My new project 'Duatiu' is actually getting some traction after just 24 hours of announcing it!

Well, I have already received quite a bit of positive feedback in the past 24 hours about this project.  First, a number of my friends in the industry have promised to help me out and that has been amazing!

So far I have commitments of time from:

Shawn Presser : Who is writing the core graphics engine and has already been working on the project for several months.  Shawn's contributions to this project have already been amazing.  We are currently working towards our first milestone to provide a demo that will allow anyone to run a character around one of our game world environments sometime in the next couple of weeks.

Jared Freedman, An excellent game designer, developer, long time friend, and all around good guy.

Billy Zelsnack : Billy is a well known figure in the game industry and a long time friend.  He has volunteered to help with the game project when he can.

Charles Bloom : It helps to have good friends in the game industry and Charles, even though he is one of the top guys in the world he still took the time yesterday just to whip up a little bit of code I needed to solve a problem.  I see shares of stock in Charles's future.  Plus, he's a fellow Porsche fan so we have that in common.

John Miles :  What has John Miles done on this project?  Nothing.  Does John Miles even know that this project exists?  Probably not.  Have I even asked John Miles if he will work on this project?  No I haven't.  But, as a life long friend, I'm sure he will help me out when I need it.

Wajih-Halim : A recent college graduate in computer science who wishes to help with graphics special effects on the game.

Ben Hesketh : Runs his own successful game company and contacted me from this website because he thinks the project sounds interesting.  Ben has volunteered to contribute on the server code.  The website for Ben's company, Compass Engine, can be found here.  And a link to his recent game 'Bounty Island' can be found here.

Robert Sitton : Robert is a long time game industry veteran and was one of my key sidekicks when developing the game 'Planetside' for Sony Online Entertainment.

Joe Bizz : Musician and sound engineer and fellow UFO enthusiast.  So how that networking shit works?

RAD Game Tools : The guys at Rad Game Tools are long time friends of mine, Jeff, Mitch, David, Brian, Sean, and others.  They have always been extremely helpful in supporting me and my projects and it looks like I may be able use their latest product 'Iggy' to accelerate the development process for this game.  'Iggy' is an amazing product written by the the no less amazing Sean Patrick Barrett (one of the Gods of the open source community).  'Iggy' is an embedded Adobe flash engine that virtually eliminates the need to do any custom user interface programming.  The entire user interface for a game becomes a series of Flash/ActionScript/FLEX data assets.  This should greatly accelerate the development of the user interface for this game.  Of course, that means that now, instead of looking for a GUI programmer, I need an expert who knows how to use these tools; but that seems like a much simpler hurdle to leap.

This is a really good start to the virtual team, but I still need some more artists to join the project.  Hopefully when people see the caliber of people involved they will realize they are missing the boat if they don't hop on soon.