When I last posted here, I had just started to get back into the swing of things after the birth of my third child. I thought I would stop by here now that things have settled down to let you know about a few other birthdays, not just the big doozy of having a new baby in the real world.
When I first started publically posting progress on our projects our group was still very young. Since then, we've grown. Tomorrow, our little project turns one year old and, though we still have a ton of work left to do, we've grown surprisingly far beyond my early expectations. Here is a little excerpt from January:
Since then, 35 models has become 150, 50 downloads has become 2000, a handful of visitors has become 1800 a month from over 60 different countries, and we are now a mere 18 textures away from having our first project completed. Probably the biggest change, though, is that all the references to "I" in the above quote now need to change to "We" as this is now a true community project. Word is spreading and the encouragement of the indie development community, more than anything, is what excites us to continue to work our butts off. I've said it before and I'll say it again I am thankful for the opportunity to work with such great artists. Not bad for a project that is run entirely in the nooks and crannies of our busy lives.I surprised myself when I recently looked back and counted the amount of work I had done over the first few months on this project. To date, I have created over 35 models, some of which I have completed and released on the forums. My work, a lot still in the work-in-progress stage even, has been downloaded over 50 times now and I have gotten great feedback and encouragement from people whose work I greatly respect.
Part of the fun of working on our project is that it is a wide open pioneering place. Anyone who contributes can carve out their own space within the walls of our community. Following on the heels of the open-content free model libraries I started up and spend the bulk of my time on, most of the artists in the coop have recently started up their own projects. So, while we are celebrating our 1 year birthday, I thought that this would be a good time to celebrate some other births around our group. Most are still just in the beginning stages but they all show a nice glow of health and hope for growth. Here are just a few, I'll write more about them in the future:
Genesis RTS. Nibbuls has started up a real time strategy project that is already, after a few short months, approaching its own first milestone. I'll be helping out on it as well once I finish up a few things.
Texture Coop. Yaniv has taken the lead-out on growing a library of raw and tileable textures that will be freely available in a way similar to our model libraries.
The Umbrella Man has just started up a project devoted to larger building-scale models.
A group has resurrected an old character model and are examining the possibility of preparing a textured model that we can distribute.
Khaine has started up a lengthy end-to-end tutorial for creating models with game engines in mind that should greatly expand on the work he has done already.
In short, the future looks bright.
New Stuff
As always, here is a preview of what is new on our site. Some of this you may have seen before if you've been hanging out on our blog but it has been a while since I had actually updated the downloadable files for our weapons pack that is in progress. Cruise on by and download the latest from the sidebar of our home page. As always, they are free for you to use with proper credit.
Stay free.
Scott Hsu-Storaker
http://www.lowpolycoop.com
