Hello everyone, Merry Christmas and happy holidays. Or happy Christmas and merry holidays...or holidays Christmas and merry happies. But that’s NOT what this post is about. Instead, we look at what this last year has meant for us, starting from right where we began.

Disclaimer: This is gonna be a hefty read.

It’s been a solid year for us here on A Township Tale, and are super pumped for what’s to come next. Some of our team members are out to see their families, getting refreshed for what’s going to be an epic year in 2018.

And so, today. I’d like to take you on a journey with us from the start of all this. I’ve been given free reign over this last blog post before the new year, and I figured it’d be fun to take a journey back.

The Start

I’ve told this story many times, about how we began with a simple desire or dream, and felt no compelling reason why we shouldn’t be the ones to make it happen. And so, we found whatever time we could to make this thing happen. I wrote a roadmap for this colossal titan of a game, and we jump-started into prototyping.

This image here, if you saw us at the beginning you’ll remember it. Much of our materials still have some of this imagery here. But before this point even, we were much smaller. Right when we began, there was actually nothing past that archway. Just a void of infinite virtual space.

I still remember when Tima first told me to make a landscape outside of this gate. Initially we fought it, saying that empty nothing was useless. But after having done it, it soon began to inspire us for what the experience could really be like.

Whilst I was doing that, Tima casually told Joel this game needed multiplayer right now. Even when the game had nothing at this point, we knew it needed multiplayer before it could have anything else.

Tima’s foresight could not have been truer. And he even had some more to spare. You see, many months before that, Tima purchased a booth at PAX Australia. He didn’t have a game to show or anything, but he did it just in case. And so after a bunch of R&D Joel and I were doing, he asked us the question that sparked all of this.

“Hey guys, can we take this to PAX?”

We scrambled to get some fun stuff going on in it. Joel and I added archery the week before PAX. We had another team member join us properly on the project, Timo who was working through our swinging mechanics for mining. We also were lucky enough to find Victor, our gameplay programmer. The day he started, we said “You’re coming with us to PAX.”

And PAX was SO good!

PAX Australia

We ended up getting sponsors so that we could get a bigger booth to play multiplayer at PAX. We even managed to link up the booths across the convention so that everyone would be on the same server. This is also where we met many of you, early fans of A Township Tale who completely understood our vision when we described it. As hard as it was to describe.

We also happened to get a prime location in the far corner of the convention center. Right next to Hanabee.

Those people not sporting the fashionable ATT shirts are Michael and Lindsay Jones from Rooster Teeth. Being PAX neighbors with them, we managed to get them to play the game, which then led to our next convention. RTX Australia, where members of Rooster Teeth would livestream our game. I lost many years of my life, but the invitation made all of this we were doing start feeling super legit. And we came back from that week in Melbourne pumped to get cracking.

We started iterating on the character models.

We made procedural caves.

And we started on combat.

At the time of RTX, some of these were too divided for us to want to show it. It was only after RTX that we started the task of merging these environments into a seamless experience. Figuring out our transition between procedural and hand-made areas.

I was building the world still, and the team was working on some heavy back end tech, and starting on server stuff.

After RTX, blacksmithing gets added, character customization gets a ton of content added, the first enemies are added, combat physics are improved, progression, procedural structures, and a metric ton of tools get developed to build things that we’re nowhere near announcing yet.

This is all without taking into account all the company business things we do on a daily basis, writing these blogs, making videos, and staying healthy.

I think around this point of the blog post, I’m going to get some backlash from the team about how long this is.

So lastly, I want to thank all of you in the community for joining us. Getting to talk to you through our DISCORD and getting feedback on our videos is great, and is fuel to the fire in our bellies. You were the first to share in our vision for the game, and inspired us to take this further and further.

We’ve got a lot more that’s going to get revealed soon, and so I’ll give you this quick sneak peek as to what we’ll be talking about when we return after the new year!