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just-stop · 3 years

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From AFLW to roller derby, experts say its time to take concussion in women's sport seriously

When the Crows chase their third AFLW premiership on Saturday, captain Chelsea Randall will be watching from the sidelines.

A concussion from a collision during last week's preliminary final left her ruled out of the match.

It's a bitter sweet way to end a season — but as Sarah McCarthy knows, a concussion can have much longer consequences

In 2016, Sarah was the jammer for her Sydney roller derby team, skating at high speed in the league's Grand Final, aiming to get past the opposition and score points.

Risks of contact sport

Sarah McCarthy received a knock to the head during a roller derby match.

"I was a few feet in front of the pack, looking over my shoulder," she tells ABC RN's Sporty.

As she skated, a competitor's elbow hit Sarah's neck and jaw hard and she crashed to the ground.

She doesn't remember if she passed out or not, but recalls feeling briefly sick.

She got up, sat out for awhile, but later re-joined the bout, feeling reasonably ok.

It was Sarah's second concussion that week, having had an earlier blow at training.

The next few months passed in a blur of sickness, dizziness and ringing ears.

"I could barely make it past lunch time without falling asleep. My head felt like it was in a vice 24 hours a day," she says.

What was worse, says Sarah, was the memory loss, heightened emotions, and constant haze in her mind as she struggled to manage a big work project.

Sarah's experience is not out of the ordinary. Experts say sportswomen are at higher risk of concussion than male athletes, and the effects of concussion in women tend to be more severe.

Sarah still lives with the ongoing after effects of her concussion even today.

Almost five years on, Sarah continues to live with the implications of Post Concussion Syndrome.

"I struggled verbally, and I still do now if I have a poor night's sleep," Sarah says.

"It's almost like I'm sitting on a chair in a room with a curtain around me and all of my vocabulary is just beyond the curtain. And I can't reach it or I use the wrong words. I forget people's name all the time," she says.

"I'm fatigued every day. I still can't exercise. I can't handle stress, I can't handle light, I can't handle sounds."

What happens when you're concussed?

Dr Adrian Cohen, an emergency and trauma physician who researches concussion prevention, says concussion is not as simple as was once thought.

He says concussion results in less blood flow to the brain.

This means brain cells, called neurons, don't get enough oxygen and glucose. They also suffer a "structural deformity".

Basically, Dr Cohen says, the brain has a "metabolic crisis" and neurons stop working properly.

Why is concussion more common in women?

We don't have enough data on the size of the problem, Dr Cohen says.

But research and scrutiny of concussion in women in sport is growing — largely in the wake of developments in elite men's sport such as the AFL and NFL.

"Doctors like myself who work in this area are definitely seeing it more often and we're seeing it with more severity," Dr Cohen says.

He says women sustain more concussions than men in high-impact sports such as rugby league, rugby union and Australian rules football. Women also take longer to recover.

One possibility is that women may be more likely to report concussion.

But Dr Cohen says there are complex physiological factors at play.

"There are structural differences between men and women's brains," he says.

"They actually have a slightly faster metabolism than male brains, and they have slightly greater oxygen flow to the head.

"The cells themselves can be thought of as being slightly hungrier. So in the context of an injury that disrupts the supply of glucose and oxygen, it can help explain why they suffer more damage."

He also says women are joining high impact sports without years of tackle training and have had less opportunity to build up the strong neck muscles crucial in protecting against impact.

Dr Cohen says these factors are not an argument for reducing women's participation in contact sport — the benefits, he says, far outweigh the risks — but he is urging for new ways to minimise those risks.

"We have to outlaw illegal play that causes damage, we have to get people off the field when they have an injury, we have to recognise concussion," he says.

He is part of a team developing a new device which he says can quickly and accurately assess a player for concussion.

"Instead of just asking somebody whether they're okay, and putting [them] through a 10 minute test, which seems fundamentally flawed at the moment, we have got to put this in the field of objectivity."

Concussion and migranes

Dr Rowena Mobbs, a Macquarie University neurologist who researches and treats the effects of concussion in sportspeople, says there is truth to suggestions that women experience concussion symptoms more severely.

"But there is this really important overlap of chronic migraine after trauma, and the term for this is post-traumatic headache," she says.

"When we talk about migraine ... they're the same multitude of symptoms that can occur in concussion.

"So you can be dizzy and clouded in your thinking, lethargic and have double vision. And we know that women are at three times the risk of chronic migraine than men."

A woman on roller skates playing roller derby can be seen flying up the court.

Experts say more research is needed into concussion in sportswomen.(Liam Mitchell Photography )

She suggests there could be an association between chronic migraine syndrome and concussion, a kind of double whammy for women.

"It's really a complex area," Dr Mobbs says.

"It's fairly new to research because, unfortunately, there's been so much preferred research in men in sport, and we're only just now approaching female concussion."

In Australia, the Sports Brain Bank works on diseases such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and other brain disorders associated with previous concussions or head impacts.

Dr Cohen says there are several Australian sports women who've pledged to donate their brain to the Sports Brain Bank.

"But in general terms, these women won't have been playing the games for as long, and at as high a level," he says.

He says concussion and its long-term consequences "are a numbers game".

"The more impacts to the head you have, the more likely you are to suffer short, medium and long-term consequences. Therefore, the more likely it is to show up as CTE. But we're going to be seeing it in women unfortunately, in the not too distant future."

Invisible injuries

Concussion rules are changing in Australian football codes — the rules that mandated Randall miss the AFLW grand final were brought in earlier this year.

Dr Mobbs welcomes these new rules, but hopes the conversation in elite sport will extend to how concussion is managed at training and in community sport.

In 2019, the Australian Institute of Sport released an updated set of concussion guidelines to improve player safety and address rising concerns in the community around the links between concussion and CTE, which has been linked to dementia and behavioural problems.

Dr Mobbs wants measures like restricting heading the ball in soccer training to be considered.

"We must look after people's brains," she says.

"We can preserve what we love about the sports, they can still be played hard, but it just means that we've got to all get together and think of ways we can preserve brain health for these players."

Sarah McCarthy wishes she'd been stopped from returning to play in the 2016 grand final, and regrets not taking time to immediately rest after the injuries.

She has advice for other people who experience concussion.

"First and foremost, stop everything - stop," she says.

"If you can, stay in a dark room, don't do anything that's too mentally taxing. Don't exercise.

"If I had taken that four to six weeks to rest [and] not have too much mental and emotional stimulation, I think my recovery would have been a lot quicker."

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thesims4blogger · 4 years

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The Sims 4 Nifty Knitting: Knitting Deep Dive

SimGuruConnor has released a forum post providing details on The Sims 4 Nifty Knitting!

Welcome back to our latest – and last! – Deep Dive into the gameplay of The Sims 4 Nifty Knitting Stuff Pack. I’ve really enjoyed sharing the designs and development of this pack with you, and I hope to continue doing these sorts of posts in the future. It’s been a super cool experience, and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these!

In today’s post I’ll talk about the feature that is core to everything in this pack, Knitting! Once again, I have to remind you that we’re still in active development on the pack and so some things may change between now and the final game.

Now, let’s talk about some nifty knits!

In order to start knitting, you’ll need to purchase a Yarn Basket from the Build/Buy catalog. You probably remember voting on these baskets a while back. This was the winning design, presented to you now in all its colorful glory! Don’t like color? That’s okay, because we included a solid black and white variant.

We have one more knitting basket coming too! Remember this one?

The basket acts as the crafting catalyst(neat term, huh?) similar to the Easel or Woodworking Bench in The Sims 4 base game. But unlike those examples, the Yarn Basket is meant to live in a Sim’s inventory so that they can take their knitting anywhere they want to go. Knitting itself is relatively straightforward: click on the Yarn Basket in your inventory, OR, with the basket in your inventory, click on the chair you want to sit in while knitting (perhaps a rocking chair?) and select the Knit interaction.

Your projects are saved to your Sim, so you can pause your progress at any time and resume later, and even juggle multiple projects at once. Starting a project costs a small amount of Simoleons for the cost of yarn, but nothing too outrageous.

(Children can knit too!)

As a Sim levels up their knitting skill they’ll have access to new patterns. They’ll start with knitting socks and beanies, but as they grow more skilled they can tackle more challenging projects like sweaters and toys for kids. But if you only want to specialize in one thing – perhaps knitted mailbox cozies? – that’s fine too! Just keep knitting anything and everything, and you’ll be level 10 before you know it.

Speaking of knitting skill, sometimes your skill is reflected in your knitted work, or rather your lack of skill. Knitting projects can fail, and when they fail they can get weird. But it’s all subjective, and maybe you’ll end up accidentally knitting the cutest derpy companion, or the perfectly itchy sweater. No mistakes, only happy accidents!

(Just own it.)

One of the niftiest parts of the knitting skill is unlocking the ability to Teach to Knit, where Sims sit down together and have a knitting pow-wow. We wanted this to feel special, so we got a really sweet animation for it (Thanks Haeju!). Now that you can infect other Sims with the knitting bug, no yarn ball will be safe!

(The knitting needles aren’t finished on the Teach To Knit interaction yet, but trust me it’s SUPER CUTE.)

So, what can you do with all these knitting projects? Lots of stuff!

Not only can knitted objects be listed on Plopsy, but you can also Donate them to charity. If you want to surprise a loved one, try Gifting a knitted object too. If you want to destroy all traces of your knitted failures, you can Frog the object and start again! If it’s a particularly nice Sweater that you made, consider Adding it to Wardrobe to make it available in Create-A-Sim to all family members.

(Everyone appreciates a nice gift!)

We want Sims to be able to knit something for their whole family. Not only will Sims be able to knit Toddler Onesies, but Baby Onesies as well. So put your little grubworm in a handmade knitted outfit. I’m sure they’d thank us if they could! (And if they didn’t like it I’m sure they’d be polite about it.)

(Here’s a sneak peek at some of the concept art for new clothing for the littlest of Sims!)

