Weekly Update 2018-04-09

Good evening everyone,

First I want to apologize for the delayed update. It’s been a rough few days.

First the bad news. Friday night around 1 am during our Emily batch renders, our GPU suffered a catastrophic meltdown. The card is a total fucking loss. Our GTX 1070 passed away quietly in the night turning what was a horrible bottle neck into a rock fall on the highway. While we were trying to be very cognizant of how hard we were pushing it, we must have miscalculated and she burned off.

Since then, we’ve had time to assess the damage to the project. Fortunately the card was the only thing to go. While we back up our files regularly, we have a number of active files that updated throughout the week, and those were still in tact. This hardware failure has not stopped our project, just merely delayed it while we scrape together the resources for a replacement

Despite the halt to our render production, we have continued to write and code our story. And the good news is we still have a secondary system that can handle modelling and staging our scenes. It just lacks the capabilities to render the images in any kind of a timely fashion.

So it’s not the end of the world, just a kick in the nuts. Getting the card replaced is priority number one, but it may take us a few weeks to drag together the funds to do so. In the meantime, we will continue to write and code and move ahead so that when the time comes all that remains is rendering and integration.

I estimate that the worst case scenario has us missing our April release schedule, but releasing a large update at the beginning of May that would include Emily, Cassie, Jane, and possibly Amanda. We have already written Emily’s scenes and are half way through Cassie’s. I don’t think it unreasonable to think we could get Jane and Amanda written and coded as well.

Just to reiterate, this train doesn’t stop. We move forward as fast and hard as we can and we will not waste a minute of this downtime. There is plenty of other tasks for us to tackle that will put us a head when we have our render machine up and running again. We were racing down this highway pretty fast, it was only matter of time before we got a flat tire. But we’ll fix it and drive forward into the night. We just need a little patience.

In the meantime, we will continue to update you on the progress we are making, and we will see if we can pump this old machine for a weekly test render or something to keep your imaginations active in the meantime.

As always, thank you for your support. It’s your enthusiasm for our work that fuels us.