#based off an existing tutorial i saw a while ago
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some twitter dot com shenanigans, might as well post this here too :D
#amongus#art tutorial#water#tutorial#based off an existing tutorial i saw a while ago#you can use funky ovals those work too :0
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V. Adding missing body parts / Frankenmeshing / Finishing touches
(Previous: IV. The most useful meshing tools in Blender)
I know I promised to finally talk about uv maps, but I realised I forgot to cover some tiny, but important meshing-related details. Originally I hoped I could mention them in the parts dedicated to uvs or clones, but somehow they didn't properly fit into any of those topics, so I decided it'd be better to make a separate post about them. I probably will have to re-mention some of this stuff later though, so sorry in advance for anything being redundant!
1) Adding missing body parts
I mentioned a long time ago that my dress, being made from a top, comes without legs. It's not a problem, as it's supposed to be floor-length anyway – but what if it wasn't? What if it reached e.g. only until knees? Or what if you accidentally (or not) deleted/messed up some other body parts, like hands or neck, and wanted to replace them?
To fix this, first of all we need to get the right body meshes from S4S.
It's almost the same steps as in the very beginning, when we were getting the top which we used as a base for the dress. Open S4S, choose 'Create 3D mesh' under CAS and then click the CAS button. Just as back then, you'll see a list of all EA CAS assets existing in your game.
To find meshes of different body parts, type 'nude' in the box in the top right corner. No worries, it's The Sims, everything is safe for work (a.k.a. Barbie-style).
Now you have to select whatever it is that you need. Let's stick to the idea of a knee-length dress in need of some legs. Click the female naked bottom (if you're not sure which one is which, hover over the picture; it'll tell you if it's yf – young female – or ym - young male) and then hit 'Next'.
You'll be asked to name your package, but – just like in case of the top – it completely doesn't matter. It's only the mesh we want – once it's extracted, we can delete the package file.
Now that the package is created, you can access its data. Again, just like in case of the top: go to 'Meshes' and click the 'Export mesh' button. Make sure NOT to change the LOD!
You can close S4S now – that was all we needed from it.
Before we go back to our mesh, I suggest we open the newly extracted legs' mesh, select all the vertices (a) and remove doubles (w, choose from the list). By default each mesh coming straight from S4S is cut in certain places (I guess wherever there are cuts in the uv-1?) - and in case of a naked body such cuts are most definitely not needed.
Save and close.
Now, open the mesh which needs the legs. For this tutorial, I cut off the bottom part of the dress I was making. As you can see, it's very legless.
Go to Object Mode (tab), open the 'File' menu and choose 'Append'.
Now you have to find your extracted legs' mesh. However, you'll notice that just selecting the right blend file isn't enough – when you click it, it opens like a normal folder, making you choose from more specific contents of the blend file/package. Here comes the tricky and very important part: the mesh data sits in the 'Object' folder, NOT in 'Mesh'. When you open the 'Object' folder, you'll find inside the file you're looking for: s4studio_mesh_1. Select it and click 'Append from Library'.
Kaboom!
As you're going to join the legs with your mesh anyway, you can safely delete the bone_shape.001 and rig.001. You don't need them and they'll just be making your blend file bigger. It's only the mesh that's necessary.
Now we need to edit the appended legs by deleting the parts which we don't need. Select the legs' mesh, go to edit mode, turn on the x-ray and select (b) everything which will be hidden underneath the skirt. Leave some margin though!
Delete (x) the selected vertices and go back to object mode.
As you can see, right now your dress and the legs are separate from each other – in other words, they are separate cuts. And while some (...many...) EA meshes include several cuts, they are never cut in this way. We need to join them.
Select the legs' mesh on the right and, while holding shift, the dress' mesh. Then simply press ctrl+j. That's all! The legs are where they're supposed to be.
In case you're interested, if you want to do the opposite – turn a part of your mesh into a new cut – select that part, press p and choose 'selection' from the drop-down menu.
Of course, appending isn't limited to saving your dresses from leglessness. As mentioned, the same principle can be used for adding any other body parts... Or even clothes.
2) Frankenmeshing
There's not much I can say to it right now, without going into cuts, weights and uv maps, but if you want to try it, that's your starting point. You extract a couple of meshes from S4S, open one of them and then append the other ones. Depending on what it is that you're frankenmeshing, it might take some time to clean the meshes (i.e. delete the unwanted vertices). In most cases it's also very important to connect the vertices of the separate parts once you join the cuts! If you combine top A with sleeves B, or top C with skirt D, you have to merge the vertices where those parts connect – otherwise it'll at the very least look weird, and that's only a best case scenario.
