It’s a pleasure to meet you all! I am Stephanie Marchand, Senior Producer on Eternal Crusade. I am extremely privileged to work on this fantastic project with an awesome team. You already met some of them but let me tell you that the development of Eternal Crusade is in really great hands. We have the right mixture of MMO veterans, Warhammer 40,000 hardcore fans and game developer experts. I am working hard to get up to speed on my Warhammer 40,000 expertise, visiting Games Workshop’s HQ and going to Games Day in Birmingham were wonderfully informative. My first painted miniatures are very promising, I’ll post pictures on the forums once I am done :)

Now let me give you a little update on the project.

With our forums open, we get daily requests to hear how the project is going, and what we’re working on. Since we’ve embraced an unprecedented openness with our production, we thought “Hey! Why don’t we just tell them?”

Why not, indeed!

We're now deep in a phase of game development called pre-production, which is the time for experimenting to figure out the exact logistics of how we'll make the game, and exactly what mechanics work best. This is where our developers have been tackling two challenges: creating mechanics that are absolutely core to the game, and ironing out the biggest risks. Our primary goal for our pre-production was producing a working combat prototype, and we were pleased with our results.

With our core combat prototype behind us, we’re now testing additional features and processes. We’re paving the way to move into full production, which is when we’ll hire many more employees and really start turning our dreams into reality. Here’s what we’ve been up to:

The combat team has been advancing on the integration of class mechanics and especially jump pack for the Assault Marine. One of our most important goals for our pre-production has been making certain that our moment-to-moment gameplay is thrilling. We're very satisfied with our progress on that front, but we know we have to push further over the next two years.

The tech team has been supporting the combat team, but they have their own challenges to figure out. They’re now digging deep into Pikkoserver and the tech from MuchDifferent, identifying challenges and putting together our first true servers.

The world structure team has been investigating deeply into how we're going to build our massive open world- from the continents, to the terrain, to the strongholds and outposts on the surface. We've found some very exciting tools that are helping to accelerate and streamline our processes, and will allow us to create more environments, that look better, in less time.

The art team has been tackling the challenge of character customization, and figuring out how many and what options players will have for making themselves look unique. A valuable part of pre-production is finding any challenges and developing solutions so that when we scale up the team, it's “full steam ahead.” The art team has been shining at finding solutions to our challenges.

With the management team, we have been planning aggressively, figuring out how long each feature will take, and how much it will cost- a critically important part of making a game! As gamers, we've all seen what happens to games that try to bite off more than they can chew. We're all working as hard as possible to be sure we know our scope, and how we can fill it absolutely to bursting.

Our pre-production phase has been going better than any of us anticipated, but we’re not satisfied- we want to do more, and better! Over the coming months and years we’ll be pushing the boundaries on all these areas and more.

Now that I've told you where we're at- why don't we show you? We've put together a second "Meet the Team" video were I introduce myself, our Art Director and our Lead UI Designer. As excited as we know you are to meet them, we know you'll be even more excited to join the full team "on the floor" and watch as we play our pre-production combat prototype. Give it a look!

Thanks for joining us on our trip through game development. If you haven’t come to our forums yet, stop by and say hi! We love hearing your encouragement and concerns alike.

Thank you all for your great support!

Stephanie Marchand

Senior Producer