It also felt like a good idea to add an Aspiration to tie this passion for knitting all together. So if you want to master the fuzzy art of knitting, consider signing your Sim up for the Lord(or Lady) of the Knits Aspiration. With yarn running through your veins, there will be no knitting mountain too hard to conquer! Master the Aspiration and you’ll be rewarded with the Sacred Knitting Knowledge trait. What does it do? Lots of stuff! What does it unlock? Something special! Am I being vague? I am! Come on guys, I can’t share all the secrets quite yet.

As I’ve mentioned previously, we’re trying to get as much cross-pack functionality for knitting as we can. Cats can play with Yarn Baskets and Yarn Balls, there will be new Club rules for Knitting, new class electives at University, and knitting counts for Emotional Control, just to name a few. I’m hoping Knitting feels nice and snug alongside our other gameplay systems.

Now let’s have a chat with our lead Object Modeler, Beth Mohler!

Conor: Can you tell us a little bit about what an Object Modeler does on The Sims 4?

Beth: As an object modeler I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make objects work in The Sims 4. This is actually a very involved process, and somewhat different from the wonderful work our environment team does. We work with designers, concept artists, engineers, animators, vfx artists (basically everyone!) to make sure that Sims can use an object properly in an animation, or that all of our objects will work with each other. Once we understand the design for a new object, we will create a rig, a block model (a very generic version of the object used to help us make more of the same object in the future), and a footprint (tells us where the object can go and how Sims move around it). Once those are tested by animators and other disciplines we can model the final version, create UVs, and add textures. We also hook up and test everything in the game to make sure it all looks good. There is a lot to think about when it comes to making objects because we know players can find so many interesting ways to place and use them in game. That makes it a very fun challenge to make them work with everything else we’ve built before.

Conor: What feature are you most excited to work on in Nifty Knitting Stuff?

Beth: I’d say I am most excited to work on the rocking chairs! I love that we are bringing them to the game and can’t wait to see them in some cozy living rooms or on porches.

Conor: What are some of the challenges you are facing working on this pack?

Beth: One of the biggest challenges is ensuring that the knitting itself looks good and is fun to watch! This is a challenge given that it needs to work for everything you can create. Figuring this out takes a lot of iteration between modeling, animation, engineering, design, and art direction so that we come to a conclusion that will work the best given our time and technical constraints.

Another interesting “challenge” is the fact that I crochet as a hobby myself! When you are knowledgeable about something (yarn!) in real life, working on it in the game it can sometimes be hard to separate the things you know and may expect in reality from what is possible or best within a video game. I have to make sure to keep a balance and to conceptualize how we can best convert the knitting experience into The Sims 4. As someone who also generally enjoys interior design and architecture, this is actually one of my favorite challenges and one of the things I love about working on objects in The Sims 4.

Conor: What is your favorite feature you have ever worked on in The Sims 4?

Beth: I think it has to be a tie between the mini fridge or the robotics table in Discover University. That pack was the first time I got to really take an entire feature from start to finish. I’ve been with Maxis for a while, but I’m relatively new to The Sims 4. Both of these objects had some complex features we wanted that required a lot of iteration. I learned a ton about the technical aspects of our game during the process as well. I’ve also worked on a few very cool things between then and now, but those can’t be shared yet ; )

As a fan of The Sims since the very beginning I am so happy to be able to share a little about what I do on a daily basis on The Sims 4 with you! I haven’t been on The Sims 4 for quite as long overall, but some of you may also recognize me from my time on Sims Mobile where I shared some of our workflows on Twitter for making a juice bar. Thanks!

Conor: You shared a screenshot of the In-Progress Rocking Chair in our Rocking Chair Deep Dive. Can you share an updated screenshot now that the Rocking Chair is further along?

Beth: I would love to! I hope everyone has been enjoying seeing the progress on this object so far! Here it is a little further along. This program allows us to set the rules for the object materials, footprint size and rig it should use, as well as all the color variants and swatch colors you see in the catalog.

Thanks Beth! By the way, Beth is on Twitter @SimGuruBeth, so be sure to Follow her! And thanks to all of you Simmers for following this pack’s development, this has been a really fun project in a very crazy time. A big thank you to my Stuff Pack teammates, and especially SimGuruSarah who edited my inane ramblings and wrangled the miscellaneous bits for these posts.

While this concludes my design Deep Dives, we still have more forum posts with development insights on the way! Keep checking the Community Stuff Pack forum and we’ll have more fun stuff to show off in the weeks to come.

Until next time, SimGuruConor

#news #ts4 #sims 4 #the sims 4 #stuff pack

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loadkorea833 · 3 years

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Contra Evolution Free

One of the best games ever for console and arcade cabinet was Contra – Contra Evolution is a remake of the original Contra first released on Chinese cellphones in 2010 and arcades in 2011 and later ported to the Android, IPhone, and IPad in 2013. This remake features two all new female characters, updated graphics, and bonus stages. CONTRA EVOLUTION Hack Cheats Tool for iOS (Iphone Ipad Ipod) and Android adds Unlimited and Free Gold, Experience and Diamonds.

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If you said yes to all of the above, you’re incredibly demanding. But also, your wish has been granted.

To celebrate the game’s latest update (which added a Boss Rush mode, ranking system, and character skill system), Contra: Evolution is available for free until Thursday. Considering the game earned a nearly perfect score in our review, this is a deal that’s well worth snagging. Now grab a big gun and head down to South America, soldier – you’re needed.

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Viewed: 7794

Contra: Evolution is a fun platform and shooting game that will also make those who played the original games feel a bit nostalgic. In fact, the way the levels are designed is just like the way the first game in the franchise was designed.

Contra: Evolution left me disappointed, partly because the controls hold it back and also because I had high expectations going in. Contra is a beloved game and the iOS app is not as easy to play as the original arcade game. I’m glad it’s available on iOS, but I will still choose the arcade version over it anyway.

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Contra – a classic, a legend, and a synonym to all extremely difficult videogames. Yet it is the extreme difficulty, addictive gameplay and the atmosphere of 1980’s action movies, that makes this gem so special. You take the role of one of the two available characters, US commandos, Bill Rize and Lance Bean, who were deployed to the Galuga archipelago near New Zealand, where they supposed to neutralize a growing threat posed by the so called Red Falcon, a terrorist organization that wants to seize the world control by teaming up with aliens that supposedly crash-landed there on a meteorite. Interesting is, that up to two players can play simultaneously in hot seat co-op—a feature rather uncommon and rare, in the times of Contra’s release—one controls Bill (blue bandana) and the other controls Lance (red bandana). The game consists of seven stages in total, the player begins on the tropical shore swarming with Red Falcon soldiers and sentry guns, from where they proceed to the first base entrance, guarded by a soldier and two cannons. Upon entering the base, the perspective changes to a pseudo-3D, where the ability to move in two additional directions (back and forth) is added, and where the player has to fight Red Falcon guards and disable base sensors in order to advance through its corridors into the base core, where the first boss is to be dealt with. After that, throughout the third stage, the perspective changes back to—this time vertical—side scrolling, as the player ascends around a streaming waterfall leading to the second base entrance, where the perspective switches once more to the pseudo-3D. Here the last boss standing between the player and the alien queen that’s been helping Red Falcon s to be found and neutralized. From the second base, stage six leads the characters through a hangar bay and—surprisingly—some kind of a snowfield to the queen’s nest. Though at spawn and respawn defaultly equipped with a semi-automatic rifle only, throughout the game, players get to use four other weapons which can be aquired by shooting green-glowing Red Falcon hatches. In addition to that, several powerups like rapid semi-automatic fire or personal defence force-field are available by shooting rugby-ball shaped bubbles, every now and then flying across the screen. Each player has three lives in total, with the ability to buy nine more lives by inserting additional coins. However, should the player lose even those, the game ends and has to be replayed from the beginning. After all those years since its release, Contra gained a status of a legend, a gem amongst the side-scrolling shooters, and it is one of the prerequisites of every serious gamer, a must.

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wolfewritings · 3 years

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My Cyberpunk 2077 Hot Takes (Spoilers for first 5ish hours of gameplay)

It was “in development” for 8 years, delayed multiple times in the final release year, and is still so poorly optimized, buggy, janky, and so obviously not fully tested on release that it is so unplayable on consoles that both Sony and Microsoft are offering refunds on digital copies regardless of hours played. And on PC you could have built and updated a desktop just to play only Cyperpunk on as high a setting as possible and you still would have to turn of features to get everything to load in properly. The game needs a full year delay working a standard 40 hour week to be even playable, and that's accounting for the features available as of Dec. 11th 2020 aka launch features. They forced the devs to work 100 hour work weeks just to launch a game that's technically playable in the loosest sense of the phrase.

TLDR: The game in-general needs to be redesigned like the RPG it was initially marketed as instead of a different flavor of near-future Ubi-sandbox. It also should totally embrace the full depth of customization cyberpunk as a genre and transhumanism as an ideology allows and envisions. And bugfixed and optimized, like seriously. There’s also almost no reason for anything to be as remotely bad as it is, if I’m remembering correctly the only “pressure” they had was from “fans” and that’s because they thought Gamers(tm) would be sensible and not send fucking death threats because they thought they had a release date.

This might be a GOG only gripe (or cpu) but that makes it even worse if it is: patching takes literal hours to complete no matter how small the patch is. The only game that might take longer to patch is Baldur’s Gate 3 which is a whole separate fuck-fest but atleast that is early access.

It has less gameplay options than vanilla Skyrim, just in general and in specifics.

Melee combat is clunky as hell and not satisfying.

I think driving is bad, and vehicle combat is god awful with almost no onscreen indicators if your hitting enemies or even correctly aimed at them.

The lifepath opener sucks. It literally ends with a montage of scenes and interactions that should have been playable and greatly added to the dynamic of Jackie and V. It also would have helped established literally every part of gameplay without requiring a literal in-game diegetic tutorial to break the flow of a scene leading into the 2018 gameplay teaser. It also so far only affects dialogue options, no ability increases, no skill increases or passive experience buffs. It doesn’t even effect how V speaks, just what they know prior to meeting Jackie.