3) Closing the mesh
I kind of mentioned this one last time, but I guess it won't hurt to explain it once again, this time properly. Whether your dress is short or super long, if you look at it from the bottom, you'll see that it's... Empty. Transparent. Unfinished. The legs – or feet – are ending apruptly, as if cut by a saw. We don't want to see it. That's why we need to close it.
(I remember when I was just learning to mesh I found this part super weird. I thought I'd rather not cut the legs, but duplicate the skirt and flip direction, to make it have both sides, just like in real life. While this idea is not completely ridiculous and can even be useful in certain cases (e.g. when you're making a half-transparent skirt – if it's see-through, you do need the legs to actually be underneath), there are two big reasons why you shouldn't do it: one, it might be very hard to get rid of any clipping, and two, the polycount could potentially kill you. Just in case you're having similar thoughts right now :) )
Select the lowest row of vertices. It might be a bit tricky now that the legs are appended – you might want to separate them into a new cut for a second, just so that they wouldn't be getting in your way. Or just hide them with h. Another easy method is selecting the row on the uv map, but we haven't covered this one yet, so let's stick to separating legs for now. Turn the x-ray on and, while in front view, select the row.
As mentioned last time, this lowest row is supposed to be a sharp edge, so before you proceed, mark it as sharp (ctrl+e)!
Turn the camera a bit to see what's going on underneath. Now extrude the vertices (e) and scale them (s). Click wherever.
As you can see, the new, extruded circle is selected now. Press alt + m to merge those vertices and, from the drop-down menu, select 'at center'.
Personally I don't like it when the bottom of a dress is so completely flat, so I move that middle point a bit higher, along the z axis (g, z). That's also one of the reasons why I left that leg margin earlier. I guess you don't have to do it, but I think it makes it look a bit more natural.
If you separated the legs, you can once again adjoin them to the main mesh now.
It's very important to close any open ends your mesh might have. The bottom of your dress/skirt, cuffs, necklines, sleeves if they're short – everything must be closed, otherwise you'll notice it in the game, sooner or later. It's fine if you don't do it now – you might want to wait until you're done with uvs and weights – but eventually you have to do it. Just for a little crack, here's a screenshot I took while testing one of my dresses. It's floor-length, so it shouldn't matter if it's closed or not, right?
That’s how it ends.
***
The long-awaited uvs tutorial will follow very soon, unless I suddenly get some urgent project to work on. I know how badly it's needed, so it's scheduled now, like any normal job-related stuff. And as hard as it might be to believe, I'm actually quite good at meeting deadlines if they're set in stone – I might not enjoy it, but I get stuff done on time. Stay tuned!
(Next: VI a. UV_0)
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( I wrote this based off where I work and stuff. Nothing specific but it does take place in Beach City. Just imagine some retail/grocery store in Beach City lol)
Balloons (a spinel x reader fic)
It was 3pm. The sky was a light blue, the air a nice breeze; not too cold, but not too warm, and the sun was shining lovely rays through it all. Sunny, autumn weather. The type of weather to jump in a pile of leaves, or go the fair with some friends. You could be out enjoying it all, however, you were trapped in this hell hole you called a job.
Well, hell-hole was a bit much. The job sucked, sure, but there was some good too it. You got things at a discount, people could bring in service animals or regular pets, so, that always brightened your day. And the job also allowed you to have a certain someone accompany you when you just weren’t able to leave her by herself.
Suddenly you heard a cat-call whistle from your right.
“Well, hello nurse~” the voice purred.
“Too bad I don’t see a price tag on you! I’d definitely take you home with me! Hold the receipt!”
You rolled your eyes at Spinel who leaned against your register, winking at you.
“Spinel, you see me everyday.” You tried to suppress your smile.
“And everyday feels like the first time~” The pink gem sighed lovingly leaning her head on the conveyer belt. It triggered the censor causing her head to move along with it before her head hit your register.
“Ow.”
You covered your mouth to hide your snicker.
This was one of the good parts about work. Since people in beach city seemed to be nicer than the average joe, your manager was more than understanding about your situation with Spinel. He allowed you off on some of her worsts days when she really couldn’t handle being home, but ultimately he allowed her to accompany you to work, just so long as you stayed focus and she didn’t cause too much trouble.
It was a nice deal. You and Spinel were able to enjoy each other’s company while you worked, and her being there was definitely entertaining.
