Ponderossa Sneak Peek & Team Expansion

Anyway, today we're having a sneak peek at the vibrant and sea-touched bastion of Ponderossa. Yes I came up with the name before checking the spelling. No, we're not changing it.

My goal with this is to reemphasize our earlier commitment to visual excellence - and while we're clearly still off the mark, we're proud of the leaps made since our first visualization of this 3D journey. It is our first game of this kind, and we want to make it right; plenty of technical research and engineering behind the scenes was warranted, but those things weren’t trivial to portray in a marketable devlog fashion.

Much of that effort was funneled into the worldbuilding and rendering toolchain, with Ponderossa serving largely as a testing ground.

Unfortunately, that did cause us to neglect the NPC department. Firstly, you will have noticed a severe lack of humanoids in the video. This is definitely not our intended direction, and making the world of Nexomon feel lively and organic is a priority. For the time being, we will have to make do with ghost towns as we preview other cities in the future.

The stylization we've achieved with the worldbuilding is undoubtedly advancing appropriately. But looking closely at our (few) humanoids, you'll notice significant visual disconnects and inconsistencies. That's a matter exacerbated by our demand for robust NPC variety and expressiveness, and unfortunately much of our worldbuilding technical research isn't exactly applicable with the such nature of workflow. You can expect future devlogs in that area, so please don't be put off by the apparent emptiness in our next explorations.

Development has been slow, though I suspect you didn't need me to tell you. We've expanded our team recently, and we expect to do so again soon. I can't promise anything regarding our timeline, but we can assure you that we're not stopping until we achieve something genuinely remarkable.

That being said, I've come to accept that it will be worthwhile for me to abandon marketability considerations and start posting seemingly more technical development musings (I guess, that was the point of a dev-log). Hopefully this, along with our continuous expansion of the team, will lead to less radio silence from our side and a deserved commitment towards our community.

Until next time, JVemon