Character creation is meh at best. Unless you choose the more techy looking eyes that change everything about the eye, the iris color barely appears to change. Pronouns being tied to voice is a very weird choice, especially when the choices are literally just male or female. Available hair styles are alot right off the bat, especially since you have to remember which numbers you like with no option to preview or change later in anyway aside from apparently forced hair styles hard designed with various head gear, especially apparent on femme V where they grow and fully style their hair on contact with ball caps etc. Tattoo options are generic “nothing or your skin is over 30% tattoos” no pure back or pure limb tattoos. Facial cybernetics are serviceable but there should have also been an option for purely cosmetic body cybernetics. Facial hair is both meh and almost too indepth at the same time. Visually bland but also having too much to customize and compare with each beard selection having seemingly 3 barely different versions and mustaches having essentially every type aside from pencil (i think, i didnt care too much to look at all of them).

In-combat weapon selection is clunky. The lower right icons for unarmed is the exact same as if you were wielding a gun. The only way to know for sure you have only fists is to use the weapon selection wheel and try to get the cursor to show you hovering unarmed even if you have weapons in 2 out of 3 slots. And im fairly certain having no weapon in the first slot breaks hotkey selecting weapons. There have been several times where I pressed 1 to only use fists and it kept my katana or gun out despite them clearly being in the 2 and 3 slots respectively.

Hacking is weird as you need direct line of sight and the game to register you’re actually looking at what you want to hack, meaning you can’t really stealth hack in enclosed areas without almost guaranteeing you’ll be spotted.

Randomized loot doesn’t really make sense, especially when the randomized tier determines if you can install components like scopes, silencers, etc.

Thats all I can remember off of the top of my head as of initial writing.

Now for some praise, but still with some complaints and ideas for improvements.

Gender and sex being separate is a great idea but could have been implemented alot better. Pronouns should have been an actual choice between he/him, she/her, and they/them. In my opinion, voice options should have also been expanded to include masc/fem or masc/fem/”yeah thats a generic ‘X’ voice” for both male-voiced and female-voiced V. Genital selection being both “which do you have?” and “do you go commando?” is just questionable. It should have been genital type as one selection and default underwear as another (maybe some people want schlonged V to wear panties and vagina’d V to wear men’s boxers or tighty-whities). I personally find the nipple and pubic hair customization almost too much for almost no reason especially since there is no practical way to even be naked to be funny without being one-shot because you have literally zero armor aside from maybe shoes, hats, and face covers.

Tattoos should be broken down into subcategories like limbs (divided into the different parts of each limb/full limb), torso (chest, stomach/full), back (shoulders, mid, lower/full), hands/feet (maybe including fingers/toes) with an extra option to mirror limbs and hands to streamline creation time if the player wants.

Hair should also be broken down between pre-styled, and customizable pieces like top, sides, and back. Hair style should also have custom gradients or full palette selection.

The nail paints were a nice surprise, but again would have been better with color customization (I managed to settle on the one that looked kinda like the demisexual flag, which was nice surprise).

Lifepath selection should have some effect outside of just the occasional dialogue option (so far only on the main story path). At the very least it should offer bonuses to atleast one associated ability (like Nomad offering a +1 to tech and associated skills gaining bonus experience). At the far end it should affect what words or slight accent uses during dialogue and maybe have some NPCs know which lifepath you chose based on that.

Melee combat needs to feel more impactful. From what Ive used so far (katana and fists) the katana barely has any reaction from enemies unless you trigger the passive bleeding skill and fists barely register outside of heavy attacks and guard breaking. Dare I say, Dead fucking Island has more impactful melee combat (probably because it wasn’t seemingly designed as an after-thought outside of skills).

Make it so that once you’ve marked a target you can hack it through walls so you can actually be somewhat stealthy or atleast give you an advantage before combat.

Make the overworld hub-based (like in the 2010s Deus Ex games) but still the same size so that its (theoretically) easier to load while also getting the same amount of detail or even more.

Add seemingly basic things in open world action-adventure games like toggle walking, keybinding, and maybe more than less than a handful of quick-select slots.

Make sure the game actually runs as it ideally should on the platforms you sell it on. Like that really should be step fucking two after can you launch it without causing a fire.

Enemies (and predetermined killable NPCs) should have set gear that is dropped and gear should have set designs for if they can be customized or just sold for money. Iconic gear should probably be better than just “ ’X’ weapon but named”.

#cyberpunk 2077 #hot take #rpg #video games #holy shit did they drop the ball #Gamers(tm) need to get all their asses kicked since they obviously don't have empathy

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cruddyborderlandstheories · 4 years

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Honestly, it's really pretty depressing the state of the game right now. I know with BL2 there were people who started playing around launch and have kept up all the way til now, and it seems like you've honestly been one of the game's biggest supporters even when there were obvious flaws, so the fact that GB has screwed up enough to make you stop playing is... yeesh.

Yeah :( I will definitely come back later on, but I've gotta take a break for my own sanity because geebus. I'm getting nowhere trying to force myself to have fun. I'll deffo play the new dlc!! (I mean I already paid for it, might as well) but I don't know if I'll go further than that. I'll have to see what the patch notes bring.

I've been a constant player of bl since 2012ish. I got bl2 on my ps3 and fell in love- I got the guidebook and that thing went with me everywhere (Zer0's sassypants is my favorite line from it). I got it on steam a couple years later when the goty edition went on sale (I didn't have the dlc on my ps) and now I have 1500 hours in it. I bought Bl3 as soon as the pre-orders went up, had a countdown on my phone, and beat the game in 30ish hours with a 2 hour nap in between sessions (and I only stopped bc my game audio glitched out to the point of complete silence as I was on my way to carnivora). I have about 300 hours in TPS and BL1, too. I think 40~ish in tales, I know I've played thru a few times. Spent countless hours sorting the BL2 audio files for people and compiling a list of cut content. Obviously spent a lot of time on this blog before bl3's release. Basically, these games are my life.

There were some things I didn't like that gearbox did with Bl2s development, but the thing is: they fixed it eventually. There's still some broken stuff (bee shield...), but a lot of it is forgettable (is that the right word?) because the main game is playable and f u n (Like when it took them forever to fix Maya's Cloud Kill). But with Bl3 it feels like they're trying to get us to ignore all the problems they're not fixing by constantly throwing new (broken) content at us. The patch/hotfix notes are really depressing to look at every week when it's a single tiny change, or a buff that means literally nothing, meanwhile there's a billion things on fire and all the VHs are screaming and it's a mess. It's worse that they sometimes do acknowledge these problems, and maybe even do attempt to fix them, but then they don't work for a week (Zane's Quick Breather skill anyone?). So it's clear they're not testing the things they implement, or only testing them at Mayhem 0, or *something*. It's mind boggling to think the Guardian Takedown was released at the state it was, when every player immediately realized something was wrong the second they entered the first room. That was kinda my tipping point because that basically proved they did not test it at all.

M10 is not so hard that their testing teams cannot go up to that difficultly level. There are youtubers like K6, Joltz, LazyData, ThiccFilA who are releasing m10 viable builds constantly (some with save files for PC!!!) and once you have that and the right modifier rolls, m10 is not difficult to get through. So it's not like their testing team can't snag a save file (or just give themselves the gear!) and test their changes with a 100% perfectly geared out character on M10 (even though that's NOT how it should work). And it's worse that Moze players just *keep* getting screwed over by gearbox's design choices. At least Zane has his one singular class mod to make him viable. But Moze players have been struggling really badly, it's like they only have one person on the balance team and they main Amara or Fl4k or something and forgot there are three other characters that need fixing. (Not that Amara and Fl4k both don't have their own set of problems that need to be addressed).

And I really hate to say it because these games have been a part of my life for a long time and I love them to death, but also it honestly feels almost like gearbox is intentionally sabotaging Bl3. That's how awful watching every Thursday's 10am update come and go has been. They either need to delay hotfixes/patches to every 2 weeks or 1x a month or something so they can properly test everything and give us substantial updates (even tho the Phase 1 update took them a month and was so pitiful I thought it was a joke at first), or they need to let their stream team have early access to the hotfixes/patches to test them. Bc clearly something is going horribly wrong with their internal testing team.

All in all I just really hope the Guardian Takedown release was an eye opener for them. Even tho this basically happened before with the Maliwan Takedown and the broken Guardian Ranks. But we can hope, right?

#Thank you!!#Geez sorry I didn't expect this to get so long #I guess I'm still salty ha #:(#Bl3 #Borderlands #Ask

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vgperson · 4 years

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What Did I Do In 2019?

#vgperson

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katieskarlette · 4 years

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Shadowlands livestream

This isn’t a comprehensive liveblog, but I’ll be editing it as I watch with whatever tidbits I find interesting.

Beta next week, y’all!

Cut for length and gameplay (not story) spoilers.

Stats from the three months of alpha: 817,508 quests completed, 2,124 people completed the new Exile’s Reach starting zone, 62,777 runs of Torghast (11,218 of which ended with the Tarragrue killing them), and 64,440 in-game bug reports.

Covenants remain central to the gameplay. Only the tip of the iceberg was in alpha, and there’s a ton more content to come for endgame. Venthir will be the first one playable in beta.

Soulbinds are a big thing, having a mini talent tree linked to an NPC character. Conduits are like sockets and let you customize class abilities, while the talent tree part is the same regardless of your class.

Straight up rep grinding with covenants won’t be a thing. You’ll gain “Renown” as you progress, and as the meter fills you unlock new features/benefits/etc. It’s not open-ended like AP, and there are catch-up mechanisms built in from the start. (Good idea.)

Covenant Sanctums can be upgraded similarly to the class halls from Legion. They’re messed up by all the stuff breaking in the afterlife, and we’ll be helping to restore them. You’ll have bonuses (such as a teleport network) if you’re in the zone for your covenant, since that’s where your power is strongest.

Anima conductor: pick an area to restore, change the map as you heal the land, gain extra events and benefits.

We still have a mission board (oh joy) because they like the way they can put little bits of story in there (people read missions?) and it allows for progression to happen when you’re offline, but they say it’s evolved into “adventures.” It’s not just a simple matching game to counter abilities with specific followers anymore, but will be more dynamic, like combat is in-game. Mobile app will be updated to accommodate it (surprise.)

