Whim Independent Studios - Development Log #49

Hey all - back with the 49th development log and the final one for 2018! I'm sitting in Christopher Nuño's studio in Los Angeles working on the log while some new music for future content is being created. I hope you are all having a happy holdays so far.

This development log entry will primarily be devoted to the up-to-date progress of Selatria going into the new year.

I'd like to start off the post with a very important announcement. As of 7:32 PM on 12/28/2018, all of the main scenario dialogue has been implemented into Selatria! It's been a long time and with a lot of help from the studio team. The dialogue for all of Selatria is several hundred pages and that's just for the main scenario alone. It took almost eight years of tweaking and editing to get all of the dialogue into the project, and now we can focus on other aspects of the game and not be tied down by having to implement pages upon pages of main scenario content.  That being said...

The focus for the rest of the development cycle is as follows.

• We are prioritizing making parts of dungeons that contain story cut-scenes before completing the rest of the dungeons. Cut-scenes are the most time consuming aspect of Selatria to create and we are creating the areas with cutscenes before finishing other incomplete sections of dungeons.

• We are planning to implement unique victory poses for each character. The art has been completed, but implementation of this will happen in January.

• Expanding the testing team to test Selatria and give feedback on implemented content to minimize the amount of bugs and errors leading into release. Over the course of 2017-2018, we've had two testers, but we're looking to increase it to a team of 4-5 people.

• Research Steam achievement API and see if implementation will be feasible (Q1 2019)

• Finishing and adjusting dungeon content (Ongoing)

• Finishing and adjusting battle content (Ongoing)

• Finishing and adjusting story and cut-scene content with related voiceovers (Ongoing)

• Finishing and adjusting art content (Ongoing)

Here are two shots from one of the dungeons in the later chapters of Selatria. This is from an upcoming dungeon called the Mirage Temple. The team will need to return to a newly discovered section of the Mirage Forest to track down an artifact for the story. 

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For this next part, I'm taking a different PR approach and outline what will NOT make it to the initial launch and what may be designated for post-release content. This is going to be a spoiler-free version of the development timeline for the rest of the game and may still be subject to change leading up to the final launch of the game.

Cuts to the original plan and scope of the game are going to be necessary in order to reasonably finish the game on time. We know there were grand plans for some of the dungeons and obstacles but we are going to be putting focus on what gets the game done while still being fun and enjoyable. So I'd like to dive in on some of the necessary changes coming to the Selatria project in 2019.

What is going to be cut from the vanilla game to make the 2019 deadline for completing the game. This is not a final list, but I’ve been doing a line by line breakdown of what we want to do to get this game done.

• Final chapter dungeons are going to be cut down in scale and reworked with an emphasis on fun over complexity. One major recurring mechanic rather than multiple mechanics.

• We are planning on cutting down the planned level for which the game is to be completed. This will help us balance the characters and make every few levels gained to be meaningful.

• Redundant/underused abilities are going to be removed from the game for all characters. Taking feedback from Selatria: Advent of the Dakk'rian Empire release, we as designers don’t utilize all the different status effects enough and it’s difficult to make one spell for each specific instance. Paralypur, Poispur, Sealpur, etc, is going to be consolidated to one single target spell called “Purify” and the area spell “Purify 2” will be changed to “Cleanse”. We also want to avoid long ability lists as players will be inclined to not use weaker abilities at later levels. For those who plan on carrying their save data over from Selatria: Advent of the Dakk'rian Empire, these changes will be automatically applied when the save data is loaded into the full game.

• We plan on having post-release content that expand on character backstories. These updates will be FREE and will not be marketed as purchasable downloadable content. I cannot promise the backstory content will have voiceovers. That will depend on how Selatria performs sales-wise.

• There will be one optional super difficult dungeon at launch and one optional super difficult dungeon in one of the free updates post-launch. More details on these dungeons will come in development updates in 2019.

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There's a lot of exciting announcements coming for our studio in 2019. As of January 3, it will have been 8 years of development on Selatria, and 2019 will be our final year of working on the full-initial launch, with more post-release content to come after. I'm glad we're on the last stretch to the development of this project and I can't wait to show you what else we have planned come next year. Happy New Year and I'll follow-up more in 2019!


