Distorting time for a new direction

So we've decided to change the course of the project temporarily to create something smaller. We are using a lot of things that we've already created, but the combat and things the player will do in the game will be different, we will however continue the base project after we've completed this shorter one.

So what do we have planned? we are creating a survival game with quests and crafting, the combat is action based and there is character progression based on what the player does, very similar to the base project except for the combat. We're using the map generator for this as well.

We've been designing a lot of things and have created a timetable in which we hope to finish a demo of sorts of this game. Currently we are working on combat (fists for now). I've created a character in Unity's mecanim using the animations and character model that Samuli created, currently it has running, jumping, idle and fist combat moves. I have to say that using mecanim has, at times, been a real pain in the ass.

While testing we noticed that we could only have 40 characters at the same time before the fps starts dropping below 60, the reason for this was that there are a lot of seperate parts in the character model and each has a skinned mesh renderer, so I've began created a skinned mesh combiner so we can have different armors for different body parts.