Each covenant also has a unique feature: Venthyr have the Ember Court where they throw fancy parties to mingle and show off their power/influences. You’ll figure out who to invite, fight off party-crashers, and figure out what features to activate to make the guests happy (and happy guests will give you rewards at the end.) It’s flavor to flesh out the culture.

Kyrians have the Path of Ascension. Inhabit the bodies of your soulbinds and do combat tasks. Loosely inspired by the Shar’tul (sp?) event in Blade’s Edge in TBC.

Necrolords have the Abomination Factory where you can practice necromancy(!!!) It’s like build-a-bear but with undead constructs, I guess. LOL Souls will need physical forms, and it’s up to you to construct one for them.

Night Fae have the Queen’s Conservatory where powerful souls germinate before being reborn--i.e. it’s a soul garden, in the same vein as the Pandaria farm.

The next dungeon to be tested is a max-level one called Theater of Pain. It’s an arena event as the greatest champions of Maldraxxus face off to see who’s the biggest badass. It’s a nonlinear dungeon as you pick which subfactions to fight in what order.

Return to the Maw: sounds similar to how Tanaan was used in WoD, where you go through the area in the starting experience, then return at max level to properly deal with the things there. Venari is the only character in the Maw who (at last overtly) doesn’t want to kill us, and she’ll give us directions, tips, etc. in her cave.

It’s a sandbox zone similar to the Timeless Isle: loosely structured, broad objectives, discoverable content. Everything in the Maw rejects you and knows you don’t belong there. There are no inns or friendly NPCs. The Jailer is watching and if you cause too much of a ruckus he sends a hit squad after you and you have to escape before they find you. “Desolate but awe-inspiring in a terrible way” is how Ion described it.

Castle Nathria testing is coming, with separate testing for each difficulty. Top guilds will be invited to test Mythic. They also want to get Mythic+ testing started as soon as possible.

Legendary Runecrafting: the response to the RNG-dependent, frustrating system of legendaries in Legion. You have a ton of agency and control over which legendary you get when by dealing with the Runesmith who is imprisoned in Torghast. He’s the guy who made the Lich King’s armor. He’ll make you legendaries (assuming you collect a bunch of materials). Some of their powers are inspired by favorites from the past.

Covenant campaigns are the equivalent of the war campaigns in BFA, but they’re tied to Covenants and not Horde/Alliance faction. That’s where the major story beats will tie in.

They’ll be enabling character copies to beta soon, so you can test the whole shebang from end to end, just as you would when playing the expansion for real.

Tuning is still very much in progress so some abilities are going to be over- or under-powered, and they know it. They want to figure out if things work conceptually and fun-wise first, and then adjust the numbers to balance things.

No release date, just “later this year.” Poo.

And it’s over just in time for me to run to work! BYE!!!!

#shadowlands #shadowlands spoilers

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atdiamantino · 4 years

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10 LEARNINGS FROM 10 YEARS

To celebrate our 10th anniversary, here are 10+1 lessons we've learnt from our first decade

by Ilkka Paananen

Today is Supercell’s 10th birthday, and honestly I can’t believe it. I want to thank all of the Supercellians, partners and, most importantly, players of our games who have gotten us to this point!

When we started the company, we were inspired by companies like Blizzard, Nintendo and Pixar. All of these companies have been able to create successful entertainment products that are loved by millions all over the world. And most importantly, they have been able to do so consistently over decades, in Nintendo’s case, for more than a hundred years!

As this is only our first decade, we still have a long way to go, but that inspiration has remained constant as has our dream: To create games that are played for years and remembered forever.

As we have approached our 10th birthday, we have been reflecting on our past, and all the memorable moments, successes, failures and learnings. To celebrate this milestone, we thought it would be fun to share what we have learned with everyone who is into creating and playing games. We also try as often as possible to give back to the community that has supported us so much throughout the years, and we hope that some of these learnings would be helpful not just for colleagues in our industry but for building teams and companies in other areas, too.

I thought it would be way cooler, though, if these learnings came from all of us, and not just me. So I asked Supercellians to share their learnings over the years. Supercellians from many different teams and offices shared their learnings, and I also added a few myself. :)

Before we get into it, I want to add an important disclaimer. These learnings and the culture that we have built together have worked for us, but that does not necessarily mean they would work for others. A big part of our success has also been luck. So if you’re building your own games company and its culture, don’t build a Supercell culture. Build the culture that works for your company. Having said that, I hope some of our learnings offer perspective and can serve as thought starters as you consider what culture is right for you.

Anyway, let’s get into the learnings!

1. Always play the infinite game (no pun intended :) ).

As I mentioned, our dream is to create games that as many people as possible play for years and that are remembered forever. We want to play what Simon Sinek would call the “infinite game”. We’ve built the entire company around this idea.

And it shows in how our teams, which we often call cells, think about everything they do. They don’t launch games that they do not believe have a realistic shot at reaching our dream. The most important factor that our teams look at when they test our games in beta phase is how long players keep playing the game. That’s ultimately all our teams care about, as evidenced by this one comment I got from a Supercellian:

“Retention, retention, retention. Not just early retention (you need to have that too), but always focus on the long term when developing new features for your game.”

This means that we don’t only kill games in beta, we kill good games. Great examples would be Smash Land and more recently Rush Wars - both very polished fun games that received positive feedback and excitement early on. But they weren’t games that people would play for years, so their development teams decided to kill them. They decided that instead of developing their games further, their time is best spent developing a new and better game.

But it does not stop there. Our teams always think about what the right long term call would be for the players and the community. This shows in how they treat game updates, and content creation and community events. The teams try their best not to think about the next quarter or the next year, but about the next decade.

One great example of this is how the Clash of Clans team has thought about their game. The team felt it necessary to pay back the design and technical debt that had accumulated over time, and they did so by prioritizing solutions to some fundamental issues rather than seeking short term impact. It took more than two years for the work to finally bear fruit. That would have never been possible in a culture that is driven by short term (quarterly) goals. Here’s how Clash of Clans’ lead Eino talks about it in this great GDC talk.

2. Great teams make great games. Great individuals do not necessarily make a great team.

In 2010, we founded Supercell on the belief that creating great games is all about having the best people and providing them with the best possible environment to focus on developing the best games. To describe this, we came up with the sentence “best people make the best games”. This was even our very first slide when we raised our first big round of funding.

However, years later, we realized that it is not about having the best individuals/people, but having the best TEAMS. So we decided to change the sentence to reflect that. A small but very important change.

For me personally, the biggest surprise over the last ten years has been how incredibly difficult it is to put together a great team that can release a new hit game. Everything really needs to fall in place:

The game needs to match player interest at the exact time it is released.

You need to have super talented individuals with very different capabilities and ways of thinking.

Most importantly, the individuals need to work very well together in a psychologically safe environment.

This learning has served as the foundation for our culture since the early days. And we are still learning ways to create great teams. Unfortunately, we have not found a silver bullet to building them. At least for us, a lot of it is still trial and error, and then trying to be cautious when making changes to teams that work well.

One very concrete thing that we have learned about forming new teams is to first put a very tight and well functioning core team of, say, 2-4 people together. This makes the problem somewhat easier; it is easier to think about just a handful of people compared to ten. In fact, we often talk about how it all starts from finding just TWO people who work extremely well together. There is complete trust, they can complete each other’s sentences, and at the same time they bring different perspectives and make each other better. Sometimes we call them "magical pairs"! Once you have a solid core team, it is way easier to add people and grow the team. But if you don’t have a solid core, do not add new people to the team!

3. Hire slowly and always raise the bar.

We are lucky to be in a business where the amount of people you have does not necessarily directly correlate to achieving better results. In fact, it can be the contrary.

One of the most valuable lessons that I learned from our first Chairman, Petteri Koponen, was his advice about hiring: when thinking about whether you should hire someone or not, try to imagine the average quality level of the people at your company. Then ask yourself whether the new hire would increase that average or not. Only hire if the average will increase.

Here’s how Supercellians expressed this:

“Working with great people makes everything better. If the team is passionate about their game and knows what they're doing, it will make everything so much easier.”

“For me, the biggest learning might be how crucial it is to hire quality-oriented people and how important it is to have a quality-oriented company culture. When I joined Supercell, one of the things that surprised me the most, in a very positive way, is how every single person in a game team (and I definitely think this happens in non-game teams as well) owns what they're working on. This is key because when people care about this, they of course also care about the general quality of the game, to a degree in which we all care about every single small detail, trying to craft the game and make it something not only cool, but really special for our players.

So what I'd say to other developers is: try to hire quality-oriented people, and most importantly, set the quality bar as high as you can on a company level. When people see day in and out that their colleagues truly care about what they're working on...that's contagious. And it's only going to create a really positive dynamic where people get inspired from others and get the best out of themselves.“

4. Stay as small as possible.

There are also surprising benefits of having small teams that we’ve learned over the years. Often, at least in our case, small teams can actually do better work and higher quality than bigger teams. Or, as one of the Supercellians put it:

“Having less people in a team forces it to focus on what really matters and what brings the biggest impact to the whole company. On the contrary, having larger teams often leads to ‘inventing’ work that only looks useful.”

This focus especially helps us early on in new game development:

“It's obviously clear that with small teams focus is key to making great things. But more specifically, two simple words often help to realign the focus properly, especially in new game development: Gameplay First.

Especially with new games, when in the early stage everything is possible, this guidance has many times helped us prioritize what to do next. Concrete example: there's no need to focus on fancy tools or tech if there's no killer gameplay, because it's a waste of time if gameplay doesn't feel solid (you'll notice rewriting / killing things and the dream about having the best possible focus isn't fulfilled).”

Ten years in, all Supercellians still fit neatly into one frame!

We have also learned that growing teams prematurely increases complexity and makes changing direction much harder. We have a few cases where we had to make the team smaller to get back on track, and in many cases that has worked out.

