Hey! So, it's been a while since we've done an update on here...
We've been quietly been working away in the background for much of the last 12 months but before moving forward, we wanted to reflect on 2020/early 2021 for Dreamfeel. These update videos are the beginning of an experiment by us to keep all of you informed of what we're doing and how things are progressing with our new project rather than the newsletters you might have become accustomed to receiving every now and then. We hope you enjoy it and let us know in the comments below or via our social media accounts (We're @dreamfeelx pretty much everywhere)
Under this is a transcription of the full video, with some edits made to tidy it up, for anyone who's pining for the return of the newsletter or just find it easier to process and take in information that way. Hopefully we'll be back in just over 3 weeks with another update but until then, enjoy! (Also, if we don't update again, this can act as a neat bit of environmental storytelling).
All the best,
Team Dreamfeel
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Glossary of Contents
1. Introductions
2. If Found 1st Anniversary
3. Switch Version
4. Tweaked Ending
5. Awards
6. Unionization
7. What’s next?
8. The Quiet Year
9. Working With The Team
10. Conclusion
Introductions
Llaura:
Hey, welcome to our first news update stream thing. I'm Llaura McGee! I'm the director of Dreamfeel. I'm here joined by Eve.
Eve:
Hello I'm Eve, I'm the Writer Producer, Co-Writer Producer! it's...I don't know? It's multiple roles!
Llaura:
Tim, down there!
Tim:
Hello I'm Tim Sabo, the Programmer here for Dreamfeel.
Llaura:
And we've all got lovely like Dreamfeel-y backgrounds. This one is our key art that we had at one point, which is like a scene from Achill all weirdly colored. Eve, you're floating in space.
Eve:
Yeah, I have one of the astronaut backgrounds. I think this is a chapter image.
Llaura:
Oh yeah, it is yes like a chapter you can click on and Tim, you're in some like unused concept art.
Tim:
Yes, I just quickly chose something.
Llaura:
(Laughs) That is nice! This one was supposed to be the walk after Kasio and Shans' fight in the house and it's Kasio walking alongside the moon, it's gonna be reflected and stuff. We went in a slightly different direction for the final result. Basically today, yeah we're just gonna, we want to do these monthly maybe. You know if people like this and if it goes well. So yeah, let us know if you enjoy this and we'll basically just say what we've been up to the past month without like NDA giving everything away…
We're working on a new game. It's gonna be awesome and we can talk about it in generalities but we can't give too many specifics because you know, we want to announce it and reveal it in one go!
But at the same time, I think you'll enjoy following our process and seeing what we're up to.
Today, I think we should go back 12 months because it is one year since If Found came out! Which is wild, now one year and almost a week!
If Found 1st Anniversary
Llaura:
This is our second attempt to record this because we recorded on the anniversary day except I forgot to record my own audio! So it was a one-sided conversation, it was just me and Eve and thankfully, Tim can join us this time. Liadh can't make it because she got her wisdom teeth out, so she is in agony, but the rest of us are here and hopefully next time we'll be able to introduce some new people from the team as well such as Adriel and Karen specifically. who are new 3d artists. So yeah...
Tim:
That already spoiled something, right?
Llaura:
How does it feel to be a year on from release then?
Eve:
It's great! I mean, it's kind of cool thinking back over the past year and everything that happened and everything that we achieved and then, also cool things that we didn't really achieve but were just given to us, which was nice like wonderful fan reactions!
Llaura:
Yeah, I mean that was like the best thing honestly. We were working on the game and I wasn't, I was just trying to make a good game, I guess. I never would have expected that it would be out there and people will be playing it and have their own reactions to it and yeah, some of them were so amazing. It really makes it worth it.
People who cried and stuff which is unbelievable, oh yeah people who really liked the game. It was just cool. I think a year ago, we weren't really able to, you know, celebrate in a big way. Not least because we were all now working remotely but also because we were still working on the game. Which is how modern game development goes, you're still fixing bugs and stuff for a few weeks. Yeah, what was that experience like, Tim?
