Kandria
GDC, Eternia Update, Sound
This week was mostly focused on GDC, though a few other exciting things happened as well!
GDC
The main event this week was GDC, which took place online on Swapcard. Overall I have to say I'm... disappointed. The highlight of the event for me were the daily video networking sessions, where you were led onto a virtual floor with a bunch of tables. Each table could seat up to six people and you'd chat over audio and video. It was really cool to hang out and chat with fellow attendees about... well, pretty much whatever!
What wasn't so cool, was that these sessions only lasted for an hour, at the end of which you were unceremoniously booted out, without even the ability to see who you were at the table with, nor the accompanying text chat. I do not understand at all why that platform was not just up throughout the entirety of the conference. It's not like there were ever that many people there to begin with, I never saw the total number rise above 120.
There weren't a lot of talks on the schedule that really interested me either, and most of the ones I did see unfortunately didn't have great presentation, so it was a bit tough to pay attention, when I had all of the rest of the internet to pay attention to during the talk.
We also tried using the GDC press list to reach out to a bunch of journalists, both on Swapcard, via Email, and Twitter, but only one of them got back to us at all. This isn't really surprising though, I'm sure all of them get more than enough stuff in their inboxes as-is. The point there was more to get a chance at them learning of us in any capacity so that when we do have more to show we'll already jostle some memory in their heads.
With regards to the booth, that turned out to be almost entirely pointless, pretty much as I predicted. Everyone I talked to at the virtual meet wasn't even aware that booths existed at all, let alone the ones in the country pavilions. Being buried under ten links almost guaranteed that we wouldn't be found except by the most vigilant. We didn't get any contacts through the message box. The only meeting requests I got were through MeetToMatch, from some marketing agencies trying to sell me their services, and from a very new Russian publisher.
I'm really confused as to why they had practically zero visibility for the showfloors and booths. It seems to me that those are a rather large part of a usual conference, so advertising them so poorly is strange. I can't even imagine what SwissNex had to pay to get our booths set up, and I feel sorry for what they got for that.
Well, in any case, I hope Devcom/Gamescom next month are gonna go at least a bit better than that.
Eternia Update
There's a new patch out for Eternia: Pet Whisperer! This patch includes some important stability fixes for Windows and MacOS. On Windows it should fix the problem that could arise from antivirus programs causing windows exceptions. On MacOS the scaling on Retina displays is now fixed and sound playback on devices with a higher samplerate than the default 44.1kHz now works properly. This should also come with general performance improvements.
Especially fixing the sound problem on MacOS took a long, painful debugging session, as their APIs are badly documented, and far more annoying to deal with than ones on other operating systems. Anyway, the deed is done now, and I hope I don't have to deal to similar platform issues soon.
Sound
I've started integrating the sounds Cai has made for us. Most notably for this is the atmospheric sound layer, which now underlays the music. Depending on where you are the atmospherics will change, which helps a lot to sell the environment. The new system can also change music tracks depending on the area, and use the appropriate music track variant depending on what state the area is in. This allows us to increase the tension for certain areas of the game to fit the current story better.
Mikel has also done a fantastic job with the new tracks. They're not quite done yet, but here's a preview:
Tim
I forgot my weekly last week: the most notable thing I did was pitch some bios for the Semi Sisters faction, so Fred can get cracking with some animations. This week I ran playtests with my wife and brother (thanks guys!), which threw up some useful things to tweak and improve - especially with directing the player a little more towards quest locations in the dialogue and journal. I forget sometimes how big our map is, even at this stage! I also blitzed some emails to key press contacts for GDC this week, and went through the entire quest line adding colour-coded text for key bits of information, as well as occasional text effects. We think the trick here is to use them sparingly, and no doubt I'll see areas to add and remove them the more I play the game.
Status
So this month was supposed to be a focus on combat redesign. While I did get some time to do that, due to the playtesting, conferences, and other stuff, there wasn't much that I actually got done regarding that. I do feel bad about it, so I'm going to try my hardest to focus on that and only that in the remaining week of the month.
I can't spare any more time for it next month though, as there's also a huge amount of UI work left to be done that really has to be done to get the demo to look as good as it possibly can. Still, we're making good progress with everything else, so I'm hopeful that we can reach the September deadline as predicted.