January Update: Happy New Year!

A new year come by, and as always Team Return is still hard at work!

First and foremost allow me to apologize for the lack of update in the last couple of month. Things have been a bit more hectic than I would have liked, and we were also hoping to have a special release ready which postponed the update… until unfortunately the new year passes us by.

We’ll do our best not to miss our monthly update anymore!

While we have to confess that production has somewhat slowed down over the last month (but with Christmas and Holidays coming this was to be expected), we’re back with a vengeance and I’m happy to say that there has still bit quite a lot of progress since our last update.

You’ve all of course saw Jolyn’s beautiful portraits, and she keeps working on them as we speak with more incoming.

We’ve been doing some UI work as well, notably crafting a somewhat new look for the dialogue window based on Storm of Zehir’s assets in order to allow you guys to fully appreciate the work Jolyn has been doing with our portraits. Jaakko has also added a new Food bar next to the portrait and our already new Mana bar in order to track in real time if your characters need food without having to go on the character sheets or the inventory.

On the programming front we are now hard at work on crafting a solid unified system integrating all the systems we created for Return in one single package. Expect some news on that front soon. Work has also begun on an editor to allow for careful writing of Books and Scrolls within the game.

As far as writing goes, with all the NPC Profile finally finished we are now hard at work to actually writing our NPCs. Things are progressing pretty well, but a few NPCs already done.

The worldbuilding is also progressing well with most of of our outdoors areas for the current part of the project being close to completion. I’m also happy to announce that MokahTGS know from the Grumpy Strumpet and Realms of Ultima fame has offered his skills to our team and has been doing simply jaw-dropping work.

We hope to finish with the outdoor areas soon, and then begin work on a our dungeons areas which promise to be interesting.

So this New Year begins well for Return and we certainly expect to have something playable to offer you all during 2011!

But even with this new year, some things does not change and indeed:

WE STILL NEED YOU!

We still need extra team members to keep development going and most importantly: make development go FASTER. Writers and Worldbuilders would definitely come in handy, and we are still sorely lacking in 3D Artists. While NWN2 has a lot of art, and there is a lot we can use from the community – if we want to create some real Ultima creatures and placeables – we definitely need 3D artists to craft these new objects, keeping in mind they could also come in handy for other projects!

Again: this project will not be finished without you!

See you all next month!