Tim:
Yeah, it's a bit nerve-wracking because you release a game and then you know, we did a lot of QA. So, making sure there's no game breaking bugs or anything but still, you know, there might be something wrong with it and then you kind of have to wait and look at the reviews, look at the feedback, see if people start complaining or not and then, you know, grab all those bugs. Hopefully get time to fix them and yeah and there's always of course, that one bug at the very end that crashes your game for some reason that we could not find until the very end!
Llaura:
I like it, I see Eve is trying to fix her camera because she's currently being directed by David lynch but I like it, I think it's cool.
Everyone:
(Laughs)
Llaura:
So yeah, the game came out a year ago. So yeah, we'll go through month by month, kind of what we were up to the first couple months. We were fixing bugs, we put out a patch a few weeks later and then on Mac and stuff the following month and it was fixing achievements and some small technical things.
But, I think the first big improvement was probably the Japanese translation. You know, we had a lot of early feedback that it wasn't kind of up to what people expected and I think the translator was just dealing with a lot of stuff at the time.
It was just kind of bad timing and we probably could have had more checks on it but once that got out there and people gave us feedback I think we were able to improve the localization a bunch more and that was like one of the big things we fixed.
And then we kind of moved into, last summer, we moved into two different directions. One was our fancy Switch version which was kind of the main focus of the studio up until October and we got lots of things in that and then the second focus, which I'll get to in a second was working on some new game ideas which we were thinking about as early as last summer...but yeah the Switch version, what was it like in the Switch dev kits and stuff?
Switch Version
Tim:
Yeah, I mean it's always exciting as a game developer to get a dev kit because it means that you know, first of all you are worthy and second of all, you get to like see how...how you get to work on the console from the other side. You know, not just playing it! Yeah but of course, If Found being a very experimental gameplay game, makes it a bit harder to port to a console in my opinion. So, we had to do some...
Llaura:
You had to... we had to change the controls a bunch, we had to go from...we weren't just remapping shoot on spacebar to shoot on a button. We had to rethink "how do you erase and everything?"
Tim:
Yeah that was really because the cursor that we have with the mouse is very precise compared to a joystick, so we had to basically redesign the system. (Laughs)
Llaura:
It's kind of cool though! I like that we have in the Switch version, there's two different sizes of erasers which is nice. There's a normal one but then there's like a bigger one which people really like being able to erase bigger but then we also have an auto erase button for when you're just like" I want to speed through this", which is technically in the pc version now as well. If you press F but it is kind of more like a secret password that's one letter long because there's nothing telling people
but yeah the controls were a big thing with Switch. We improved some of the levels and stuff. I think we tweaked the writing here and there, added a few things and we also worked on the art for a couple of the scenes. Particularly, I guess, Maggie on the cliff and we added in some more movie sections. Do you remember which ones those were, Eve? I guess the start of, before the chipper scene. That section got redone to be a movie section which was nice.
Eve:
We also...was that when we reworked the two books?
Llaura:
Yeah, that was a later thing as well. These two books, we kind of changed the graphical thing. So you were kind of burning the background up. Like, I think in retrospect I wish we added movies to the books rather than that, maybe for the super special edition but it still worked, you know? I think I wanted to add more movie sections in general.
Tim:
That's a good idea. We should have used that more. (Laughs)
Llaura:
Yeah!
Eve:
Yeah! (Laughs) The things you think about in retrospect, right?
Llaura:
(Laughs) I mean, that's the thing about working on games. The big challenge was like okay, port it to the Switch, make sure it ran okay... controls and then all this other stuff we were trying to sneak in while we were working on it, which was not stuff you're technically supposed to do with a port but we were like “we want to make it better!”. Yeah so, the ending was a big thing we tweaked a lot as well.