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Happy 6 years to whimindie!

Six years ago I asked my friends to help me clean out the Groove Time building so I could start a small video game development studio. Only Paul and Matt showed up. Wouldn't have been able to start or go this far without them and I am very grateful for that.

And thus whimindie was born! Setting up the studio changed my life in many ways for the better. Opened up new opportunities for myself and those have worked with us over the years. Not to mention we released three games in the process. Happy 6 years! We will finish Selatria soon!

Gaming Laptop Keyboards (Or not even gaming laptop keyboards ... just laptop keyboards)

My one big gripe with gaming laptop keyboards is that companies want to sacrifice either the size of the shift key or the arrow keys to make things fit (and they can keep a rectangular design). Both shift keys should be large, rectangular and consistent on both sides. Arrow keys need to be large and square shape with all four directions being consistent in size!

The only non-compromised gaming laptop keyboard I can seem to find is Alienware (Dell) - and that's really unfortunate. Please don't sacrifice the integrity of the shift key, arrow keys, or any other commonly used key. Our niche audience needs you!

Current Toshiba Qosmio laptop. Most of the keyboard is good but they put some keys into really weird locations. (Print Screen requiring FN key). Toshiba has left the market for good laptops so replacement parts and repairs get worse as time goes on

Also small arrow keys.

Studio touch screen laptop for big mobile game demonstrations. What's up with that arrow key design, HP?

Forgive the dust, this is a really old retired Toshiba laptop from college

Full keyboard, no compromise in key sizes. The important keys have their own keys. Arrow keys decent size. Shift key and numeric keys aren't compromised

All I ask is for some consistency and care when designing keyboards for laptops and test popular and commonly used keys before trying to design a good layout.


I'm not getting into the debate between gaming laptops and gaming desktops. Please save that for a different discussion. There are many reasons why I don't have a Desktop including but not limited to: Game jams, IGDA meetings, game dev meetups, and back and forth between California and Nevada every two weeks. Just because I travel a lot does not mean I shouldn't have to deal with poorly thought out laptop keyboard designs.

Get yourself out there

I just got out of a 2-hour conversation with a female friend of mine who is frustrated that she cannot get anyone to date her.

It frustrates her when I tell her she's not doing enough to put herself out there to find anyone, but I honestly feel like she's not putting enough effort in. Go to meetups, converse with people, get to know them. Go on dating sites, lower your standards. Find what you like and don't like.

If you want someone to date, there is someone out there for everyone. I don't understand how she finds it to be difficult.

Go vote.

Rant about weight and self-image

I really don't consider myself to be overweight. I commissioned my friend to do art for me holding a Nintendo Switch and being angry (showing fake gamer rage) but he made my face look completely round and my body all pudgy -- I didn't think it looked like me at all.

When another friend drew me, it looked far closer to me. Maybe my friend thinks I look fatter than I am? I'm not sure. It's kind of a motivation to work out and lose some pounds, but I don't believe in dieting. If I eat something unhealthy, then I balance it out later in the evening by eating something healthy. Simple as that.

I was going to say more, but I think I got that off my chest. Go vote tomorrow.

Whim Independent Studios - Development Log #48

Hey all, back with the 48th development log for the studio! I've admittedly been slacking on regular updates and not posting them as often as I should have been, but that's not to say we haven't been making great progress for the studio.

The Dastardly Dairy Debacle

We finally released our game "The Dastardly Dairy Debacle" (DDD) for Android devices. You can download the game for $1 on itch.io or Google Play. A big thanks to the team members who helped with development of the project and seeing it through.

Programmer/Designer: Matthew Hawkins
Artist: Jessica M. Jacuinde
Story: Ryan Homme
Composer/Sound Effects: Christopher "H2o" Nuño
Additional Programming: Timothy Blanchet
Executive Producers: Paul Vela, Matthew Estrada
Testers: Jasmine Flores Baro, Kevin Flores
Special Thanks: Edwin Baranov

Also a special thanks to Dustin Adair who I reached out to help with some of the build issues we were having.

