Kandria
Composing a World for Kandria
Nick
What a week. Well, after putting up the listing for the composer position last week, things have been rather wild. We've gotten close to 300 applications for the position! I'm honestly still a bit dumbfounded that we got that many. It's amazing that interest has been so great! Simultaneously though, I'm also dreading having to turn down so many talented people. All of the tracks I've managed to listen to so far have been good to great.
Listening to the samples has been rather difficult a process, though. For one, after listening to music for more than two hours straight, things just start to blur together as you start to forget the specifics of what you had listened to before. It's harder still to compare works from different people, since there's so many different styles and approaches. Having little experience in producing music myself, I can't even really make good technical assessments or clear judgements on whether people can adapt to fit requirements well, either. Given all this, so far I've been basing things mostly on whether I enjoyed listening to the tracks in general, without trying too hard to figure out technical measures.
I want to listen to a few more people, then re-listen to the top picks after that, and ultimately filter it down to 10 or less people to interview. I hope to get that done next week. If you applied, thank you very much, and I hope you can bear with me a few days more before I can give you an answer!
While all of these applications have been flooding in, there was unfortunately also some rather distressing news. On Sunday I got my Discord account disabled for "Spam or Platform Abuse". All I got was an automated email listing a bunch of things that could lead to such a ban, but as you might guess I have never done any of those things. After emailing Discord about this, all I got in return was another automated email saying they won't lift the ban, without any clarification on what they think I did wrong or anything. I'm frankly not surprised by that, but I'm still disgusted that this happened. Just goes to show that it's a really terrible idea to rely on proprietary platforms in any capacity at all, especially one as hostile to open source as Discord.
We've now moved development chat away from Discord, so we're at least safe in that regard. Unfortunately, Discord as a platform is still the only really viable choice for the kind of community building we're seeking, simply because everyone already has an account, and thus doesn't need to keep track of yet another service just for Kandria. As such, we've created a new server – the old one had to be abandoned, as I hadn't anticipated this kind of thing and hadn't any other admins on roll to maintain it. I've corrected this mistake on the new one, so it should at least stick around even if any one of us gets their account nuked for no reason again.
Moving back on to more productive and positive things again, I did take some time between vetting applications to work on the levels some more. A lot of the chunks are still way too bare, but it's getting somewhere. I also realised we hadn't decided on names for anything yet, so I spent a while coming up with names for the locations and corporations that had owned everything before the calamity.
Most importantly though, we've settled on calling the former city Zenith. It feels appropriately simple, futuristic, and has that kind of positive, corporate flair that's deliciously ironic in hindsight.
It's fun to see the world slowly come together, even if realising just how many custom assets and bits and bobs are needed to get it done fills me with a fair amount of dread. If I didn't have to worry about deadlines and expenses, I'd probably be able to spend years and years adding new areas and cool locations to visit, though! The setting we've placed Kandria into is something that really gets my imagination going, and it's very hard to keep that in check and avoid feature-creep, ha ha.
Anyway, it's close to 1AM here now and I need to wrap this up. After working a lot more than usual this week I really want a proper "turn it all off" Sunday to unwind. More exciting news to share next week, I'm sure!
Tim
I hit some difficulty this week getting the functionality for some of the side quests working as I wanted. Despite being simpler quests content-wise, there is some complex scripting needed to make them play nice within a dialogue tree hub structure, and to make some of them repeatable (in particular the time trial quest). I'm mostly there though, and I've also tidied my git branch so Nick can merge my content back into master.
Fred
I did a few things here and there – helped create additional assets for the hub area, finished up some remaining animations, and polished up some tiles. Most of the major animation work for the slice content has been finished, so I'm hopping around between tasks a bit, focusing on what's needed at the time.
The rest of the month
So, next week will be deciding on a selection of candidates for an interview – depending on how those go we might have our final candidate already, or we might commission a few to do a custom piece to base our selection on. After that we'll draft up a contract for a month, which will hopefully be extended for much longer after!
Aside from that we'll focus on getting the quests merged in, revised, and fixed up to properly match into all the new level content we have. I'll also need to focus on turning some of the rooms into proper platforming challenges, add more side rooms for exploration. We'll see how that goes.
If you have Discord, don't forget to join our new server!