OK, so its been a little more than two months since the last Dev Log, but this time, weve got a little more than just progress updates to share!Namaqualand is out!After more than a year in the making, were finally happy to share our latest asset collection!A rocky South African Desert, blooming with wildflowers and succulents.Ive written a more detailed blog post about the trip and the project as a whole as well, which you can read here: https://blog.polyhaven.com/namaqualand/Browse the assetsDownload the scene fileRead more about the projectQwantani HDRI TripAt the Southern point of the Sterkfontein Dam, just shy of the Drakensberg mountains, is a reasonably sized hilltop that sits a short 10-minute hike from a holiday resort I visited several years ago: Qwantani.Jarod and I revisited this location in August for a week with the sole purpose of capturing more HDRIs from the hilltop.The weather was mostly clear the whole week, which is not super exciting, but we did at least capture what we came for (including testing out our new astro lens).Were still working on stitching all the HDRIs, but youll see them released over the next few weeks.Into the Deep End of Game DesignDario, Rico, Greg, Jenelle, JamesIn a blog post I wrote earlier this year, I explained a bit about the idea of Poly Haven getting into game development. But in a nutshell:Were exploring the idea of making video games as a means to prove the usefulness of our assets to show that the assets we make can indeed be used for the purposes we intend them much like how the Blender Studio creates open movies to prove and improve Blender itself.At the same time, wed like to explore if we can use this as a potential method for funding the creation of our 3D assets. Funding a team that makes free content has always been one of our biggest challenges (I did a talk about it a few Blender Conferences ago), and were wondering if selling video games might be a good way to support this.So, starting in October, we jumped into the deep end of game design: a 5-week sprint to make a game, any game, and get a clearer picture of what this idea might look like (and how much were in over our heads).The game that we make this month will be shared exclusively on Patreon to give us some stakes and accountability. Since this is more of a learning experience than a real game project, we wont be publishing the game anywhere else.No one on the team has any experience making games. Working on assets for games, yes, but nothing remotely connected to the task of designing and implementing gameplay at all.We dont intend to become game designers ourselves. Poly Haven, at its core, will remain an asset platform. Rather, we want to be able to relate to and better work with designers and developers we hire or collaborate with in the future.The broad idea is this: Learn a bit about game development this year (through this 5-week sprint and a jam or two) so that next year we can hire some talent and try to make something worthwhilethat suits Poly Havens mission too.Other ProjectsThose are the three big ones, but to give you an update on the other things happening in the background:The moon scans are still in the works, weve made some progress but plan to tackle it fully after the game sprint.The fabric scans are almost there, were just waiting for a final few scans before we can set up the materials in Blender and upload them.My Blender patch for the asset drag&drop handler still hasnt been reviewed, however another similar patch landed which ads a handler for append/linking in general. This could feasibly be used instead for all the features of our add-on that were relying on my patch, so Ill be looking into it soon.Were still planning to recategorize all our models, but since this may have some unknown impact on users on our site and in our add-on, wed like to wait and figure out new categories for textures and HDRIs first too.