November Monthly Update

Hey Everyone,

A whole month (a bit more than that) has gone by, and I wanted to give kind of a monthly update and keep you in the loop on all the goings on, the ins and outs, the ups, and some downs, that make the great heart of our community beat. And allow me to say, things are exciting!

Community: Let’s start with what matters most: you guys(and gals).

Discord: Our discord grew to nearly 10000 members. Most of the growth, obviously, happened during the first week of this project. But even now, things are moving forward, and more people are joining us every week! People are recommending us to their friends and bringing them over, sharing that this is a place where politics don’t matter. I mention this because I've seen it happen, and it’s something I'm particularly proud of.

There is no such thing as a FOSS project entirely devoid of drama, but aside from some smaller flair ups, we've managed to avoid it almost entirely. For whatever reason, most people are really nice to each other here. I, myself, have had absolutely stellar experiences hanging out with people in voice chats, talking in general, answering your questions and DMs.

We have also announced our first game jam, and we invite everyone from this community to take part. Submissions for this event will be open from November 15th at 3:01 PM to November 23rd at 2:59 PM (PST), and you can read more about it on our Itchio Game Jam page, here: https://itch.io/jam/redotgamjam - everyone is welcome!

Lowest moment so far? What happened to our X account. As most of you have heard by now, it got hacked, and X wasn't exactly helpful with bringing it back into our fold. We have created a secondary account, but there is still reluctance for some whether to follow it, due to the hopes that our previous account might be returned to us. As we're slowly losing hope in X's support with this matter, we're no longer calling it our "backup" account. If you're not yet following it - do so. While the numbers its doing are a far cry from what we had on the previous one (while already over the 1K user bump), it's definitely growing and with your support - any comment, retweet and like is greatly appreciated - we can grow it further. Some of our community members know already, some don't, but if you tag the Redot account on interesting projects or post, we will share them. Anything you can do to get us in front of more eyes is greatly appreciated - and, at the same time, we consider it important to also share and promote your own work. If you're not yet following it - do so (here: https://x.com/Redot_Engine).

Ko-fi: As many of you know, we opened a Ko-fi account to help offset some of the ongoing costs, especially since these are getting pretty serious. As of now, myself and a couple of the devs have been funding everything out of our pockets, and we continue to do so. While the Ko-fi doesn’t cover everything, the support from the community is amazing and every bit helps.

The current totals of our Ko-fi donations: Monthly $120 One-off $165 Total $285 (not including fees paid to Stripe/Paypal)

We really appreciate everyone's support! Right now we are saving up for the eventual non-profit setup, as per our goal on the Ko-fi page.

Engine: Our engine developers are working like crazy, getting close to rolling out a stable version. They've been steadily releasing updates, progressing through a couple betas to a release candidate. Note that release candidates are primarily for final bug testing and aren’t meant to introduce new features. We are currently building our RC2, with the possibility of one more release candidate to resolve any remaining issues before the stable release. We aim to launch the stable version in about two weeks, but please keep in mind that, as all work is volunteer-based, timelines may shift. New Teams: We’ve established a couple new teams, allowing Redot to branch out into new directions, without impacting our core engine development. First, we have our Creative Team, led by our own Mudder$ (be sure to contact him if you'd like to help with any of this!), dedicated to creating content for and by our community, whether that's videos for our YouTube channel or new memes for our X. If you have any skills that could help our creatives produce even better stuff, be sure to let us know!

Secondly, we've also kicked off our Experimental Project team, which might very well decide Redot's future. The team's goal is to explore some of the more unconventional (and sometimes just wacky) ideas that were thrown our way (Zig rewrite, anyone? ). Their first project is a launcher to handle engine versions, starting projects from templates, etc. - similar to UE's launcher, with a possible tie in to the asset library. This is still in early stages, but already under active development.

I’ve wanted to do an update like this for a while, and my goal is to keep these coming monthly to keep everyone in the loop - to always keep you guys in the loop, especially if you're one of the people who don't lurk in the Discord everyday. Once again, thank you for your support, your feedback, your shitposts, and everything else that makes this community into what it is: the best in indie game development. See you around, and as always, if you have any questions, I’ll be hanging out in general chat to answer them, or you can PM me. Make Gam.

~ Drew