DDD was our first successful attempt at adapting an incomplete prototype and securing the rights and seeing it to the end as a complete game. I may follow up with a post-mortem with what went well and what didn't. As of the writing in this blog entry, I'm still talking to some team members for their feedback. 

Some final screenshots of the finished game.

Selatria

For Selatria, we have been making some significant progress. We have an additional battle system designer - Matt Hawkins, who is joining from the Dastardly Dairy Debacle team to join with expediting the process. While I don't plan on releasing the exact date of release that we have in mind other than the 2019 date we talked about, I'm happy to say we're ahead of schedule.

Don Alfieri who took over developing full main scenario cutscenes for our remaining chapters has really taken off and made significant progress on Chapter 4. Here's a tease of what's to come!


    

Just a note, what you see in the video above is not the final draft. I wanted to cut out spoilers from the scene, and I've since made some adjustments which you'll see in the final release.

With the current progress, we're averaging a new cutscene being done about every 1-2 weeks. I then go through it and make sure everything is smooth.

With that being said, I would like to say we have our production pipeline working pretty well.

Shadoe makes sure the voices are edited and cut to the proper volume. Leigh-anna takes the voice files and matches them with the implmented text and scenes.  Don takes the the text/scene instructions him or I have implemented into the game and makes character movements. Jon and now Matt Hawkins take the boss battle designs from our google doc and implement them. Tim works on coming up with new quirky features that we were planning on postponing to after release. And I am involved with all of the above and do final checks on everything to make sure it's implemented and working correctly and make adjustments as needed.

In the next development log, which will probably be the final development for 2018, I'm going to delve-deep into what may be cut from Selatria in order to make our target release date.

Until next time!



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My thoughts on 10/24 Wed attack

Early Wednesday morning on the news there were reports of suspicious package with explosives sent to the houses of prominent Democratic families as well as CNN, and most of these were places that President Trump has attacked in the past with his comments.

The political landscape has gotten so vitriolic that there needs to be changes. Please vote in the upcoming elections. Hopefully as blue. This far-right rhetoric is getting too violent and unbalanced and unhinged. People are willing to blindly follow someone if it means they get a little of what they want, and that's extremely dangerous.

That's my thoughts on that.

Why won't they take my indie game development advice, man?

Artist: No to exposure! Pay your artists.

Game Programmer: No to just ideas! Start implementing something.

Indie Game Producer: No to self-funding! I want others to fund my projects!

One of those three has to give. If you don't invest in your own games first and foremost, how can you expect others to? No one will ever care about your video game project more than you do.

 [Based off my frustration trying to give advice online.]

In several instances in the past week, it seems like my advice and suggestions for working on indie games is falling on deaf ears. No one wants to work on projects for free unless they feel they can get something out of it. Indie game developers and producers I've met seem to think everyone cares (or should care) about the project as much as they do. Even the two co-founders of Whim Indie don't care about Selatria as much as I do. Please pay them or agree upon some kind of stake to the game that respects the amount of effort they put into it.


If you can't afford art, make a game with default assets and save up money. If you can't save up money or don't have any money, get a job to be able to get money. Make the best game you can. Even if artists or voiceovers agree to work on a cheaper indie rate, putting your own money to kickstart a project says a lot about your own dedication to it. If you're not invested in your project, why should others be?

Fixing my coding/programming skill faults and going back to the basics

I am really dissatisfied with my lack of coding knowledge. During my first years of university for Computer Science, I was going through a depression and I couldn't focus on my studies during the crucial levels of university. It hurt me later on and now I'm not confident in my programming abilities.

Some team members of mine are having to fix my spaghetti code later on and spruce it up, and I can't continue to lie in mediocrity so I went back and am fixing my issues and faults for my programming language knowledge.

I purchased this book a few months ago Beginning C++ with Game Programming which uses gamification techniques to teach C++ and programming/object-oriented programming concepts.

During downtimes at work, I'm fiddling with C++ to be able to get back up to speed with what I feel like concepts that went through one ear and out the other during my university.