Tim:
Yeah...
Llaura:
If you hear like banging by the way that's eve's neighbors currently so she's like muting/unmuting (Laughs)
Eve:
Yes, no notice that they were going to be doing this today. Thank you neighbors, very kind!
Llaura:
It feels like whenever one of your neighbors stops working another neighbor has to start.
Eve:
It's true and I hate it.
Tweaked Ending
Llaura:
(Laughs)
So, we also worked on the ending because we felt it wasn't clear enough. Specifically the thing we changed most was the diary scene before the credits where originally, you'd be overwhelmed with lots of choices but in this one we give you two specific ones.
One of Kasio waking up and one of Mac and Cassiopeia saying bye or saying hello whichever way it goes and it kind of simplified it. It got people to the character creator quicker and to the credits and then we pushed all of the rest of the interactive kind of epilogue-y stuff to a bonus scene, which a lot of people miss, I think.
You know, I think we probably could have triggered it automatically or something but it's really nice and you get to play through all of them in one go and we did loads of new art for that actually... and there's some new art through the rest of it so you know, this was a big focus of our work last year, the Switch port. Awards Llaura:
You know and also all the normal press stuff of doing interviews and reviews and stuff. We got a bunch of game of the year nominations for awards and things which are just really cool. Yeah, even the Pégases awards, which were French games industry. We were in The Game Awards, so Eve you know, I don't know. It was half a million people watching, that was wild. It was very very surreal but it was cool to see such a strange queer LGBT experimental game up there, you know?
Eve:
It's funny, I have a writing Discord that I'm on and I hadn't told my friends that I was going to be on The Game Awards so I was feeling shy about it and then they saw me on the screen like "Eve, what are you doing?!" (Laughs)
So, that was a good experience and then they were all extremely sweet and yeah.
Unionization
Llaura:
Oh that's awesome. You also unionized last year, didn't you?
Eve:
Hell yeah.
Llaura:
Because Eve, as well as working with Dreamfeel, you used to work with Vow, is that what they're called?
Eve:
Yeah, Voltage is the company, that is the union that came out of it.
Llaura:
Yeah, that was awesome, that's a huge achievement. Ireland is moving towards...IMIRT is gonna be, “everyone's involved”, all the companies sign up to and all your employees but as well as IMIRT, which is the group for representing studios in Ireland, we also have Game Workers Unite in Ireland which is cool and yeah I know they're probably talking to each other but it's definitely getting better.
Yeah, there's a lot of marginalized writers on that team who just weren't getting the respect that they deserve for creating the content that people cared about you know...so I'm glad like there are some victories in that though obviously, it's an ongoing thing always.
Eve:
Yes!
What’s next?
Llaura:
So yeah If Found was our big thing last year and we got the game out there, loads of nice feedback from everyone which is really cool. I have a bunch of reviews I'm looking at here and i was really taken by surprise, you know, and it's just nice when you make a personal and experimental and strange thing and it works but the next question as soon as you finish something, people are always like "yeah and what's next?"
(Laughs)
And I think for me the best thing was the team we had built by the end of it. It was really just rolling into working on a new game so we've been busy with that. Again, I can't give too many details but last summer we basically started pitching two different ideas and we developed a prototype for a third which is really cool. That prototype was too similar to If Found so we didn't kind of want to pursue it at the time and we wanted to do something very, very different. So, it's a 3d game which is not something that we've done on the scale before and yeah how's it going, Eve?
Eve:
Yeah, it's going great, I mean, it's been really exciting! I think with any game, and this is true with If Found, and it's true of the current project. There's a whole period of experimentation and testing things out and getting closer to the end of that phase and being like "oh we have a direction now" and it's really exciting. So yeah, it feels really good.
