content with this system! Also, the new locomotion system makes them feel alive! So much better than what it used to be.

• You’ll notice that the old press kit has been retired. The overall quality has gone up so much that, once again, the press kit