It's a really good book. Even if you don't know any programming, it's written so you can learn and get up to speed.

Negative tropes and Selatria

Certain offensive tropes, particularly the bury your gays trope -- I wasn't aware of it until I saw it brought up in (as of this posting) the newest season of Voltron and noticed this term being used a lot in discussion forums. It prompted an apology from the creators and producers in several tweets.

Reading through this had me analyze and doing research on this trope, and if any video games were guilty of it. I noticed the Shopkeeper in Selatria had a lot of these qualities.

Our original vision of Shopkeeper was modeled after a close friend of mine who we casted because he could pull off a lispy voice. (At the time.) When we were thinking of characters for Selatria, we wanted to shift traditional roles to different characters. ie: Main character being a maic-user and very weak at the start, and the main heroine who is a tank and not a love interest. And we wanted to have a masculine character with feminine qualities and characteristics. So we put these all together and came up with the shopkeeper. Because my close friend was being annoying at the time, we wanted to have the Shopkeeper have this same characteristic. Then we thought what if we gave the player an opportunity to determine if they live or die throughout the game and reward them if the Shopkeeper was able to survive throughout the whole game.

It was a great idea coming from a game design standpoint, but we weren't thinking of the cultural undertones.

I don't want LGBTQ+ audiences to feel alienated from our products and feel threatened or excluded based off my own overlooking and ignorance for taking this into account on the creation of Shopkeeper, so we've decided to remove all of Shopkeeper's death scenes from Selatria with the release of the 2.0 patch in 2019, and he will be retroactively revived for players who didn't save him at the crucial points in the story. We also removed a scene in Chapter 2-4 where Mage casts a Fire spell on Shopkeeper when he says he's not paying or doesn't have enough cash.

Next time we make a story like this for the game, we will be more mindful of combining character traits to where we don't exclude groups of people in that way.

Video Game Music Mashups

I've taken a liking to mash-ups in the past year or so.

My favorite mashup artists seem to be DJ Cummerbund and SiivaGunner's YouTube collection of video game music "rips".

It seems like a natural evolution from the YTPMVs of old with better music quality and heart put into them. Maybe that's not the right word...

My favorite one as of this post is the mashup which mixes The Beatles, Tears for Fears, and Nintendo.

This one from DJ Cummerbund is good too.

First time on a panel (at Coyote Cross-Up 2018)

So my team and I were planning to be at the Coyote Cross-Up on October 6th. One of the artists on my team who is a good friend of mine sent me a message of one of the panels in particular. "Are you interested in joining the game industry?"

I sent the director an email asking them if they were open to me letting the students know about internships and they asked me if I wanted to sit on the panel outright. It was a bit out of my element, as I've normally avoided panels. But if these were people who were interested in the industry and maybe potential team members, I couldn't turn the opportunity down. (I remember Paul laughing so hard when I told him I was participating)

It didn't go so bad. I was seated with a professor who also works in big-budget animation films and a teacher/entrepeneur who teaches kids how to code (I wish I had that when I was a kid rather than piano lessons) as well as someone who works higher-up at Live Nation. In my head I was kind of worried about being a bit too annoying because I always thought of things to say after someone else talked. But a lot of people came to our booth afterwards and talked about how much they enjoyed it. Perhaps I'll talk about the booth experience next time.

My gradual decline into mediocrity as a teenager

I had a rough work week this past week for my outside-of game dev work with a lot of unrealistic deadlines.

At some point during my break, I started looking into work meltdowns to try and reassure myself that it's really not as bad as it seems. For those that don't know, I went through a meltdown of my own a few years ago and quit the software job I was at at the time. It was a toxic restrictive (physically and mentally) environment and I should have left more gracefully. One of my biggest regrets.

Anyway, one of the stories in particular was about a teacher who lost it and made their kids run less than 7 minute miles. And it took me back to when I was at middle school. I had this mis-aligned thought from my time in elementary school that I can just coast on by with A's because I was the smartest, 6th grade hit and I felt stupid. Couldn't figure out the math problems and challenges I thought was so easy in elementary school, and rather than try and learn, I gave up. It extended to my competitive nature in physical education. I tried really hard to be the fastest person, and got 6 minute miles, and by the end of the year I didn't care any more and just walked.