Llaura:
So, in the summer, we basically had very high level ideas, we had concept art, we had pitches, this is like how the game will play. We went forward with one of those ideas. We started in October, as the Switch version was winding down. Tim was coding the Switch version while the rest of us were working on the game
And basically we finished kind of our first prototype by January I'd say of this new game and...it was really cool but we realized it also wasn't the game we wanted to make so we kind of...it's something that i do a lot but we changed direction radically. It's still a similar-ish genre if genre can even apply, but we changed the art style completely and we changed the story completely and started making something very different and probably as of April, we had a really nice demo of that you know? Specifically showing how the art process and the art style would work and now that we have that. So, that was up until April and I'm really happy with what we did with the art, because I want to do something that was true to Liadh's art because Liadh is still our lead artist but you know was in 3d and also was quite unique. Since this past month, we've moved on to blocking out one of the first areas of the game, you know, getting it white boxed properly.
We've had a few kinds of white boxy experiments, trying to figure stuff out over the first third of the year but this is the first one that I think is..."yeah this scene will very directly be in the game". So, in terms of implementation that's where we're at. We're gonna be moving into getting nice art into that scene now and then, it's just yeah going from here, seeing how quickly that takes and then we can decide from that how long the game is. Although we've also been doing a lot of work on the story, haven't we?
The Quiet Year
Eve:
Yeah I mean, I think last week we...we have done a lot of work on the story in a very exploratory way. Actually, we spent some of April playing The Quiet Year (https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/the-quiet-year). Llaura and Liadh and I did a game and then I did a game with Tim and-
Llaura:
What's The Quiet Year?
Eve:
Oh yes, that's a valid question. The Quiet Year is a game by Avery Alder, which is a world building game based on a deck of cards where you go through the seasons
Llaura:
Also she's a really cool trans tabletop creator.
Eve:
Yeah, I mean her work is incredible in general and The Quiet Year, you've probably seen it on a podcast. It's now on The Adventure Zone so, probably everyone knows it now but it's a wonderful game and it's really good for making space and thinking about what are possible ideas that you can have about this place and this community and directions it could go. So, that was this incredible foundation and then Llaura and I took that and narrowed in on it and we're thinking okay "which of these ideas do we like?", "How are we gonna use them?" and so now, we have a plan. Will it stay the same? Probably not. (Laughs)
Llaura:
I think it's a process of when you make changes at the start like big things change, slightly smaller things change, slightly smaller things change. I think we're really in this process of honing down. I think with If Found, like you know we started working on it full time in 2018 and I think that first year, we didn't have that direction, you know? We were just kind of making individual scenes which were, you know, quite good but we didn't know where it was all going and we had a version of the gig then but it wasn't until you know spring 2019, I think that If Found really started coming together with okay "this is where we're going to" and it's nice to be past that point with our new game now. We were talking about story stuff, you know, we've been talking about it obviously since last summer. We've been with this new direction since January/February but yeah, as of last Thursday, I think we kind of have a plan for the different main story beats and yeah, the cool thing about The Quiet Year was also just because sometimes the game development is so much, at least story wise, is me and Eve, you know? So, it was nice to get other people's thoughts "Hey! What are you guys into?". So we can incorporate that some more.
Tim:
Yeah, it was nice to be involved for once with the story, you know? Not game design!
(Everyone Laughs)
Tim:
Oh, by the way Llaura, you should maybe explain what white boxing means.
Llaura:
Oh yeah sure! So, white boxing is basically...it's your first pass at developing a level or an area and it's basically, it should be playable but without any nice art, so it kind of comes as white boxes or a white cube. So you know, typically lots of lots of white cubes or flat cubes that you're walking around and for how the game works, without giving too much away...it lets us get a sense of the pacing and how it flows and we can then determine when the dialogue should happen, what kind of story there is and just what the shape of the areas is so then Liadh can come in and do better concepts and better art for the actual game.
