Stardate: 23954.9

As we are wrapping up this year, we are also capping off the weekly patches. Last week's 1.0.7 patch was our last planned weekly patch for this year. With the patch we closed off our top rated bugs and cleared out a huge backlog of minor issues. We are now in discussions on what our future roadmap looks like, what the game needs and what type of resources we need to hit those goals. We are still in the early stages of this discussion however and don’t have any information to release at this time. But one thing I wanted to dive a bit more into was a minor point in this week's patch notes:

[i]Cerritos and California class ships' 3d models were adjusted to follow the lore more closely.[/i]

This was something we had been working on in the background for a while, and I wanted it as an example of how development works and give everyone a peek behind the scenes. When we initially launched, our approval of the Cerritos had gone a bit fast. We aligned on the ship in early August, and had a model up and running for mid-late august. Lots of time before the October release right. Problem was, we needed everything ready for our [url=https://youtu.be/3gS_nMkKl84?si=4YvDt0ZtwYxApsjC]Game Feature and Pre-Purchase bonus video[/url] that went live on September 7th. The date was important to hit, as it was supposed to align with the release of Season 4 of [i]Lower Decks[/i], and hit the day before [i]Star Trek Day[/i]. This was to get into the water before the wave of Trek news hit on the 8th. It was a solid plan until the morning of September 7th, when we got a notification that there was a blocker for our video, it could not be released. Major issue: [b]The ship was missing the registry number.[/b] The scene we had at [url=https://youtu.be/3gS_nMkKl84?si=4YvDt0ZtwYxApsjC&t=43]0:43[/url] was supposed to mimic the [i]Lower Decks[/i] opening credits, with an over the ship arc shot. The camera ends up behind the ship before it goes into warp.

After a few minutes of freaking out and a few calming coffees, we did a call with our trailer team and we got an alternative shot that loses the iconic shot. This prevents the blocker we had for missing the registry by doing the arc shot underneath the ship instead of over, but now it was not a reproduction of the shot from [i]Lower Decks[/i]. - A stressful few hours indeed. At this point, we get the registry added and lock the game code for release. Another problem then came along a few days later, several points on the model were incorrect, and needed to be updated. - The team had just had code freeze, and we would not be able to do anything until we had a day 1 patch. Launch day comes along, and as you might remember it was not the smoothest launch. With everything on fire, fixing the Cerritos was not high on our priority list. However, with Patch 1.0.7 we finally got around to implementing the fixes that needed to be done, but what changed? Let’s take the biggest most obvious change: [i]We went from this:[/i]