This sense of not trying and mediocrity lasted me throughout college, really. Rather than strive for A's, I tried to calculate what the minimum I needed to get to pass. It wasn't until I started developing Selatria where I got that drive back that I lost in 6th grade.

If you're reading this somehow and you felt like the smartest person in the class going into 6th grade and suddenly feel stupid and embarrassed that you're not. I feel you. I've been there. Don't give up and don't be afraid to ask for help. No one will care or remember you asking a question down the line and it's OK to struggle a bit.

Just don't give up like I did.

Quick word on unreleased successful Kickstarter games

Recently, I was curious and looked up development on Project Phoenix, as the last time I looked at the game, there was negative rumored controversy that the game was used to fund another project called Tiny Metal. (It looks like there was a lawsuit over this that proved the claims to be false.) I wanted to see what other Kickstarters have had similar development issues, and I found myself going across this article back from 2015.

http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2015/12/10/nine-more-successful-kickstarters-that-didnt-deliver

In the back of my mind, I worry if people think of Selatria that way. Am I a failure as a Producer and Director because I keep having to push Selatria's release back? I don't think normal gamers understand how difficult it is to finish something as complicated as a game. On top of it, you get raked across the coals if it's not perfect or not what people are expecting.

As for these kickstarters, I feel that a lot of these games failed from mismanagement behind the scenes but the worst possible thing you can do is not communicate with your audience -- the people who want to play your game. If you don't have them, then who do you have? For what it's worth, I totally forgot Echoes of Eternea even existed. I remember talking about that years ago when we were starting work on Selatria.

For the record, Selatria is going well, hopefully I'll have a detailed development log in the near future that talks about it in more detail. But do check out our @whimindie social media channels if you haven't.

Until next time.

We've come full circle in caring about realism in games

I saw a link to this video in an AskReddit thread, it kind of evokes 90's esque nostalgia. We really did come full circle to going from the design of the game to caring to realism to back to caring about the design of the game again with the rise of the indie movement. Also, NES classic, SNES classic, etc...

A lot of people want the consoles and games of old, which is great. With the technology available to us, it should be easily accessible, but it's hidden behind rights issues, deliberate withholding of titles, and scarcity. Something to think about...

Interesting post I saw from a friend of a friend

#IHateVideogames

It was a post I saw by a friend of my best friend on Facebook. It was a picture of a disassembled Nintendo Switch and a smartphone and a broken Xbox 360 saying she wanted her son back and with that hashtag.

Now this friend of my best friend was known for teasing him (and me by extension) about being nerds with no life who can't get meaningful relationships and never leave their room.

I honestly feel that it's a cover-up for bad parenting. What's the kid going to think if he doesn't have a healthy way to spend his spare time? It's important to go outside. It's important to learn about the outside world, and gaming should be kept to reasonable standards. (No more than a couple of hours a night at worst, but only after doing homework and getting some time in the sun.)

The kid spends 7-8 hours a day at school doing physical education and learning, and it's important to balance that out with something fun. If they like it, don't use negative reinforcement to take away games and punish them, foster it with positive reinforcement. Teach programming and algebra and do some research on scripting languages so they can make their own games. Channel that interest in tech to something that will help their grades and their future.

Note, I'm saying this as someone who isn't a parent. Please take my advice with a grain of salt.

And FWIW - I do go outside and make sure to go on road trips and travel, even with being a nerd. I'll probably get to that in a future post.

Until next time.

Letting go

Those who have known me for a long time know that it's really hard for me to let go of things.

As my real life has gotten more hectic and busy, I've had to step back a bit from actively working in the trenches on Selatria to focus on some of the other studio projects to make sure that they were progressing in a serious manner.

At first, I'll be honest, it really hurt because I made most of the cutscenes and was constantly tweaking it so it's perfect. As of Chapter 4-2 of Selatria, the main assignments of cutscenes was passed on to one of our newer game designers in the team, while I play and review it and polish it and make necessary tweaks at the end as needed.