5. Culture is the sum of everyone’s actions, not a slide deck or something written on a wall.

As I mentioned in my last blog post, my favorite book of last year was “What You Do Is Who You Are” by Ben Horowitz. As you would guess from the title, he talks about how culture is defined by actions, not by what you say. I couldn't agree more! I would add that in my experience, culture is defined by the hardest decisions.

In our case some of these decisions include:

Killing games that do not live up to our dream of being played for years

Saying “no” to interesting ideas because we need to focus, or

Making changes to team compositions because things aren’t working out as well as they should.

What makes Supercell special and what I am most proud of is that the vast majority of decisions like these happen in the teams, without anyone outside the team (including me) getting involved.

Here’s how one Supercellian talked about the importance of making changes to team composition if things aren’t working out:

“Game development is a group effort with everyone filling a very important role. If only a single person either isn't pulling their weight or acts in a way that deteriorates the team spirit, this person can bring down the productivity and wellbeing of the whole team...Fixing the dynamics of a team previously handicapped by an individual who wasn't a team player can often release its untapped potential.”

The most important thing written on our walls has been messages from players

Another interesting example of our culture in action: team leads have many times given up their position to someone who they think is better suited for it. This happened in Clash Royale during its early days, in Marketing and, most recently, in Brawl Stars. No one told them to do so. They just did it of their own accord because they thought it was the right thing to do for Supercell. We also have many examples of individuals or entire game teams killing their own projects to move to another game team to help with a game launch.

These are all great examples of Supercellians taking responsibility for our culture. These moments have been a million times more important for our culture than any slide deck or memo could ever be.

Or as one of the Supercellians put it:

“The culture and its fostering need to run thru every fiber of the company from hiring a new person to making day to day decisions, how you talk to your co-workers, how you react to mistakes, how you micromanage (or don’t) and how you allow even seemingly bad decisions to be made.

Even small actions against the culture start to eat it up. It is extremely rare, for example, to hear someone at Supercell belittle someone else’s idea no matter how stupid it might be. I think this in part ensures that people have a very low threshold to bring up improvement suggestions and ideas proactively because you feel that you’re always heard.”

What you do is who you are.

6. Replace control with trust.

Decisions should be made by the people best equipped to make them. We believe that the more decisions the teams make, the better it is for us. This is for two reasons:

Teams are closest to what they do and therefore they should be in the best position to decide what the best course of action is.

If teams can come to a decision on their own without seeking approval from others, they will execute faster and be happier.

For me, the best moments at Supercell have been the ones where something amazing has happened and I have had nothing to do with it and have been the last to hear about it. This is exactly how I would like Supercell to operate: in an ideal world, the teams would make all the decisions which means that I would make none. This is what I mean when I say that my goal is to be the world’s least influential CEO. People think that I am joking when I say that, but I am not.

This is how different Supercellians talked about the value of trust and what it means to them:

“People are more capable than most companies/cultures allow them to be. Most companies are built with hierarchies, processes, and cultures that may teach people, but don’t let them contribute to their max capacity… Supercell has demonstrated that when you remove approvals, processes, hierarchies, and bureaucracies, our people can deliver incredible achievements. That’s fundamentally why we have 5 hit games that have been played by more than a billion unique players, creating experiences that will be remembered for a long time.”

“To me, the most amazing thing is the levels of trust between people in the company. The nature of my work is around anti-fraud, catching cheaters. I would imagine in any company, not only in gaming companies, this is a sensitive topic, but I have been given all the trust that I need to operate.”

“I've been to multiple companies which state that they hire great people and trust them but still have very rigid approval processes and steering groups in place. Supercell for me is the first company where I've noticed what complete trust for people and teams really mean.”

A few Supercellians also pointed out that you should trust others not just inside the company, but also outside: and it effectively means that you give some of that “control” away:

“I feel like the concept of "ownership" is super important, in that the team and members inside the team feel that they are the ones owning the work they do and that they get to decide big things. And I've learned that this is true not just within the team, but to achieve the best possible results you need to give some of that ownership away to your trusted partners (especially in art outsourcing) … if they feel that they are a vital part of something bigger, they will thrive! You also learn to trust others so much more than without giving the ownership away.”

“Build strong partnerships with your vendors and make them feel part of your organisation. Great value in outsourcing comes from trusting the partners, letting them try things out and feel involved in the positive changes in the product.”

Trusting others does not mean that you cannot give constructive criticism. On the contrary, it is everyone’s responsibility both to proactively ask for feedback on their work and also to give feedback on the work of others. Feedback makes ideas better. I also believe that the fact that it is the team that decides what to do with the feedback makes receiving even very critical feedback somewhat easier.

Saying that the team decides is easy when things are going well or everyone agrees on what should be done. It is much harder when that is not the case.

We’ve had numerous examples of these situations. For instance, after 5 months of development and a company playable of Boom Beach, many Supercell founders and game leads did not believe in the game and wanted to kill it. In fact, 9/10 people in a key game lead meeting believed it should be killed. We wondered what we should do. It felt like we were at a crossroads. On one hand, it seemed likely that the right business decision would be to kill the game. On the other hand, if we made that call and overruled what the team wanted to do, that would be the end of our culture of independent teams.

We figured that because culture is more important than short term business outcomes, we should trust the team and let them do what they believe. So that’s what we did. Luckily, the team was right and everyone else was wrong. But, the most important thing here to understand is that I believe we as a company would have made the right call even if the team had been wrong.

Team independence in action during the launch of Boom Beach

Interestingly enough, we’ve been in very similar situations where Supercellians outside the team doubted both Clash Royale and Brawl Stars. I am extremely proud that our company culture has enabled these teams to release these games regardless.

One final learning that is related to trust that I wanted to cover is what I would call our fight against becoming a “reporting culture”. In a “reporting culture”, people do one of these two things: i) they write reports on what they’re doing for others to read, or ii) they read reports from others on what they’re doing. And there is no time left for actual work. This obviously makes no sense. Oftentimes if teams and people just trusted each other this would not need to happen. We have had to remind ourselves of this several times in our history, especially when teams are distant to each other and work in different offices. So in cases where different teams work on things that aren’t related to each other, we prefer them to work independently. Communication is good when we share information that is for the greater benefit of the company, but we’ve learned that it can also be a double edged sword. More is not necessarily always better.

7. Don’t let fear of failure guide what you do. Be bold and try new things!

None of our biggest successes have been obvious at the beginning. In fact, very far from it! We had no idea how big our biggest games could become when we released them. I still remember someone from the original Clash of Clans team telling me a few days before the release that he thinks the game will never be as big as Hay Day (which was already out at that time).

Also, each of our three most recent releases (Boom Beach, Clash Royale and Brawl Stars) have faced considerable scepticism internally in their early days. In the case of Brawl Stars, the game spent a very long time in development and in beta before the team decided to release it. Many Supercellians had mixed feelings about the art style and controls, and even whether Brawl was “a Supercell game” to begin with. But, the team kept working hard to improve the game, making massive changes to the game in beta and launched it after seeing the positive feedback from the community.

In short, I guess we’ve learned over the years that we really do not know much! ;-) Much of what we do is really making educated guesses and ultimately trying things out. One Supercellian put it well:

“No one knows anything! Players are changing, the company is changing, we are changing. Life is like a constant moving target.

When I first arrived at Supercell, I thought the successes were because we had super talented people that knew some secret of how to make hit games. But I have come to realize that instead we just have super talented people that care A LOT about what they do … coupled with the freedom and independence of the company (which is key), this gives those people the best chance to make great things.”

As a related point, the same person continued to talk about how important intuition is and how really the only way to build it is to succeed and also fail (and fail BIG!). And if you are not humble enough, you will not be able to grow your intuition.

“At the end of the day, all we have is our intuition. A good intuition is built from great successes and great failures from our past. It doesn't necessarily give us the answers for the future, but it gives us our best bets! Obviously we have data and graphs to help guide us, but I feel they are there to guide our intuition.

I think it's all about building your intuition and it's a long game. You have to succeed and fail, and the bigger the better.

There is a certain amount of faith and belief you need to have with your intuition. That’s why you have to surround yourself with people that inspire you, encourage you to take those risks and do the crazy things.

You have to be humble and know that you don't know anything, otherwise your intuition becomes stale.”

Building new things and innovating is hard and requires taking risks. By definition, taking big risks means that you will fail more often than you will succeed. If people were afraid to fail, they would not take these risks, and thus there would be no innovation and no hit games. To encourage our people to take risks and fail, we’ve tried to create a culture where failures are not only acceptable, but expected. In fact, we try our best not to think of them as failures, but as learnings.

One of the practical things we do to enforce this is by celebrating the learnings that come from our failures. One of my favorite days at Supercell was the all hands Friday update a few years ago where one of the game leads talked about the learnings from killing a game AND our marketing team shared a retrospective on a failed campaign where we lost a huge amount of money which led to the first negative month in a very long time at Supercell. I was so proud of these people who were brutally honest in front of everyone about what had gone wrong. That ensured that the entire company learned a lot from their experiences. It is these moments that make our culture stronger.

8. Resist the temptation to create processes and rules...even when you have made a mistake!

Humans have a tendency to try to control situations. Most of us feel safer when we feel we are in control. In companies, to make us feel this way, we like to establish rules or processes. This happens particularly after we’ve made a mistake. “Let’s make sure we don't make that mistake again! So here’s a new rule…”

We have found this approach to be problematic on several accounts. First, rules which made sense back in the day usually don’t make sense today, because something has changed since the rule was originally created. Second, sometimes people may have a tendency to do what the process says, not necessarily what makes sense.

As an example, many years ago, we instituted a rule that all new games had three months to get to playable, because we wanted our new games to get to a proof of concept more quickly. Developers then started to game the system by starting earlier without telling anyone to make sure they could get to playable within that time frame. This created an unhealthy environment where developers were trying to get around the “rules” vs focusing on making the best game possible. Also, applying one rule to all games didn’t make sense because some games needed six weeks to get to a playable and others needed six months.

It took us some time to remove this rule and get back to our foundation: trusting that every team will do their best to make the right decision for their game and for Supercell.

