Whim Independent Studios - Development Log #43

Hey everyone! Thanks for reading the 43rd development log, the first one for the new year.  Most of this month's update will be regarding Selatria and it's ongoing development.

We started off the year by opening up the studio to new interns for the new year. We've received more internship applicants this year than we've ever had. Professors and coordinators from both CSUSB and the Art Institute of the Inland Empire have been very helpful in sending us their talent. They get experience and college credit and we get additional help for our projects.

Meet Timothy Blanchet (Left) and Hamza Khan (Right) below!

So it's easier to report it to their respective schools, we assign the interns to work that's not spoiler related, and on features and additional content we would have otherwise scrapped in order to make the reasonable deadline on the game. Here's some examples below on what they've worked on.

 

What's this? It's just a title screen with a 2 in MS-Paint drawn over it! Actually, this will be replaced with the title screen for the second half of the game when it's completed. On boot up, if the save data exists for someone who has made it to Chapter 4 and beyond, the title screen will show the new Part 2 title screen. This is just a placeholder for now.

Centered battlers! If the party has less than four people, the remaining battlers will set up in a formation that is originated in the center, as opposed to the left with extra space to the right. Makes for a much cleaner battle interface.


When the player completes Selatria fully, they'll be able to access an extra window where you can manipulate voices and play through the game with edits varying from chipmunk to slow-mo. The above features were developed by Timothy.

Paul volunteered to play through some of the new content that's being worked on. Hamza is currently designing the Selactic monsters for Part 2.

 Fighting a Selactic monster with only two party members? Probably not the best idea...

We have had unimplemented blueprints for a lot of ideas, and we pair them up as Hamza fills in the blanks and implements and balances the difficulty.

Our E3 picture from last year is also immortalized in the studio. Small cameo from Matt and Paul to the left, there.

As for the main team members, we've been coordinating between Las Vegas and San Bernardino. As two of the fellow Selatria developers now live in Las Vegas, we're now able to collaborate on some Sundays when I'm in town, primarily with the battle system and the mechanics of the final two characters. Unfortunately, there are still tweaks and art/sound assets that need to be implemented before that's at a state we can show, even at a development phase.

For me, dialogue. I've been implementing dialogue into the engine line by line, adding in appropriate face art to go with the context of the line, and putting in context and direction. Before December 2017, we were developing cutscenes at the same time we implemented the dialogue and it caused considerable slowdown when we find that we were blocked by lack of context in the scene or missing voices, so I've since put in the following hierarchy:

1st - Implement all dialogue from section
2nd - If there is implemented voices, put in the section
3rd - Check to see if unedited recordings exist for missing implementations
4th - If recordings exist and were recorded/edited elsewhere, cut and implement. If not, send to Shadoe and update task management system
5th - When lines are edited/cut, go back and place in the sections.

Implementing Chapter 5-5A dialogue. Swapping in the implemented voices after pasting in the dialogue and adding faces is the best part.

To give an idea of where we were, we were only at the beginning of Chapter 4 the last time we had a development log, and now we're nearing the end of Chapter 5 in implementation. This method is much smoother and efficient. Once all of the dialogue and context is implemented, we will be cutting and pasting blocks of the implemented dialogue into the areas themselves and turn them into actual cutscenes. It's going to take another month or two to be able to get the dialogue fully implemented in-game so you will start to see new cutscene previews after that point. It's the "boring" part of the development cycle, but it's getting done.

Last but not least, we're going to be resuming the behind-the-scenes series. In this episode, Shadoe, our sound engineer on the team talks about their challenges with recording, editing, and implementing voices as well as editing the sounds we already had.



That's all for this development log. Until the end of February!



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Stepping down from Viva - Retrospective a year later

So I wanted to type this out, because it's been on my mind lately.

Viva Eorzea Group Picture - 2016

It's been about a year since I stepped down from leading Viva Eorzea, one of the free companies (or in other MMOs known as guilds) in Final Fantasy XIV. I stepped down after leading it for a little over 6 years. (September 2010 to December 2016. I ended up making the decision to step down a few weeks before, but I've contemplated stepping down since 2014.

In 2014, we formed a static to tackle the hardest raid at the time, the Coil of Bahamut. The original static disbanded during Twintania (we couldn't make it past the snakes/twisters phase at a rate people were comfortable) and we reformed and got to Turn 7 and Ramuh. At the same time, I was balancing FFXIV leadership duties, running the video game studio, and took an offer for a full-time job that was a 2 1/2 hour drive one way. I was frustrated and exhausted every night by the time we would run (I think we went 3 days a week? Pretty crazy.) - It all came to a head when we were walling on the last phase of Ramuh, when in a mix of all of my emotions I let out all my anger and steam on the Scholar who messed up on one mechanic and made her cry. We disbanded the static the day after largely due to my outbursts and very poor attitude, which I regret. In fact, I consider it to be one of my biggest regrets in my gaming history. I vowed to never get that angry at another player or at a game ever again. I was directing the wrong feelings at the wrong time and exploded in a fit of rage.

At that point, I felt changes had to be made. I stopped desiring to be a hardcore player after that point, I figured as long as I do the new content at all (and preferably while it's somewhat recent and relevant), I'll be happy. I was stressing myself too much and didn't have the time and patience to be able to do things that way again if I wanted to keep my sanity. Part of this was wanting to step down from Viva Eorzea leadership which I announced to the group at the very first Fan Festival in Las Vegas.

After some compromise from the officers at the time to be able to shoulder some of the responsibility, I agreed to stay on board as leader for the Heavensward expansion. Fast forward another year or two, one of my longtime XIV friends from 1.0 comes back to the game and we form a new group called Zaelen's Revenge in order to tackle the newest raid and primal at a very midcore pace. I was happy again, being able to do some of the new content at a reasonable pace that is befitting of my lifestyle. I will say it took some time to find like-minded players. On Hyperion, at least, most players are either very hardcore or very casual and it's hard to find players in the middle. Some of this extended to the FC, it was very hard to come up with events people would attend and are interested in due to this range of playstyle preferences. Events started to be cancelled, people left for more active groups, and I found myself neglecting my personal projects on weekday nights to try and prioritize events that would never come to fruition.

Ultimately, in December, I took a work trip and some people took my week absence from the game as me leaving or quitting and we lost a lot of members that week. One week of me gone. By this point, due to unrelated issues with their static, some of my longtime XI friends who were officers had either quit the game or moved to other servers to play more hardcore. Who was I leading Viva for? A bunch of people I no longer really knew. That's when I made the decision to step down. I spent a week or two thinking of who would best be able to take over. I didn't want to throw away members' efforts who put money into the bank for our free company assets, house, and ships, to someone who would abuse it. I also didn't want to leave the free company either, so I didn't want to make the decision lightly. I chose Azu La to be the one to take over, because like me, he attended the Fan Festivals, was a dedicated member to the FC, and he helped run the events to get us our free company base and airships funded. He is and was the best person to take Viva Eorzea forward, and he still runs things to this day.

Now a year later, I have an officer title but I feel it's only honorary at this point, I don't really do any running of Viva any more other than posting news articles about XIV on the group.

What was the point of saying all of this? I miss leading Viva Eorzea, but running something like that requires a lot of thankless responsibility, and a lot of management behind the scenes is involved if you want to stay active and engaged with the FC. People will leave or get disinterested or start getting the feeling that "it's not the same" if you let up even a little bit from what is considered the norm. It's not easy, and at times feels like a full-time job. I'm really thankful for the opportunity for leading a great group for that amount of time, but I don't think it'll be something I do again, for this game or another one.