well I can't say I've heard either way but I haven't really been following. Certainly think for a lean team they are going about it the right way to build, but I don't know what the long term plan is. I just assumed it was in house models since they have 2 3d art people on their team. I guess they are building assets or something?
plus, building a game is damn expensive. It's awesome they want to do this in their free time, hopefully they can find enough good people that have the skill to pull it off, but it's not easy. From what I can tell, they appear to be lacking a tool programmer, good tools are a must and the sooner they are in the better the project runs. Again, wish them luck but it's an uphill battle for any small team trying to build a MMO.
Our art team are currently building assets, yes, (and have been since around July of this year; prior to that they were concepting out) and will be doing so up until launch and beyond. We have a third artist confirmed to join us in January (after she finishes her grad program this fall/winter).
We have 14 people on the team so far. We started recruitment this week for an environmental artist, and we'll be expanding over the next few months with a goal of having roughly 4-6 new team members filling a few key roles for the 2017 calendar year. But the hardest part is finding people who share the same passions as the rest of us.
I certainly won't work for free with my day job, so finding people who have the talent + desire to pursue their hobby/dream in their spare time on sweat equity like the rest of us while they work a day job to pay the bills = our biggest challenge. But it's also our biggest asset because we aren't putting ourselves in debt to angel investors or banks or publishers who have their own agendas and timelines. We've been extremely blessed to have gathered the team we have to-date, because they are working here based on passion and shared vision for our fledgling game studio, not simply a paycheck, and we're keeping everything in-house.
There's some pretty amazing tools that are already being used, and when we need more we'll develop them. Robert and Richard are wizards and have been able to quickly get us up to speed on things as-needed, but just about everything we use already has intuitive controls and are relatively user-friendly in terms of basic functionality; it's more of a time thing than anything else, although polish is another matter entirely and that's where specializations come into play.
For example, last month; I had some extra free time as I was between contracts with the day job, so I spent a few 12-hour days getting up to speed on the new world building tools, and then jumped in and banged out three rough draft zones to pass off down the pipeline to the rest of the world builders. But they aren't anywhere near ready for publication. There's dozens of more passes by the world building team, then the environmental artist, and then there's lighting, shading, NPC placement, and so much more before things are anywhere near ready, and that's where specialists (people other than me lol) on the world building and art side come into play.
Another example is Emma incorporating Speed Tree into her existing work flow for Elenhi asset creation; she was already using Maya, Quixel, and other tools, and it took her about a week to learn Speed Tree at its most basic level. That's a relatively low learning curve, and obviously she's only using it at its most basic level, but it's all downhill from there (relatively speaking).