Working with the team
Llaura:
So now, hopefully every month me and Eve will be making more progress on those and then the rest of the team will be like...it's kind of like laying the track in front of the train as we're going...which isn't how film works but I think it's not unlike how some animation works. At least Hayao Miyazaki was still writing films while the rest of his team were animating them. He didn't even know how the films were going to end, which is wild.
Tim:
Wow.
Llaura:
Yeah, yeah. I remember there was some documentary I was watching where, yeah, he puts the final touches I think on The Wind Rises and then goes, it leaves his office and he tells everyone else he's working on some early part of the movie "It's finished i know where it goes!" and everyone's like "Woo, thank god!" So games aren't completely unique in that.
Eve:
I think we're able to do it very successfully because we have a small team who work very well together.
Llaura:
Yeah.
Eve:
I know that with bigger and more corporate projects, you probably wouldn't be able to do that just because of the number of people involved and all the juggling that has to happen.
Llaura:
Although with bigger-
Yeah, you go on, sorry.
Eve:
I was just saying that I've been listening to a podcast that's partially about the production of a tv show and they're talking about how you know the order that you watch things in, when it gets released. This is for a kid's animated show, it isn't the order that it gets written in because there's the production order and then the release order and they're completely different and it's all shuffled around. It's really interesting.
Llaura:
I think with games what typically happens though isthe Game Director/Designer will decide the levels and what areas it would be cool to go to and then someone, a writer comes in halfway and is like "make this make sense please!" (Laughs). There's some degree of "we would like these kinds of scenes" but the story is driving the rest of it for us instead. There's a bit of a difference.
Conclusion
Llaura:
So, I think we covered a lot of stuff there. Lots of tidbits about the new game, you can probably guess some of it. I don't know how much more covert we'll have to be in the future, if we ever have lots of people watching this...but yeah, that's what we've been up to this past year anyway.
Hopefully we keep this going like every month and yeah if you like this, let us know. We did those videos for LudoNarraCon and some talks I did recently and thought "Hey! This would be a nice way to do this without having to type out a blog post" (Laughs) And we'll get someone else to transcribe them (Laughs).
Is there anything that I missed? Anything worth touching on? Oh actually, one other thing that we did was that I released a small game at Christmas which was cool, which was with Sarah Maria Griffin, a cool novelist.
We released a game called Pixels at Solstice (https://dreamfeel.itch.io/solstice), which was in Unity and it's kind of a zine-like game. We wanted to try out the flatgame stuff I've been playing around with. We developed this tool called the Flat Game Maker which is really rad but I think it's still pretty inaccessible.
I think you need to know Unity to be able to use it. There's some things that I would like to do with it, so that anyone can make games with it... but you can get really nice effects to art and specifically, the way that it works is you hold up a piece of paper to your webcam and it takes a picture of it and you can cut out the art in the program and change the colors and do all kinds of cool things and it's really powerful but it's not quite hitting its achieved target of being usable by just anyone yet...but we had a jam and we've got a bunch of games in it which is really cool and yeah, I'll do some work on it sometime this year i think. Yeah, that's everything really! That's what we've been up to.
We might run a poll before the next one of these so we have something else to talk about and we might in the future have some more just chill chats about anything interesting we've been playing or watching or reading. We were talking about Brandon Sanderson in the last one and earlier today because this whole format was inspired by his weekly updates on Youtube, which are wild! He's a really cool fantasy author that I've recently become obsessed with and Tim, it turns out, had read ages ago. I had no idea, I've been talking to Eve about him for the last like four months, i won't shut up. (Laughs)
Cool thanks for watching, I'm Llaura signing out (Laughs)
Tim:
Like and subscribe!
Eve:
Yeah, come back next month, we'll do it again.
Llaura:
Yeah and you can find all our stuff on Dreamfeel. Thanks to Alexandra Day, who's probably going to edit this video and put it out there...
Eve:
Thanks Alex!
Llaura:
Thank you for watching it. If you found this interesting, let us know! Bye!
Eve:
Bye guys!