I am a Kobold, I'm digging a hole!

Author: Salireths

Born underground, hatched from an egg of stone
Raised in the dark, the safety of our Dragon home
Scales made of iron, steel in our bones
To dig and dig makes us free
Come on brothers sing with me!

Some things have changed since the last time I wrote about Second Life.

In short: the Sergal avatar did not turn out quite how I'd want it to be - it needs a rework before I can release it. Turns out, SL avatar models have different expectations after all, understanding comes with experience. Because it seemed like it would be a similar workload, I decided to delay the Sergal.

Instead of working on an another sexy furry, something SL already has aplenty, I wanted to make a properly sexy scalie for it who can melt hearts of people, and who can be a better candidate for than a Kobold! I even had a base sculpt laying around already, all was left to do is to put some retopology and textures - and it would be done!

But of course, it wasn't as simple. Over time the ambition grew, fresh updates to SL brought new untapped opportunities that we couldn't miss. We had to put our genius together to make the old LSL scripting language dance to our songs.

But time doesn't take it kindly to those whom strive for the best possible creations... Initial plan was to finish the Kobold for Christmas - but despite closing indoors, working and not seeing sunlight for weeks, the workload was simply too huge to meet this deadline. And I have to apologize for the lack of updates for the festive season.

The good part is that alongside making the Kobold, we've built a road - whatever SL project comes next, it will be much easier. Lots of script work has been done, modular and re-usable, all to operate avatar systems. We've even made our own Blender mesh and animation exporter (because the only available alternative isn't good at all). Nothing is handed on a silver platter in SL, so we've built it all.

While this project wasn't as easy as we'd hoped before, as I said before, it's all done to help us attract a new community and share The Gateway of Realities with more people. At the same time we can expand into other platforms to bring some enjoyment to fellow furries there!

***

At the moment the Kobold avatar is not finished, it's almost there, but we need more time to iron out the bugs and complete some features. However we're already giving it away to all Patrons who supported us before 2020 and are interested to beta-test it!

We will return soon with news related to TGOR, as well as a retrospective/2019 game progress report.

Thank you for reading. I wish you an exciting, happy New Year with lots of great things to come! One of such great things is, of course, The Gateway of Realities :P

PS: Tasty NSFW version of the Kobold pic on is in the attachments below /
PPS: I couldn't find a better-made pickaxe for that photo :\ Should have made it myself, but time is of the essence.