While I ported most of the script by hand into the game for Chapter 4, I left behind vague stage instructions for how I would have directed/implemented the scene and he rolled with it and then some. The newer game designer also develops cutscenes a lot faster and more efficiently than I can.

I had to let go of my vision a bit if it means we make substantial progress on the project. I'm happy with his iteration of the scenes, and that's just the first step in learning how to let go. I was telling Jon during one of our lunches that a big factor in me wanting to hold onto cutscene creation is that I didn't have suitable talents that would transfer well and cutscenes were the only thing I had left. People can program better than I can. People can map better than I can. People can design better battles than I can. And people can design better cutscenes than I can. But I think my talent is that I can manage several teams pretty well. (This is still something I'm learning) while I'm average at the other parts.

I'm really not sure where I'm going with this ramble, but the one thing that puts me at ease is this. I don't assign these because of whether or not they can do it and I can't, it's just better to assign and collaborate where people would be most efficient. Even if it means letting go.

Getting rid of facebook groups for whimindie

So on October 1st, I announced to the whimindie folks that we're going to stop using Facebook groups by the end of 2019.

Back when I started "professional" game development in 2011, we used Facebook groups as at the time I felt that was an easy way to add my friends who worked on the game and ensure people will read updates.

Fast forward 6 years later and there are far more efficient ways to keep the team together using more modern and efficient methods. We have Slack and Discord for team communication (Well, I set up the Discord for the studio at the same time we announced us slowly moving away from FB) and HackNPlan for task management.

And honestly, now that I think about it, adding people that I'm not personally friends with in real life to our facebook group is kind of awkward.

That's not to say I don't begin to come friends with the people I work on these games with, but it shouldn't be a requirement to join the studio.

Did I mention that a lot of younger people don't even use Facebook? It may be one of the dominant players right now, but that could change down the line, and this is a test to see if we can adapt to that.

Until next time.

Official returning post

Also, hey! I'm back. My dreams were my ticket out. It's been a little while. A month and a half perhaps? I'm going to start posting a bit more here whenever I have a bit of free time. I don't think I'll be able to talk as regularly as I used to when I started the blog, and please don't expect these posts in-between the development logs to be as concise and organized as those, as I tend to ramble.

I don't think I'll be posting these particular entries publicly on social media, but if you're somehow reading these, don't feel ashamed to bring it up to me. If I posted them here, then it's public and I expect it to be public knowledge, even if I'm not going out of the way to ramble about it to social media.

Now that's out of the way. It's been a pretty busy month. Since I've last posted in August, I've officially became chair of the IGDA Las Vegas and we had our first meet-up. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't incredibly nervous about getting up on stage and addressing the crowd. I haven't watched the recording in full, but what bits and pieces I've seen, I've not been very proud of my posture. I try to look relaxed but I tend to fidget and look around a lot. When we have our meeting in October, I'm going to sit in the second row and not the first one so I'm not constantly on camera.

Anyway, if you want to see how it went.

A lot of people come up to me and talk to me like I know what I'm talking about. I have no idea what I'm talking about. Earlier today when I went to lunch with my friend Jon, we were talking about one of the fortunes I had in my cookie. It read: "Life is about making some things happen, not waiting for something to happen." I know it came from a fortune cookie and it was supposed to be a generic message, but that's really the source of any successes(?) I may have had in life. It didn't come from my intelligence (where there isn't any) or my wit, it just came from volunteering or offering to do what no one else wanted to do. For better or worse, that's how I got to be where I am. Being opportunistic and taking any opportunity available is what gets you places. (Within ethical reason, that is.)

There were a lot of people that can do game development a lot better than I can, and were smarter than I am at that IGDA meeting. I feel honored to be in the room and to be able to absorb that knowledge and see where I can apply and make my own projects.

This Saturday is the Coyote Cross-Up event at CSUSB. We're going to use this as an opportunity to see about getting additional interns for an upcoming project we're getting started on, as well as showing one of the boss battles Jon and I recently finished for Selatria and get some user feedback on how they handle that.

Until next time!