9. Traditional goal setting does not work in our culture of independent cells.

An interesting learning that is related to trust is about how we used to set goals for Supercell and how we do it today. Many years ago, we figured that we should set annual goals for Supercell because that is what companies do. So we involved all the Leads in the company, and spent weeks of their time trying to figure out the five most important company-wide goals for the following year. Once we finally had agreed on them, we published them in the beginning of the year.

Well, fast-forward six months to an all hands company meeting. I asked people how they thought we were doing against the goals. In the discussion that followed, it turned out that i) most people could not remember what the goals were and this was because ii) the goals were either not relevant for their particular team or just not relevant overall. And then someone just asked: “Hey, isn’t our goal to just create great games that lots of people play for a long time?” I said: "Well, yes.” And this person continued: “And don’t we believe that we will do this if we have the best teams (cells) working in the best culture?” Me: “Correct.” Him: “So what other goals could there be?” Me: “I don’t know”.

Goals become meaningful when they are relevant to individual teams

So the learning here for us was that in a very team centric culture like ours, we need to think about goal setting very differently. These days we think that we really have that one goal as a company, which is to build great games that as many people as possible play for years and that are remembered forever. That’s our long term goal. And every year, we try to get closer to this dream within the restrictions set by our short term goals / budgets. These days we simply let the teams set their own goals within this framework, and they in turn tell everyone else what they are. Last year, we presented the team goals in two separate one-hour all hands sessions. We think the biggest value here comes from the fact that it makes teams pause and think about their mid to long term goals. As an added benefit, it is inspiring for everyone around the company to hear what everyone else is planning to do.

10. Write down your values and define your culture (and revise as you learn and evolve as a company).

After all these years where many have heard me talking about how important culture is to Supercell, you will perhaps find it amusing that one of my biggest personal mistakes at Supercell is that it took me too long to actually write down and define our values and culture.

Supercell had six founders and I feel that we all had complete clarity between us six what the culture we wanted to build was all about. But, it took me almost two years and growing to a team of 40 to write the culture down. I didn’t do it sooner partly because putting together a memo or culture deck sounded like a very corporate thing to do, but mostly because I was just so busy doing other stuff (that felt more important and urgent at the time).

What triggered me finally to get on it was a meeting where someone was talking about “responsibility” (one of our values) but clearly had a completely different way to think about it than what I thought we meant by “responsibility” when we founded the company.

This was a huge wake up call for me. So what I did was that I met with every single Supercellian individually, in an effort to figure out what they thought the values were. Then I summarized and wrote them down in a few slides, making sure they were consistent with the company we wanted to build. This was a huge effort, but well worth it. I just wish I had done it when there were only six of us :)

Having learned from this, these days we try to revisit our culture and values every 1-2 years. Our small leadership team of three meets with every single team at Supercell in all of our four offices, and we talk about the culture, and ask our teams to challenge whatever is the latest version of our culture document. I have found this to be a great way to improve our culture and also make sure all recent learnings are included in it.

Another mistake I’ve made regarding documenting culture was my attempt to oversimplify it. At some point, we felt we had too many values and that no one could remember them. So we tried to simplify them to short memorable catch phrases in a slide deck that we tried to make as short as possible. But that led to problems: people interpreted these phrases in different ways and it was not clear what we meant by them. So then we took a step back and in fact wrote a very detailed, old-fashioned memo about the culture. Yes, it takes a bit to read and digest it, but what could possibly be more important than our culture!? The next version of our culture document will also include real stories from Supercell that demonstrates our culture in action. This will hopefully make it even more clear.

Bonus learning: The most important thing is that you enjoy the ride!

And for this last bonus learning, I’m just going to leave you with a quote from another Supercellian. I couldn’t have said it better myself:

“Life is short...enjoy the ride! Find people that inspire you and make you better at what you do and make you a better person. We don't know what we are doing, so it is best to focus on creating a great team and the best possible environment for that team to succeed.”

Ok, that’s it! Congrats if you managed to read this far! We don’t know what the future holds for us, but we are excited that we can now count our years in decades. One thing we do know is that we’ll stay focused on our vision to be the best place to create games. And for us that means continuing our journey on trying to build even better teams and a better culture for these teams to operate in.

Finally, I wanted to thank all of the past and present Supercellians and partners who have gotten us to where we are today on our 10th birthday. And most importantly, I want to thank the players of our games over the years. You continue to inspire us every day! Thank you for enabling us to do what we love to do.

On behalf of everyone at Supercell,

Ilkka

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blaurascon-kzk · 4 years

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KZK Discord Digest [Week of Nov 22 - Nov 28]

SUMMARY: Work's still progressing on the LE Kirins. Some previews for the Aeterna (Time) one in this post! Kat's made a channel in the Discord specifically for posting quick WIP shots and previews while he's working. I likely won't be covering that channel in the Digests, given 1. there are a lot and 2. there are still WIP shots in Announcements, but we'll see. In the meantime, you'll have to check out the Discord to see em. Links in my SL profile. We migrated our databases to a new host the other day. The old host had been giving us fits for a long while, from downtime to failed purchases, but the recent streak of "vendors going offline and unable to come back online if we had to reboot anything" was the last straw. New host is much more robust than the old one - you'll notice this in faster purchase times, and if vendors need to reboot, they'll come back up faster. In addition, we'll be able to add item descriptions again! We weren't able to have these for quite a while due to issues with the old host. We'll get those updated soon as we have a bit of spare time. One caveat: If you happen to have any Vouchers left over from old events (e.g. the Sweetheart vouchers from Valentine's where you choose an avatar color), those will no longer work. They need to talk to the databases & don't have the right configuration now. You can manually redeem them from Kat if you need. Similarly, any vendors that we missed updating will no longer be able to properly talk to the item servers. If you happen across a vendor that seems to be failing to deliver an item, let us know so we can update it!

______

Nov 22

KatLast Friday at 5:09 PM @everyone So one of the final 4 kirins to be release is Aeterna, the avatar of Time. Here's a quick concept doodle for it. It wears a mask resembling a ram's head, and the horns are notched like a gear or cog.

For the design, I wanted something that looked aged and wise, yet still had a regal air to it. its main colors will be bronze, gold, copper, and maroon.

KatLast Friday at 8:31 PM @everyone So tonight I was approached by a fellow KZK community member and friend, with a simple request to help them troubleshoot a rig. After trial and error, a solution was found and they were well on their way toward finishing a project that had been plaguing them for weeks.

And herein lies the problem. The individual, who will remain nameless, who rigged this model, seems to have taken umbrage to me assisting.

I don't understand this mentality. I don't understand why they're upset, or why they're taking it out on the person who asked me for help.

KZK wouldn't be where it was were it not for the contributions of many before me. Everything I've learned, I learned from youtube videos, forum tutorials, and industry leaders like Michael "Orb" Vicente, most famous for his 'Orb_Cracks' brush that basically every major game studio uses these days(I'm not kidding).

Im also not afraid to admit when I'm wrong, or when I don't understand something. Years ago, I didn't know how to make good LODs, until members of this very community gave me information that made it possible.

Point I'm trying to make is, and the reason I'm posting this: If you don't know something, reach out. Its not dumb to not know something. Its dumb to not ask for help, because it just makes you look close minded and ignorant. Don't punish others for your ignorance, because the files I worked with tonight were new territory for me. I had the missing piece to the puzzle and progress was made.

Art and progress can't exist in a vacuum. There's entire generations of others who came long before you did--And there'll be plenty more to follow in your footsteps and eventually surpass you. Its why I'm always so eager to help. always eager to teach, because someone else was kind enough to teach me.

This has been your latest 'Old man shouts at clouds', brought to you by Kat who needs another cup of coffee.

KatLast Friday at 8:39 PM @everyone Also, if you're new to KZK, or not familiar with this: Sometimes a topic will come up, or something will happen that sorta.. just sets me off.

I'm 'famous', at least as far as the furry community in Second life is concerned. I could use that power for evil, but I dont. Instead I use it to try and spread a message from time to time. Today's lesson just happened to be about 'learning to learn', a subject that's always been near and dear to me.

You can ignore these kinds of posts if you want, but if you do read them, Please take them either with a grain of salt, or to heart. up to you. Its just important for me to raise awareness for issues like this from time to time.

______

Nov 24

KatLast Sunday at 1:57 AM @everyone Kinda dawned on me tonight that I wanted to make a channel where I could post updates and teasers to ongoing projects too minor/frequent to place into announcements(I don't like sending too many too often).

So, I've added a new channel to the General tab, called #teasers-and-wips. Reactions are enabled, but replies are disabled--you can share feedback in #general chat. Enjoy!

KatLast Sunday at 5:25 AM @everyone My progress for today on the Aeterna Kirin. I've got the rings already modelled, just need to uv unwrap them and get them baked out once I get some sculpted detail onto them. Then its on to the floaty bits of fabric, which should go quickly, and lastly a new set of fur assets to make this old soul look wiry and wise. I'm particularly tickled with the skull so far. While definitely not true to a goat's skull, as intended, I much prefer the visage this design gives and I hope you all do too!

The skull and horns (and all other parts), will be static(with a bento alternative tail included, per the norm), so you'll be free to rip everything apart and repurpose it as your heart desires!

______

Nov 25

KatLast Monday at 6:16 PM @everyone Progress on the Aeterna is probably 95% at this point. The skin/body textures in use are not final(jsut using the chocolate textures so its not solid white), and I still gotta add the belly scales and make the asset for the maroon fabric hanging from the rings all over. I'm pretty stoked with how these hair assets came out. Also fun little side effect, when you remove the mask/horns, it looks like a cool kirin/zebra witch doctor kinda, so hey, some modding potentiall there for people.

Bonus: No mask

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Nov 27

KatYesterday at 3:37 AM @everyone Hey reminder that there's a snazzy new #teasers-and-wips channel where I post progress on upcoming projects! I've been posting my recent progress on the Nova, complete with some behind the scenes showing how I create assets that contribute to larger items. Its good fun!

