Buzz Buzz March has been a busy month for our team. We started ramping up recruitment ahead of release. The development team locked down the features that will be necessary for launch - and now they are in the process of turning them into reality. Both the builders and lore writers have been organising content and throwing in new additions for you to explore. The forums have been a little quiet, but our internal Discord channels have hundreds (if not thousands) of messages a day. Here is a March update from across our teams: Management I have spent most of last week processing staff applications. There has been strong interest in our server, with some brilliant applicants. The happy news is that the work has come to fruition - we on-boarded several stellar members. The build team has grown by Tyler, who is now a full staff member. We've also had strong contributions from prospective staff build members, with GWolf being promoted to work on server related content. We have two new developers (Farcon and Thomas), a new lore writer (Zelda) and an artist (Shokk). All of these members are incredibly talented at what they do, bringing new talent to MF, helping to crunch down towards 1.0. Development With four developers now on the project, the dev team is more then capable of delivering a consistent flow of features, both for launch and beyond. We submitted 37 features and bug fixes, with 28 left for release. This pace is likely to pick up considerably as our two new developers get settled in. The team has finished major features that are now ready for launch, including a redesigned plot system, new stamina, food, and region plugins. We also have new internal tools - such as the ability to move maps across servers (to update the play server with new builds), or a whole new internal website for designing items. Building At the beginning of March, we had set up our public trial world. This allows any prospective builder to hop on and contribute to our building efforts. The builds created in the public space can then be migrated over to the game play areas, so no eye-candy gets left behind. We had over 10 builders join us in trial world, creating well over 30 new buildings - some of which you'll see as player housing in game! Next to that, we drafted out the new content needed for release. Isaiha has been hard at work upgrading the visuals of the island, from the coasts to new points of interests to visit. Matt, the creator of most our dungeon content, has proposed a modular dungeon design. Known as the cultist dungeon (to be announced next month), this will be the largest and most challenging piece of content for players to tackle. Community Alir and Quann have been consistently delivering new event plans for the past two months. Thanks to them, there is now a clear and reliable schedule of both story and community events. We will announce our specific event plans in the coming month, but you can expect engaging and rewarding activities on a weekly basis, with larger story-driven pieces every other week. I am quite excited about this personally, as it is a big step up from our event efforts in the prototypes. We are moving away from individual events, to thought out campaigns and story arcs. These build up the storytelling towards climactic moments where players get to shape the outcomes of the world. Lore Our lore team has grown to two members - with Zelda hopping in last weekend and already fleshing out several key non player characters. For release, we will spend time making sure players have interesting people to meet and befriend. Driven by our now working reputation plugin, the Lore team will be able to deliver deeper responses from the characters around you. We have also been working on new environments around the island, establishing the stories behind the enemies you will fight. We will announce a lot more on Lore in the weeks ahead. Marketing & Wiki You will see the team focusing a lot more on player-facing content. As we approach release, we will be ramping up our media efforts, with videos, posts and announcements throughout April and May. We are aiming for a 2-week lockdown period. After we finish designing all the plugins and the content, we will leave two weeks for media, player interaction and internal testing. This will give both the staff and the players time to get ready for release and our launch weekend. Plans for April The team has shifted gears. With new members joining all our branches, we are focusing our efforts on content creation. This means April will see new additions in content across all aspects of the project. The biggest features and game play content will be put together in this coming month, from new signature builds, to plugins and itemisation. We are also hoping to fill the additional spaces in our Marketing and Community teams, starting to focus on a release strategy. This should be clearly visible through regular updates, both on our forums and on YouTube. We are also actively exploring more experimental features. These are longer term efforts to try something new - some of these will likely make it into our post-launch updates. It is quite early to announce most of the ideas, but we are thinking about things like dynamically grown trees, a custom texture pack or voice acted characters. These are quite ambitious and will take months until we can even announce specific plans. At the moment, we are actively looking at how to best deliver these concepts. We have made great strides in March and only expect more from April. Our launch doesn't yet have a set date, but looking at our content plans, it is expected towards the end of May - if all goes well. That is sooner than you might think though, as we will be ramping up our community activity well ahead of the actual release! There are bright times in front of us, with the team moving full sail ahead. We will see you soon in Elpida, Tomas Owner of Minecraft Frontiers