#VegasStronger

A year ago today I woke up to a bunch of missed calls and messages asking where I was and if I was OK. Had no idea of the chaos that was going on about 10 miles away from where I was.

Co-workers from other remote offices were pinging us asking if everyone and their families were okay. It was just really surreal.

For about the next month everything was just kind of off, usually I would drive to California and when I would normally see a lot of cars piled up going the North to try and go to Vegas, and it was eerily empty.

A year later, there are still signs and banners on the side of the freeway that say #VegasStrong, and I see the saying on the back of a LOT of cars on the freeway.

What long term solution could you do to minimize the impact that some deranged person could do something like that again? I certainly wouldn't want to be checked and frisked every time I wish to go somewhere, but with something as busy and populated and unregulated as this, I'm concerned something like this will happen again.

It's an unfortunate feeling to have and think about. The city has recovered and gave us something to come together and help each other out on.

Whim Independent Studios - Development Log #47

Hey all, back with the 47th development log for the studio. For this update, we're going to talk about progress on our games and infrastructure for the studio. A lot of this might be a bit boring if you're not interested in what goes on under the hood, but I guess the point of a development log isn't really to entertain but instead talk about what's going on. Anyhow...

Selatria

Progress on the Selatria project is going well. The most difficult aspect of the project is still managing the large amount of voices, what needs to be done, and what needs to be re-cast and re-recorded. Shadoe, the sound engineer of the project, has taken to going through the last main character's voices and sending me a list of what needs to be retaken there. While I go through the long backlog of voices for side characters and recurring characters and approve/send emails out as needed. Here are some new screenshots from Chapter 4.

The new cutscene developer Donald Alfieri has come up with the basis for a lot of these new cutscenes for the second half.

Changes to Shopkeeper:


Currently Shopkeeper can die based off the player's actions or if they're careless or don't choose to buy goods from them based off the previous actions.

I was ignorant to some very negative tropes that this contributes to and I'm making some changes and what I feel are needed retcons to the character. We've begun work already on some of the points you see below, and all of these are going to be implemented by the time Selatria is ready for release. For future games, I want to do better on this and do better research on people of different backgrounds/orientations/communities so something like this doesn't happen again. I personally feel embarrassed that I didn't know about these aspects of the community and I want to make sure it gets changed.


Negatives removed/planned:


• Removed "Shopkeeper's Dying Will" item that would appear in wherever you let him die.

• Removed permadeath aspect. You will be able to see Shopkeeper in every scene he's supposed to be involved in.

• For places where his bones used to be if you let him die, it will just be nothing there assuming he somehow escaped or got free.


Positives planned:

• A "rewards" like system for if you buy the goods and stop him from getting angry, you get permanent discounts on his wares starting at 5% per positive interaction to a 25% discount cap

We have more additional further changes in mind to the Shopkeeper character, and we'll announce them as they become available.

Dastardly Dairy Debacle

We're still making some progress on The Dastardly Dairy Debacle, but there's some last minute hiccups before we can bring it to Google Play. More information on this game will be in next month's development log.

Improving the infrastructure/implementing proper source control

Up until now, we've been using Dropbox and Google Drive for our version control for game development. (I know, really bad/amateurish on our end.) While we've attempted to use more professional version control like GitHub, we've noticed it was rejecting some of the assets for our project that wasn't code-related, so that wouldn't work for us.

After messing with Perforce and trying to get in contact with them for the Indie Studio pack and having to jump through hoops and emails to get a price point, we've settled on Plastic SCM/Gluon for the version/source control tool for the studio. I wanted to make sure we got a tool that everyone can use without it being a hassle, and I'm really happy we settled on the choice. I thought I was going to have to fight to get this all set up but it was extremely easy and straightforward. Why didn't we use this sooner?

We ended up going for the Cloud Server option for us.

E3 and future conventions

E3 was handled a lot better this year than it has in previous years. While the industry only hours, there was time to actually get some dedicated playtime in but it wasn't enough of a time block to be able to see everything. (Each popular game was a multi-hour wait, even including industry credentials.) I hope next year they take more of a stance similar to Tokyo Game Show and have an industry-only day and then two full days for the public. That would be the best compromise to making the exhibition a better event.