You shook your head as you watched Spinel rub her head, pouting slightly.
“What just happened would be avoided if stood behind my register and not in line,” you said as you ran your hand through her hair.
“Well, you stand in line if you wanna buy something right?” Spinel smile at you.
“Oh, really, and just what do you wanna buy with my money?”
Spinel smile even wider as she handed you a little baggy of latex balloons.
You sighed mentally. Ever since Spinel learned your store blew up balloons with the helium tank reserved for it, she practically became obsessed. Ever since she first accompanied you to the store she would take a balloon with her every time you both left from your shift, which you would have to run back and immediately pay for.
She stopped soon after you explained that not could the apartment only house so many balloons, but also that buying a balloon everyday was starting to rack up in money.
But that didn’t mean her love of balloons ever ceased.
“You know I can’t blow these up with the helium tank, right? I can only do the ones on display.”
“I know! I just wanna try somethin’ with ‘em.”
You looked at her skeptically.
“It’s not bad I promise! Look, I have it all thought out, doll face!” Spinel waved her hands. “These have 15 in a pack, I can blow em up myself, and you can do so much more with these than the others!”
It’s not that you didn’t trust Spinel, it was more of the fact, trouble seemed to just find her. And even the most innocent tasks of buying her balloons made you second guess.
But the way she used those pink puppy dog eyes along with batting her eyelashes was enough to sway you into scanning the balloons and shoving your own debit card into the chip reader.
“Now move, you’re holding up my line.” You teased tossing the items to her.
After few minutes passed from you tending to other customers, you turned back to look at Spinel.
You watched as she happily tore open the plastic bag that held the balloons. She pulled out a long pink balloon and stretched it out before inhaling loudly and blowing into the latex. It stretched out and you realized that those weren’t regular latex balloons.
They were too long and none too circular.
Spinel tied the end of the balloon into a knot before slowly but carefully beginning to twist and turn the pink balloon in different knots before exclaiming:
“Ta-dah!!”
You blinked in amazement.
“It’s a bunny!” She explained handing it to you.
“I-I know what it is... since when could you make balloon animals? Did they have these at home world...?” You asked hesitantly.
“Oh no!” Spinel blew up another balloon next before using it to tap her chin.
“I think it was a couple of days ago. You were sleeping. I had one hand holding the phone and the other wrapped around you, of course,”
Your cheeks slightly flushed as she continued to talk.
“I was searching stuff like balloons and I saw that not only do so many different balloons exist but you can make em into stuff! Like this!” She showed you another balloon animal; another bunny, this time blue.
You gave her a bemused look as you took the second bunny.
“Got anymore tricks?” You asked.
She blew up another animal balloon, once more a bunny, but this time yellow.
“I may have only watched videos on how to make bunnies...” she admitted making you laugh.
She’s so cute in the easiest of ways...
“Well, thanks. Here, you can watch some more tutorials on my phone while I’m working. I’m not using it anyway.”
“Don’t mind if I do! Thanks, toots!” She smiled giving you a peck on the cheek before you turned back to your register.
You greeted the elderly customer who smiled back at you as she finished setting her groceries on the conveyor belt.
About three more customers passed. It was almost 3:40pm.
“Yes, almost quitting time.” You sighed stretching your arms over your head.
You were about to tell Spinel before another customer came up to your register.
A young lady, who looked pretty tired. You watched as she tried to stop her little girl in her shopping cart (around the years of 2 or 3) from hitting things on your register with a wooden spoon.
She looked at you apologetically but you just smiled and asked her how her day was going.
“Long.” She breathed out before making you both chuckle. She continued to place her items on the machine and you bagged them with speed, very eager to leave.
“Alright, your total is $32.50.” You told her. You watched as she pulled out her wallet before you noticed the toddler still holding the spoon.
“Did you get the spoon from here, ma’am?” You asked.
The lady looked up before looking back at her daughter. “Oh, yes, we did, I’m sorry. Sweetheart give the nice lady the spoon.”
“But... but I wan’ it.”
Here we go...
“She’ll give it right back sweetie, I promise!”
The toddler looked at you, and you internally cringed.
You could see it, the tiny hands balling into fists, the mistiness in her eyes, the frown along with the pink hue that formed on her face.
Here comes the tantrum.
The toddler kicked her legs as she started to scream, fresh tears streaming from her face. You were used to this, babies and tots just couldn’t comprehend the fact that you were just trying to do your job. You were used to the little pouts and glares you would receive, only to turn into smiles once you did, in fact, give the item back to them.
