Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Happy New Year, Io Saturnalia,whatever you’re celebrating, hope your new year brings you lots of joy and happy new experiences!
For us, 2014 is looking to be a momentous year. We’re working hard to make sure we release a solid new title next year, a title that will thrive in 2015, 2016, and beyond.
Most of our employees are based in Russia or in the former Soviet Union. The wonderful thing for employees, and a horrible thing for employers, is the fact that most of those countries are officially off from December 31st to January 10th. People in that part of the world love to celebrate the New Year, and they celebrate hard. Many businesses do not return to full working capacity for another week or two after the official holidays end, but we are of course different. Some of our employees are even planning to work from home over the holidays to ensure deadlines, but that’s purely their personal choice. I as a project manager obviously cannot ask anyone to do that unless it’s their own personal choice.
Having said that, we probably won’t have any significant work done on the project for the fateful 11-day period.
December was a difficult month for me personally with some unexpected events jumping out when least expected. One of our employees ended up in the hospital. Russian healthcare being what it is, waiting for the ambulance for two and a half ours almost led to a bigger tragedy. Not one but two of our married employees had their wives end up in the hospital.
Finally, another valuable team member slipped on the ice but thankfully his face broke the fall. He now looks like a B-movie monster, and has to continue modeling with one eye swollen shut. Finally, I know many of you are very concerned about the state of kickstarter rewards fulfillment system. The work has not been progressing nearly as fast as we needed. We’re still not there. Including paypal with kickstarter ended up adding a huge layer of complexity because we can no longer just use kickstarter’s features. Programming everything together, bringing the lists of kickstarter and paypal backers, and integrating it with DCS forums and other site features just turned out to be a nightmare. At this point, it almost seems like it would have been easier for me to manually do the reward surveys via email or something basic like that. At this point, looks like the roll-out is not going to happen until at least the end of January 2014. For this I sincerely apologize. I should have planned this out better. In hindsight, I should have stuck with kickstarter alone.
Anyway, I was really hoping to end 2013 with a bang: a couple of screenshots of the Bf.109 cockpit in-engine, flying around, and we still have a couple of days left in the year. If that does not happen, we’ll do a consolation update on the 31st.
For now, here’s the current state of the P-47 cockpit. Looking to be completed by late January.
We’re actually well ahead of schedule on cockpits with the project, which I guess is the best news I have to offer at the end of 2013.