For future conventions and events, some of us will be at the Las Vegas game jam next weekend and Gameacon Las Vegas at the end of the year. Next, Salt Lake Gaming Con? LVLUPEXPO 2019? More to come in the next development log.

Until next time!

Producing and Directing comments

Me: You know, I don't really do a lot of hands-on game development. ...Or at least as much as I'd like to.

Jon: That's because you're both a PRODUCER and DIRECTOR.

Me: ...Good point.

They're not just titles, I'm want to make sure the game is heading in a good direction as well as making sure we get everything settled with the publisher and patches. I think next project I'll take more of a creative role and leave the production side to the end. Well, at least, make the game, let it sit for a while during which I'll market it and build hype, then announce a release date and send it out to the world. Doing it all simultaneously is taxing.

Whim Independent Studios - Development Log #46 [E3 2018 Edition]

Hey all - back with a new development log. Pre-E3 edition. For this June update, I wanted to make sure we had our own big announcements to show to go with E3.

Selatria

After seven years of development on the game, we are finally going to be completing our work on Selatria. We are currently aiming for a release date in late-2019 for the full Selatria game. As promised before, any progress from Selatria: Advent of the Dakk'rian Empire will be compatible with the full final release. Here is some promotional art and some new screenshots!

To accompany this announcement, we have a few new people on the main team to introduce or switched their roles. Donald Alfieri has been brought onto the team in the past year to join me on mapping and designing the cutscene movements and porting in the script for Part 2. We still have two more sections of script to port in for the main scenario before we can consider that leg finished and move 100% of our effort to cutscene designs. Dominique Hodnett is a brand-new addition to our team, and we have been working together on Wednesday nights and Saturdays to complete the content of Mage's journal and some side stories involving the main characters you will get to experience in Part 2. Leigh-anna Griswould has been behind the implementation of the voices into the cutscenes, and last but not least, Timothy Blanchet has been behind the scripting of some of the new features that you will see explained below.

Some new features:

-The journal will now open automatically to the newest page. As mentioned in the last post, we now will have an indicator that briefly popups when the journal is updated. When selecting the journal from the main menu or the items section, it will now highlight Mage's current thoughts dependent on your progress. I feel this will be good for players who take a long break between play sessions or are waiting for the new release and forgot where they needed to go.

-Quick Save will also be coming in with the 2019 update. Quick save will allow for shorter play sessions by being able to save and close the game at any time. However, when a quick save is loaded, that data is deleted from memory. This was a requested feature from different forums given that most games these days have save anywhere functionality. But due to the nature of the game, we don't want to have our players stuck in a situation they can't get out of. So we set up a compromise and implemented Quick Save.

Also to note, you will start to see more video footage from upcoming scenes that our team has worked on implementing, and I will be cross posting this to our new forums and on our Steam discussion board.

Regarding the new release date: Previously I have been concerned about giving away release date windows due to naively announcing an August 2012 release date for the full game back when we started.  Since then, we have better project management protocols in place and up-to-date metrics on where we are and what we need to do to be able to get there. I feel we've gotten to the point that if we can't finish it in the next year, it will simply never get done. I'm really hoping you'll continue to support this project as you have been as we go into our final year of development. For those of you who have supported us on Indiegogo, we will be making further announcements for physical rewards and fulfillment before the end of this year.


The Dastardly Dairy Debacle

After a few months of fixing issues and pushing back on release for The Dastardly Dairy Debacle, we're currently doing final checks on content implementation and we are aiming for a new release of this summer. For now, we've uploaded a new theme from the game, so please take a listen. Please also take a look at some new screenshots as well as a new song composed by Christopher Nuño!

We also have a new Whim Indie interview available regarding music creation and a new interview by Jabari for the J-Tendo show (if you haven't seen it yet).





Before we end for this month's update, I'd like to show some highlights from our time at LVLUPEXPO this year. We had a great turnout and we hope to demonstrate our games at the convention next year as well.

That's it for this update. See you next month or at the E3 show floor!