KatYesterday at 4:35 AM @everyone At this moment, we're performing some server migration for our databases(We've got backups this time I promise!), so purchasing will be unavailable.

For those curious, we've had many vendors crashing and not coming back online in recent months. We originally suspected this to be a Second Life issue but it traced back to recent changes our host made, effectively crippling our servers.

We're migrating to a new host, and internal testing has already shown faster purchases, vendor boots, and the restoration of a long missing feature, item descriptions!!

We'll give the all clear once migration is done.

KatYesterday at 7:20 AM @everyone It is 7:15 in the morning, and Flame and I have powered through the night (although this is his day), to chase down a MYRIAD of issues that have been plaguing our system for the last several years. The crashing and failure to boot was definitely the nail in the coffin So this had to happen sooner or later.

BUT! We're ..technically code orange. The migration is complete, and as of the time of this writing, only the MAIN STORE KZK vendors and DIREWOLF Vendors have been updated to cache to the new server.

ANY Purchases made from ANY OTHER KZK vendor WILL NOT DELIVER at this time. I will be fixing the remaining vendors grid-wide once I've gone and copped a few hours of beauty sleep. This includes all KZK Multi-category vendors, and ALL Single prim vendors besides the Direwolves.

ALSO: If you are in possession of a voucher, they will no longer deliver items! There is no way to fix these going forward besides doing a manual delivery of the desired item(in exchange for the in-tact, unused voucher). All future vouchers going forward will use the new system.

TLDR: Only kzk main vendors work in Okarthel, as well as direwolves. Everything else is still fucked and im too tired to bother. I'll deal with those in the morning(after ive slept) (any purchases made to off-site vendors will be manually redelivered tomorrow as well, so if you wanna avoid failed purchases, just use Okarthel)

Flame SoulisYesterday at 7:35 AM Do note though that vendors and vouchers will continue to be recorded. All we have to do is re-add the purchase/item redemption to the newer system and your item will deliver.

So, in short, your purchase will be recorded if purchased outside the main store. It'll just be delayed until someone can update the newer system.

KatYesterday at 8:08 PM @everyone Took all day but I think I've managed to track down all active locations. All vendors, including the single prim stuff, has been switched over. In the event you find a vendor that fails to deliver properly, please let me or blau know.

Current vendor versions are 1.94(sergal and normal), and 1.51 for the stone pillar ones.

you are now free to move about the cabin. Now if you'll excuse me, I need more coffee and food. Stupid blood sugar @-@

#kzk-dd #kzk

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dangersam · 5 years

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Saved game serialization

Well, seems like another two months has gone by in a flash! I was away visiting family for some of this time, and the work I've been doing on the game has resulted in a frustrating lack of progress to show for it, but here's an update on what I've been up to anyway.

Saved game serialization

Up until now, saved games and constructions have been serialized via a binary stream, with no formatting, just using BinaryReader and BinaryWriter directly. This is fast and results in a compact file size, but has one huge disadvantage, a lack of version tolerance. In other words, if I add or remove any variables to be saved, or reorder them, then old saved game files will no longer load correctly. To work around this I wrote code to check a version number in the saved file, and then convert things over for each added or removed variable. This is a hack really, and has resulted in rather messy and hard to maintain code.

This situation is bad enough with just the demo version of the game out there, with a cut down feature set. Maintaining saved game backwards compatibility will only get harder once the full version is released.

Ideally, I need a properly structured save file format, with some kind of key value pairing that would allow for version tolerance, but wouldn't bloat the file size too much.

BinaryFormatter

First I investigated using BinaryFormatter, because it allows for version tolerance via optional fields, but I couldn't get it to work when deserializing MonoBehaviour classes. I need to be able to instantiate the MonoBehaviour and then populate serialized values into it, not have the deserialization process itself try and allocate a new MonoBehaviour (which is not allowed by Unity). I thought maybe using a serialization surrogate might allow for this, but couldn't figure out a way to make it work. The other downside of BinaryFormatter is all the assembly and type data it saves out adds quite a bit to the file size.

Json serialization

So after looking around for other possible solutions, I decided to try Json. This provides the key value pairs I need in a fairly compact structured format. I used Json.NET from Newtonsoft (provided via a Unity asset store package for ease of integration) which seemed really promising, it's very easy to use and highly configurable. In most cases there's very little additional code to write, you can just use the JsonProperty attribute to specify which class properties to serialize, and configure how they're serialized. Also, it allows for populating properties of a MonoBehaviour that has already been allocated, by using JsonSerializer.Populate() inside a JsonConverter.

Still, it took me several weeks to get Json serialization working for both saved constructions and full saved games, there were a few stumbling blocks along the way which took time to work around, as did just learning how to best use the Json.NET API. The end result seemed great though, it solved the version tolerance problem, and the code was so much simpler and cleaner.

One issue was that the resulting file sizes of the text based Json format were huge. Given that the game uses the same serialization code path to send construction data between networked players, this was a problem. So, I switched over to using Bson (the binary equivalent to Json), and also compressed the data via a DeflateStream. This worked well, the resulting file sizes actually ending up smaller than my original binary stream format.

Performance and memory problems

At this point I thought I was good to go, but then I started profiling the Json serialization with large saved game files (more than a thousand parts), and realized I was in trouble. Firstly, deserializing the saved game was more than twice as slow using Json vs. the old binary stream method. This wasn't a complete disaster as the load times weren't terribly long in the first place. The other more serious issue was that the Json deserialization did an enormous number of tiny GC allocations (as in millions of allocs, totalling hundreds of MB!).

I found that reducing the JsonProperty name lengths helped slightly with this but not to any significant degree. I spent quite a lot of time restructuring the code that loads the various modules in the game (player, constructions, time of day, etc.) to try and deserialize from the file stream more efficiently, but this made very little difference to performance or memory usage unfortunately (the resulting code was cleaner than before though so I guess the refactoring was worth doing anyway).

I'm annoyed with myself that I didn't do enough tests to pick up on these problems before putting all the effort in to convert the game over to use Json. If I'd known ahead of time, I probably wouldn't have bothered.

So now I'm not sure what to do. If I stick with the old binary stream solution, then all the Json serialization effort will have been wasted and I'm still stuck with difficult to maintain code for backwards compatibility. But the Json serialization option as it stands isn't acceptable, I'd need to do something to resolve the memory and performance issues. One possibility would be to manually serialize everything (i.e. use JsonReader / JsonWriter directly rather than JsonSerializer), supposedly this is the fastest way as it avoids overhead from reflection and so on.

I've decided for now to put all this to one side, think about it some more, and come back to it later. In the meantime I really need to get back to trying to make some positive progress with the rest of the game!

#gearblocks #Unity3D #sandbox games #game development #indie games

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quietdaysco · 5 years

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Primrose Path - Devlog #006

Hey, it’s us again—two indie devs with fresh dirt on our visual novel progress. Ready?

Behind the Scenes

Playtesting Feedback

Last month we closed the pre-alpha Ink build of Primrose Path’s common route outline. It met its purpose of proving the basic concepts of our game were viable and that it interested players in our target demographic. In fact, playtesters gave us overwhelmingly positive feedback in our post-test form about the characters and story. Here are a few quotes from their responses:

“The number of elements of the MC's [main character’s] life added in to the story in increments helped me not only relate to the MC but also stay interested.”

“There's a good variety of calmer moments and more outlandish/exciting/otherwise more high tension moment [sic], no issues for me.”

“[T]he clients are a rainbow of people with a few that [sic] very much stand out [to me]”

“By the end, I was definitely considering who I was going to chose as my client and was sad the pre-alpha ended even though I knew it was going to.”

“I 100% would dance [in a mini-game similar to] DDR [Dance Dance Revolution]”

As you can see, the beginnings of Primrose Path went over well and players definitely had a lot of interesting things to say about our mischievous clients! We can’t spoil them here, but you may be able to see for yourself when alpha testing comes to our server in the future!

Now, for all the good we received, it’s not to say the pre-alpha went without its criticisms:

“This might be silly, but I wish there were an option that weren't a dress for her outfit to the party.”

It’s not silly at all, playtester! It had us thinking about the different ways our protagonist, Lynn Austen, could express herself. This concern lead to one outfit redesign and introduced a number of new ones!

“The beginning was a little slow, but I love Priya, so all of her scenes brought my attention back instantly.”

We love co-worker and bestie, Priya, too, but she can’t be an exception for pacing. We’ve since reevaluated and tweaked Part 1: Work Day. Plenty of visual changes and cutting scenes entirely were discussed in order to tighten up the overall pacing.

“Harper seems harsh but has pressure on her to make her harsh, but then you see her and shes [sic] just straight up scary.”

While all playtesters understood Harper’s role as Lynn’s no-slack boss, a few found her consequentially unapproachable. We have a lot in store for her in later routes, but acknowledge she was sparse during the common route. We’ve since taken this concern and made her more available in new scenes, adjusted her tone in some of the older ones, and had other characters—who have a very different relationship with her than Lynn does—reflect more openly on her. We think this humanizes Harper much more.

“Unfortunately [Bellarmino] feels like a snobbier, more irritating Matt. [...] I personally don't find him very likable but I'm looking forward to being proven wrong.”

In our feedback form, we asked about character impressions. We also polled if players didn’t have to play all routes at least once, which clients they’d pick. While character impression responses expressed a willingness to give our model and fashion designer, Bellarmino LaFauci, a chance, he was our least popular choice in the poll. We figured it may have been that his personality wasn’t differentiated enough against the company with whom Lynn encounters him, so we’ve made adjustments to contrast him more against his judgmental cabal.

So as we went through and addressed feedback, we had some ideas of our own to implement, which leads us to...

Updated Revised Outline

Double the wordcount! Yep, we’re just shy of 32,000 words for the revised common route outline. How could this be? Look: don’t mistake Primrose Path for a linear narrative. Your choices affect the world from day one.

Beyond changes from playtester feedback, other new content includes:

New Characters! We work to make sure our side characters leave an impression. We’ve added a few more with the means to salvage or devastate Lynn’s career. Until you yourself can meet them, look out for future Lore snippets on our Twitter!

