August 1st FBS Update

Greetings again, everyone.

It's time for the fundraising update. Thanks to several one-time PayPal contributions, July was a pretty good month for us. We raised $391.41, which beat our monthly goal, and reduced what we needed monthly to guarantee a second milestone. This month puts us at $936, which is almost 1/3rd of the way to the goal. With nine more months to go, we will need to raise $229.33 monthly for nine months to hit the goal. Unfortunately, our Patreon is only at $144/mo, so we're not fully out of the woods yet and still rely on one-time contributors. We are standing a much better chance than the last update, though.

There are still three users without official forum accounts. Two of you should be able to read this post (I'll email the third). If you have not signed up on the official forums, please do so. We will use the forum for bounty voting once we hit the milestone goal.

I have generated your voting points. You may notice slightly less VP than your subscribed tier. Because of currency conversions, I have to round the values. For the last several months, I have rounded VP up. This month I did proper rounding. The points system on our forums does not support fractional VP, but I am storing your exact values in my database. Before we do voting, I will audit the DB and the forum VP to ensure that you have the amount you contributed in USD rounded up in VP. 

Now that we got that out of the way. Let's talk about what's been happening.

A couple of weeks ago, I finished entering feature bounties into the system. With 521 bounties, I think we have a pretty good starting foundation. As we knock down milestones, I'll add more.

I have divided up the two days a week I was devoting to FBS entries between GearCity's documentation and AeroMogul.

Speaking of AeroMogul, work continues on the game. I am 95% confident with the client engine selection (Unity). I have mostly evaluated our UI solution for the game. Please note that the UI library was the main factor in engine selection. Unity as an engine was by no means my first choice. The Sever/Logic engine will still be an in-house rewrite of the Beardgine I&II economics engine. 

I am in the process of skinning the UI library and have begun the process of creating the main menu for the game. I started with work on the Main Menu because that will allow me to test most of the UI functions we'll need for the game. If I find the UI tools inadequate, I won't be too deep into the game development that I can't change. (Lessons learned from my mistakes with GearCity's UI library.) 

I've also recently read a 500-page book on modern UI design. So, hopefully, we'll get fewer snarky "This game looks like a DOS Word Processing UI." But we're likely to get snarky "This game looks like a late teens/early-20s website" comments. >.>

I should have some exclusive screenshots and maybe even a video of AeroMogul's Main Menu in the middle of the month. And I plan on giving you FBS contributors much more exclusive content and early access to that game.   

I think that's everything I wanted to cover. Once again, let me thank you all for contributing. We're a third of the way toward our goal of getting more content for GearCity. We're looking more and more likely to reach that goal every month. I hope the exclusive content I provide for AeroMogul helps tide you over until we hit those goals.

Once again, thanks,

Eric