Hey everyone,
Back again with another update video. This time around, we're joined by Bri, who worked with us on If Found... and is back on board for Dreamfeel NEXT. We talk about the development progress as always before letting Bri tell you a bit more about herself and her role on the game, we answer a question about getting into writing for games and Llaura chats about 10 years of A MAZE. Until next month,
Take care,
Team Dreamfeel
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Glossary of Contents:
1) Introductions
2) Development Updates
3) Meet Bri!
4) Writing for Games
5) New video series
6) A MAZE
7) Shoutouts
8) Wrap-Up
Introductions
Llaura:
Hey! welcome to our next update which is our August update on everything we did in July basically. I'm Llaura. I'm the Director, Co-writer at Dreamfeel. Eve, do you want to introduce yourself?
Eve:
I'm Eve, hi yeah. I am the Co-writer and Producer for Dreamfeel and yeah, lovely to be here again!
Llaura:
Bri, do you want to introduce yourself?
Bri:
Hi! I'm Bri. I work on kind of general unity stuff and rigging and posing and stuff like that.
Llaura:
Cool yeah, we'll jump into it in a second. Bri worked on If Found... with us. She came in the summer before we released and had a really awesome impact on the game and then last but not least, we have Alex who does all our video stuff and will edit out all this dead air whenever it happens
Alexandra:
True, true!
Development Updates
Llaura:
So, we will start with what we did and then we'll chat, Bri, about what you do specifically but we'll just have a general chat about what we did this month. We'll just jump right in! So, I think we mentioned in our last update which was only like three weeks ago, maybe it was less, I think we were a bit late with that one that the script had just been finished so that was a huge milestone we hit and actually I think we're gonna start including like little progress bars so like bzzzt, 100% for script draft 1.0 and now script draft 2.0 is at like 15% bzzzt.
but once you have kind of the full picture of a game, that's when you can really start shaping it. So ,I think probably the comparison with If Found for this was, I would say September of 2019, was when we had a full draft that was fairly decent. So, what was working or was not working in script draft 1.0, Eve?
Eve:
Well there was one character who definitely didn't work. The Poochie of our new game.
Llaura:
Yeah that's what I've been calling poor Lorcan. We added this character who had to be in every single scene and then when he wasn't in a scene, everyone had to be asking "Where's Lorcan?". That was because Lorcan was added late because we thought we needed this other character and we had already planned out all the scenes so we just put him in every scene basically but yeah, we don't need him. He's gone, no Poochie.
Eve:
I think his name still exists, maybe for a side character because I quite like the name Lorcan.
Llaura:
Yeah, there'll probably still be a character named Lorcan.
Eve:
Yeah, they will be mostly irrelevant.
Llaura:
The interesting thing about this game as compared to If Found... as a little tidbit is that we have a large main cast. It's not ridiculously big but there's half a dozen main characters whereas If Found, Kasio was the main point of view and you could say Shans/Anú is almost as big but not really whereas in this game, there's six main characters at least right now who have almost equal points of view.
Eve:
It's true!
Llaura:
That's a big reveal!
Eve:
Yeah, I guess it is. Figuring out how to juggle that and how to make sure that all of those characters have time and space to develop has been a really interesting challenge. We are not quite there yet but we get closer and closer.
Llaura:
I think the other thing that this 1.0 draft has let us do is see what areas we need for the game. I think since finishing it over July, one of the big story changes was changing the setting in that we've kind of streamlined it rather than every single scene happening somewhere completely different. We are more gonna be based around a kind of central theme of settings, which means we'll get the game done sooner which is nice but also thematically, it works a lot better than what we've been working on. It goes back to what we planned at the start of the year and the end of last year except now we have a really clear sense of how the story progresses. That's a big thing and then on the development front, we're kind of splitting work into three streams basically because we're all working on Unity which is like part of the reason why Bri is here, to help us with unity and stuff. As well as originally, it was animating and posing but also Bri can just do so many things. It was just like "oh yeah, help us with this".