New Events! Lynn has more opportunities than before, and under different states of mind, to navigate and impact the world around her. Depending on what Lynn did, where, and when can completely change an encounter within that same space and time.

New Key Items! There are a couple of items Lynn can collect if she meets the right people and takes certain actions. These items can reveal some important information in client routes later on—and some hints for others, too!

New Areas! A few more places have been added to the common route, including whole new scenes. What could possibly lie behind these doors?

So how’s that sound? If you said “Damn, that’s hella rad,” well you just took the words right out of our mouths. But we’re not done yet; we take feedback seriously. When we can’t decide on what our audience may want, we leave no room for speculation. There’s really only one way to settle that.

VN Protagonist Sprite Survey

We run a survey! We wanted to know how visual novel fans preferred to see a customizable MC represented as a sprite, if at all. It’s tough for us because as much as we want to make Lynn as visually present as her sense of self, we also acknowledge that “immersion” for many players also means different levels of “intrusion” from MC’s sprite—down to none at all, for folks wanting to self-insert despite taking on another character’s existing backstory. While we think we’ve come to a happy medium that serves our purposes and would appeal to a good number of players, we’ll be sharing with you all in a separate post our findings.

Two things are for certain:

Visual novel players are an incredibly dedicated base, having turned out over 100 responses to our form! Thank you so much for helping us see your side on the matter!

The communities we frequent overwhelmingly take issue with one specific manner of MC representation—one that seems to plague the industry. If you’re not an avid consumer of visual novels, this begrudged answer may surprise you!

But hey, we haven’t closed it yet: you can contribute your opinion too until August 5th, 11:59 PM EDT. Stay tuned for our detailed write-up on the results, next time. We’ve got another survey in the works too (sounds like we’ve got a few hard decisions, huh?) so keep tabs on our Twitter when we release that form.

Greyson’s Twitter

Greyson’s been taking a break from Twitter for a minute. Working Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday overheated him, and in that vulnerable time, he caught a virus! So now he’s on sick leave and we’ve promised him an easier schedule of one day a week when he gets better. His posting schedule will be announced soon. You can still send him some love on his Twitter account. He’ll be sure to respond when he’s feeling up to it. He’s always there for you. Will you return the favor?

Main Game Progress

Common Route:

Rough Outline: 100% ✔

Revised Outline: 100% ✔

Draft Script: --%

The Artist: Matthias Barousse

Rough Outline: 100% ✔

Revised Outline: --%

Progress on the main game has primarily been on the common route outline. Some interesting things to note are that last time we reported our revision to be at 90%. After implementing feedback, our clean outline doubled in word count and we’ve reviewed it entirely since then. So now we’re thoroughly at 100%!

The breakdown of that is:

We finished up the common route’s Part 3: The Interviews, in which Lynn meets all her clients whom she may or may not have stumbled upon at a legendary bash.

We elaborated on Part 2: The Party encounters and added more variations which subsequently trickle over into alternate interactions in The Interviews.

We added an interactive, portent dream sequence the night of The Interviews, right when Lynn hits the bed after evaluating all potential clients at work.

... and a few other additions. Also among other things, we’ve actually started work on the draft script already, but we’ve not had time to properly calculate the percentage. It’ll be updated accordingly in our next log.

What’s Next For Us

We’re going to finish up our script draft and start focusing our efforts into creating a playable, visual alpha build of Primrose Path. Yes, we want to play our game as much as you do and that’s motivation enough!

We’re focusing on monthly devlogs for our Tumblr, but we have to ask:

Are there other kinds of content and updates you folks would like to see here? We want to know! Shoot us a message in our Ask the Devs inbox here on Tumblr, or hit us up on Twitter, Discord, and Lemma Soft!

Thanks for reading! Keep up and remember to enjoy your Quiet Days. ♥

Socials

- Micro-updates on Twitter!

♦ Factoids with Greyson!

- Live art development on Twitch!

- Art logging on Instagram!

- Ask us anything here!

- Continue the discussion on Discord!

- Master thread on Lemma Soft!

#devlog #primrosepath #visual novel #otome #english otome #indiedev #gamedev #otomedev

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edomtheproject-blog · 6 years

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Devlog #1 - 01/10/2018: First things first

Hey, all of you!

I’m not exactly sure how I should start this post. Maybe I should introduce myself and then explain what’s going on here. So, here we go.

My name is Davi Bretas, but you can call me Dave, I believe it’s simpler that way. I’m one of the owners of this Tumblr page/Devlog, along with my friend João Rabello (“John” is also an acceptable option, or, if you prefer a more BR alternative, “Jão”). We’re two Brazilian guys with one mutual interest: creating video games. And while he’s the one responsible for taking care of this page so it can be pleasant to the readers, I’m the one who’s gonna write a lot around here. So I hope you don’t get bored.

Okay, introductions properly made. But what is this text about?

My purpose here is very clear: introduce you guys to our new “under-construction” universe. We’re pretty new into this, but it seems people really appreciate to be into the developers’ work, so I guess it’d be nice if we started to share somewhere our creative process while we’re working in our game. Well, we’ll eventually get there, but… First things first.

1) Who exactly are we?

To begin with, I think we should go back in time and explain who we are, how we got to know each other and what is our objective.

Both of us study at the same university. More specifically, we study at UFRJ (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro/Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) but in different areas. We’ve got to know each other when we both decided to be part of a group called GDP (Game Development Project), which is basically a bunch of guys and girls who want to create awesome games and stuff like that. After a long selective process, we made it. And during this same process, we got to know some very talented people. One of them is Carol Sá, our artist (you can find more of her work right here) and also Paulo Richard, the music guy (here).

(Some paparazzi stalked us on campus)

Together, we had the opportunity to create our first (mini)game: a The Legend of Zelda-like inspired by The World Cup entitled The Legend of Neyney. This game was just some kind of test. We had one month to give birth to our first child. It was an interesting experience but given the small amount of time, the game contains some bugs and problems that we didn’t care to fix because… Well, it was just a test. It was not supposed to be something really serious (but if you want to give it a try, here is the link - I should warn you, though: there are no English subtitles and, besides that, many references that you’ll only get if you’re into our internet/meme culture).

Anyway, we’re now part of GDP and we wanted to start our first game. We gathered some other skillful people (another artist, Nayara Glei and our game designer, Victor Corrêa - we’ll probably prepare a video in a near future to introduce everyone properly) to start our FIRST SERIOUS GAME EVER.

So, summing up, this is our current team:

Game Designer: Victor Corrêa

Programmer: João Rabello

Artists: Carolina Sá and Nayara Glei

Musician: Paulo Richard

Writer: Davi Bretas (aka me)

2) Okay, nice… But what is this “Edom” thing about?

I gotta say to you guys that “Edom” is not the actual name of the game. We’ve been discussing a lot and we didn’t get to a real answer. “Edom” is some kind of nickname. It’s a long story that makes more sense in Portuguese, but I’ll eventually explain it when we post about possible names and stuff. For now, let me explain our idea.

This project came out from a wish Carol had and she wanted to become true. Since we like her very much, we’re doing our best to accomplish it. After some weeks of intense brainstorming and many ideas, we decided to create a horror game with a strong narrative and many puzzles to be solved.

However, we wanted a real challenge. Given the fact that we’re a small team with little experience, we ended up with a medium-to-large scope. Initially, the purpose was to create a Metroidvania, but it wouldn’t suit our main idea. So we kinda decided to get some aspects of Metroidvanias and apply’em to our target, but it’s not entirely a Metroidvania as we are used to. More than that, we’re talking about a pixel art game based on a few characteristics from some Survival Horrors. Aaaand there’s more. The icing on the cake: an isometric view.

If this is not an ambitious project, I sure as hell don’t know what it is. But the thing is: we’re very excited about it. And we’re working hard to do our best.

3) That’s good. But could you tell me a little bit more about the plot?

I’d prefer not to. But I can tell you something simple: this game is set in a huge and weird house (as any huge house should be) and we start playing as a young lady whose name is Ariel. Obviously, she doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing there and, as any normal person would be willing to do, she just wants to get the f*ck out of there. That’s not going to be an easy task, as you may imagine, otherwise, it wouldn’t be a game at all.

Eventually, she finds out that there are other guests in the same house: Clarice, Ezekiel, and Pamela. Each one of them with their respective characteristics (I promise to talk more about the characters later). As you may expect, everything goes to sh*t and you must find a way to escape the mansion with your new friends.

So, it’s basically this. I don’t want to spoil the plot or anything like that. Don’t get mad, please. ): Keep reading and I’m sure that we’ll find a way to reward you for dealing with your curiosity. ;)

4) Okay, I get it. I’m kinda interested in it. How long do you guys plan to release the game?

Probably it’s gonna take some time. However, we are already working in some type of “alpha-demo”. A demo like any other, which consists in explaining the general idea of the game, our purpose and, if we’re successful, properly set you guys in our uncanny universe (as any demo should do). The deadline is NOVEMBER, 6TH and we hope to be sharing with you that same week. So you can have a taste of what we’re preparing and also give us some feedback.

I call it an “alpha” because MY idea (and here is Dave telling his deepest wishes) is to release another demo - a more complex and really “I-want-to-play-this-freakin-game-right-now” type of demo than the alpha is going to be (but this doesn’t mean it won’t be good, of course, you can trust me).

(I know you can’t see a damn thing, but maybe it’s better this way)

5) Nice! I can’t wait for that alpha-demo or anything like that. How can I be updated?

First step: follow this Tumblr account (duuh).

Second step: you can follow us on Twitter and like our page on Facebook.

We’ll be preparing videos for our YouTube Devlog channel and also an Instagram account soon. In the meantime, feel free to contact us through our pages or our e-mail ([email protected]).

I guess this is it. For now.

Soon enough we’ll be updating this Devlog with more useful information about our process. Next topic will explain in details what we have imagined until now and some of the difficulties we’ve been facing.

Hope to get some feedback.

See ya!

#game #gaming #video games #devlog #indiedev #indiedevelopers #indiedevelopment #indie game #indiegame #dev #edom

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