The trick with having lots of people working in Unity is lots of people stepping on each other's toes and having to redo bits and pieces so with this latest draft of the script, we find all these scenes are being rewritten now, this implementation isn't exactly what we wanted. So, to avoid that going forward, even though our script is fairly tight, besides the writing is going to be changed. We are moving to just having the art be done separately from the whiteboxing. So we've mentioned whiteboxing before. It's where you plan out a level. So, our plan over the rest of this year to whitebox the entire game so we get it done by December and have everything playable, except it's going to look horrid. It's going to be all cubes and then at the same time, our team will be working on on all the environments and we're not going to worry about meshing those together until next year. That's next year's problem but it means the art is gonna be what we expect the environments to work like but we're not gonna be trying to get the mechanics to work essentially yet um. So, that's two streams. The third stream is just polishing the mechanics with one area basically where the art is how it should be and that's a big change. Any thoughts not from a production point of view, Eve?
Eve:
It makes a lot of sense and hopefully it will help to smooth things out. It certainly means that you and I can kind of speed ahead Llaura, which is nice. Just kind of rapidly iterate on various scenes and stuff and check the script and see how it feels to kind of play that, which is really nice because a lot of time when you write something for games, you can write it on the page and it seems fine and then you play it and you're like hmm no!
Llaura:
We finished the build last week actually and I didn't think we were going to finish one because I wasn't happy with how the mechanics were working but we did that thing where "Okay, here's just the environments and you can see them and walk through them", which is really nice and then I just put in the white box as its own little scene and that white box plays really well. You can see how the cameras work and all the different effects but it's just ugly you know and funnily enough that scene, it's not going to exist as it is in game so if we spend time putting art in that and everything would have been just wasted time.
I'm looking forward...we're gonna have the first act done this month so in terms of white box alpha, here's our next progress bar. We're, I'd say, five percent done and hopefully every month we get another 20% done so that by December, we have the whole game done and then next year is working on beta! Programming wise, we have been developing tools and such and effects and everything. Not much we can talk about. We improved the dialogue tool a lot and and I think while we didn't get it done for last week's build, I think we have it going forward and you got all the dialogue into that scene afterwards so quickly or how the speech bubbles work specifically.
Eve:
Yeah, it's it's a really strong improvement. It will make our lives a lot easier so thank you Tim!
Llaura:
So then, that's all our development things. Script 2.0, 15% percent and i don't know... how long do you think that's gonna take? I think like three months or so, we should definitely have that pretty tight.
Eve:
I think the way we're planning to do it is a little bit more like we'll write a scene and then we'll put it into a whitebox and then we'll write another scene and put it in. So, the script itself might take a bit longer but it'll also be more polished because each scene will have at least one immediate revision.
Meet Bri!
Llaura:
So Bri, I thought it was cool to get you on board. We mentioned you last time. You're back with us now about six weeks or so. Maybe two months?
Bri:
Yeah, about that!
Llaura:
You used to be with us. You probably did the colour of the image that's behind you didn't you?
Bri:
Yeah, I did!
Eve:
and for me!
Llaura:
and the colour of Eve's one too. That was awesome.
Bri:
Yes, all of that.
Llaura:
Bri is responsible for a lot of the colouring in the game, specifically scenes that were fully coloured. The house one was really good and then you also did lots of Unity for If Found... What else did you do on If Found...
Bri:
I did nearly pretty much all of the menus and the UI for that.
Llaura:
You did something we posted on Twitter recently, a hundred different versions of the logo that we didn't end up using.
Bri:
Oh so many! So, so many!
Llaura:
I actually really liked some of them. It's a pity we didn't get to use them.
Eve:
They were very stylish.
Llaura:
You were very much a generalist. You can do a bit of everything. I know you through Dublin and through specifically, you went to TUD and did games there. So, you got like a grounding in game design as well as you kind of specialize in art yourself. What kind of stuff are you interested in doing?
Bri:
I kind of really enjoy being a generalist. I kind of just like taking whatever's thrown at me and being able to learn whatever I need to and adapt to different skill sets because I personally believe that nearly every part of game development is very interesting to me. So I like to have a hand in whatever.
Llaura:
The last day you were looking into cloths which is really cool so we have a very realistic looking cloth that looks awesome.
Bri:
Yeah, we got we have some really cool cloth physics right now. So, it adds to the cool movement of the scenes and characters.
Llaura:
I mean, maybe we should just wrap everything in cloth. Go full Journey, have cloth everywhere.
Bri:
Oh god!
Llaura:
You also do loads of commissions online and stuff in between...like you weren't working with us for a bit but we're happy to have you back.
Bri:
Yeah in my personal time I take commissions on Twitter and stuff. I mostly do single image characters or I kind of bounce around and I've been doing a lot of Twitch commissions and stuff for people. which is really cool.
Llaura:
Is that profile pics and emojis or what?
Bri:
Emotes, overlays, any assets needed for Twitch stuff. Stuff like that.
Llaura:
Cool!
Bri:
It's been really fun!
Writing for Games
Llaura:
I think that's the main things. We had one question to talk about, I guess. It was about how to get into writing in games. Alex, is that correct?
Alexandra:
Yeah, that was a question I didn't see in time for our question time last time around.
Llaura:
Eve, you probably have a lot of good insight on this one.
Eve:
Oh boy, it's hard is the first thing and it can be very discouraging. There are a lot more talented writers than there are decent paying jobs in games. So, the main things I would say are make your own games and they don't have to be fancy. Use Twine or Ren'Py or Bitsy. Bitsy is really good, highly recommend it and just try writing little stories because you'll learn a lot as well about pacing and stuff. Pacing in games works super differently to other mediums so it's it's definitely good practice and then send your C.V. out a lot. Oh god, sorry I have so many friends who are game writers and who are...I don't know
Llaura:
Underemployed?
Eve:
So talented and so underemployed and I'm just like "Please, I want all of these people to have lovely jobs".
Llaura:
You talked about something there. I think to get the job, you need to have the material to show for it. There's not necessarily a games writing degree you can do or anything and even if you did, what would matter is still what you can show off it. So, it really is what you create but I think if you are into games and care about games and writing and such, I think the most important thing is you creating anyway so rather than go and work for some AAA company where you write one character's backstory or something, just make your own games and put them out there. It's hard to make a living at it. It's hard to make a living in the 21st century but you don't have to make a living at it to do it. If you can because it also doesn't pay very well unfortunately. So if you do it at all, that's a success.
Eve:
There was a good thread on Twitter recently of writers talking about where they get their income from and some quite famous writers, writers who win awards and stuff were like "Yeah, writing's not my day job. I write novels in my free time and I also do this other thing and it can be a bit startling if you're just kind of a fan you think "Oh, I assumed you were making money" and it turns out no because writers don't make any money.
Llaura:
My favourite gamemaker and potentially my favourite writer is Stephen Murphy (thecatamites) and he's making the ...of the Killer games at the moment. They're so good! He sells his games but he doesn't make a living at it and he very self-consciously doesn't want to join the industry and make a living at it in that way. So, there are other avenues. Obviously maybe not as many people are playing his games as are playing Apex Legends, I don't know, I mean obviously but yeah I think if you make art, it's like it's cool to have a big impact on fewer people.
Eve:
Capitalism and our culture in general tends to devalue stuff that is not done for money and that doesn't make a profit, that isn't seen by tons of people but there's so much value in all art and community-based art is the much more historical and traditional version of art. Art that you make for your friends, for your family, that's how most people in generations past made art. So, there's nothing to be ashamed of if that's what you can do to tell the stories that you want to tell. You should absolutely do that and it's very beautiful.
Llaura:
Even if you do want to make a living out of it, you still have to start with doing it for free.
Eve:
It's true, it's true!
Llaura:
I saw someone on Twitter talk recently about how you shouldn't work for someone who's kind of self-financing and that's a pretty hot take but in a lot of ways...
Eve:
It's amazing!
Llaura:
I think "be careful about it" because it's very easy to guilt trip and to get people to work extra hours and do all this extra stuff and not pay for it or "Oh, we'll do revenue share!" or something and it's like right yeah... just if you're going to do it, do it that you own it yourself. So, rather than doing it for Joe Schmo, if Joe Schmo is sharing it equal with you, okay cool!
but if they're saying "Oh, I'll pay you five percent of what we make". I'll just make my own thing.
Eve:
Yeah, that is good advice.
Llaura:
Ok!
Eve:
I thought it was going to be a much spicier take than it actually was. Just don't fall for scammers who say "Please do all my work for me".
Llaura:
They don't think of themselves as scammers but...
Eve:
No, it's true.
Alexandra:
I was also going to say as well we shared a Twitter thread a couple weeks back of writing resources.
Llaura:
Oh really?
Alexandra:
Stuff to get started in the industry so I will put those in the show notes.
Llaura:
Yeah, awesome!
Alexandra:
...for anyone who's interested.
New video series
Llaura:
So Alex, what's up with you this weather?
Alexandra:
New series potentially starting very soon as well. Kind of an interview or chat series that we're hoping to get the first episode out next week or the week afterwards. Yeah, it's really exciting to add another new format to the YouTube stuff and hopefully you'll all enjoy it.
A MAZE
Llaura:
A MAZE was 10 years old, the berlin festival, so they had on past winners such as myself. I won the Grand Prize for Curtain so it was really cool to chat with everyone and what's really neat about that is the person who wins comes back the next year and judges the the following year's games so there's a real through line and they definitely pick games outside the norm, often indie games space can be very American-centric. A MAZE, one of the big focuses is getting just the sheer highest number of different countries involved as possible. They do great stuff reaching out to various countries. They have a really strong connection with South Africa in particular but they reach out across the globe to get developers from different kind of communities which is cool.
There's obviously a big European focus as well, continental Europe, and then we're nominated for the IGDA awards this month and we were nominated for the GDC awards which is very fancy. We didn't get to sit at the fancy dining tables as it was in San Francisco. I did that once, I sat with a friend who was nominated for the IGFs. It's so strange and then all the plebs are in the seats at the back. It's so silly!
but it's fun, it's like it's a celebration of cool indie games stuff and speaking of which, Annapurna had their direct last week. It was a really cool celebration, they had a really good line-up so I'm very excited to see what comes from Annapurna. It's a interesting startup!
Alexandra:
Ragtag publisher! (what I meant to say but word soup just came out instead - editor)
Shoutouts
Eve:
I wanted to shout out that I was part of a game jam that ran for a couple months and it finished last month. It was for the Otome game jam and so you can go play it. It is a cute little game called Fated about working in a café and dating Shakespeare characters. I had a lot of fun working on it.
Llaura:
You did the art for it, right?
Eve:
I did some of the background art, my friend AK did the character sprites. They are really, really good and I also wrote one of the characters.
Llaura:
Cool, that's awesome!
Eve:
Yeah!
Llaura:
and that's with the the Vow Together people, right?
Eve:
Yeah.
Llaura:
Sweet! Bri, do you have any last shout outs?
Bri:
Go support No Longer Home.
Eve:
Yeah!
Alexandra:
Yeah, there we go!
Llaura:
No Longer Home is out now. I'm excited to play it. I mean I love all of Cel's and Hana's games and Eli worked on If Found. They also do great stuff so three really awesome non-binary game devs and they also worked with a bunch of other really rad people and made No Longer Home. I played the demo and it was really good so I am excited to play the full thing and it's so cool to see it come together.
Eve:
It's been a really nice journey following the Kickstarter and stuff so yeah i'm just proud of them for getting it out.
Llaura:
If you like queer games, if you like narrative games, if you love Kentucky Route Zero there's a lot of Kentucky Route Zero influence in it but it's definitely its own thing. It's such a unique sense of space and world and the characters are just so real. It's two non-binary characters after college being like "What the hell do we do with our lives?" or "What happens now?".
Eve:
If you have any answers, I'd like them please.
Llaura:
I mean, college must be a while ago for you, Eve. I know we're the Millennial generation. We're still dealing with it.
Eve:
yeah no, college was ten years ago. Let's not talk about it.
Llaura:
Can i go invisible? oh my god! Whoosh!
Wrap-Up
Llaura:
Take care everybody, we'll see you soon. We'll see you in four or five weeks for the next one!
Eve:
Sounds good! Bye everybody!
Bri:
Bye!