However, this kid was determined not to give you the spoon. Which wasn’t even a toy you might add.
If only you had the scanner gun like other store had.
“Hey, there, little lady! What’s the matta?” You heard Spinel ask from your right.
The girl stopped crying and hiccuped out a response.
“I wan’ the spoon...” she said before pouting at you. Somehow, you felt guilty.
“Well, here, hows about we do a trade? You give the nice lady here, the spoon and I’ll give you this!” Spinel smiles revealing a pink and yellow balloon flower.
“A pretty flower for a pretty gal, like yourself!”
The girl who had stars in her eyes all but thrusted her arm with the spoon at you before Spinel handed her the balloon. Quickly you scanned the item and handed it back to the little girl as the mother began to pay her total.
“There, see, now you have the flower AND the spoon!” Spinel booped her on the noise making her giggle.
“Now, what do we say?” The young mother looked at her daughter, gently.
“Tank you.” She smiled looking at you and then spinel.
The mother waved and gave a silent “thanks” as well before she strolled off with her cart of groceries and he daughter.
You quickly turned off your light before anymore crying kids could come up to your line.
“Wow, you’re better with human kids than me.” You turned back to the pink gem.
“Well, makin’ smiles was what I was made for! Though, It’s a little easier to make kids happy then the diamonds anyway.” She muttered rubbing the back of her head softy.
You took notice of the sadden look on her face.
“Well, with just one action you made three people happy. You made the little girl happy, her mom, and you made me very happy everyday. So, thank you.” You gave her a kiss on the nose.
“A-aw, gee, what are friends for?” She blushed, hands behind her back, moving her foot sheepishly.
You smiled. “C’mon. I gotta clock out in the back and then we can go home. We’ll Watch even more balloon animal tutorials.”
Spinel smiled as she grabbed your hand, the other holding on the balloons she bought.
“Sounds like a great way to spend the day, toots!”
End.
(Yeah, that’s all I got.)
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Art Resources
Check out this plethora of art-related resources archived from Comic Tea Party’s Art Resources Channel!
RebelVampire
starting this channel off with @Kabocha 's site http://www.shooting-stars.org/ lots of fantastic brushes and materials to use for both photoshop and clip studio(edited)
https://inkarnate.com/ - a nifty site for creating maps. while there is a pro version, the free version still has a lot of features if you just need a map for personal use to reference for your stories.(edited)
https://bodykunposeoftheday.tumblr.com/ - lots of pose photos of the SH Figuarts Body-Kun figures. really great if you want to get some anatomy and pose practice in!(edited)
http://blog.studiominiboss.com/pixelart - if you're a fan of pixel art, this is a hugely great collection of tutorials by Pedro Medeiros. it's got everything from process explanations, animation tips, shading, and more.(edited)
http://terawell.net/terawell/ - Design Doll, a great 3d program solely focused on doll posing. learning to pose the dolls can be a bit of a learning curve, but it can be fantastic if you really need a specific pose reference.(edited)
http://www.yeoldemapmaker.com/ - another map making website. this one is a lot better for interiors, especially if what you want is to just understand the base layout of a room for reference.(edited)
https://www.textures.com/ - a good site for textures. you have to make an account to download them, unfortunately. however, theres tons upon tons of them. for comics they should be safe, but would recommend checking terms for other things.(edited)
Kabocha
Free Software: I have not personally tested all of these programs. Download at your own risk. indicates that I have used it. Pixia: http://www.ne.jp/asahi/mighty/knight/index.html Artweaver: https://www.artweaver.de/en (has paid version) Medibang Paint: https://medibangpaint.com/en/ Krita: https://krita.org/en/ MyPaint: http://mypaint.org/ (Pressure does not work properly on Surface devices newer than the Surface 3) SmoothDraw: http://www.smoothdraw.com/sd Paint.Net: https://www.getpaint.net/ GIMP: https://www.gimp.org/ Pinta: https://pinta-project.com/pintaproject/pinta/ Inkscape: https://inkscape.org/en/
RebelVampire
https://nattosoup.blogspot.com/ - If you aren't familiar with Becca's blog yet, it's really great. while there is an emphasis on watercolor and traditional art supplies, theres honestly just great information all around. processes, supply reviews, and so on!
Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)
http://leifandthorn.com/2018/07/resources-for-making-webcomics/ - resources I've collected over the years. Mostly art stuff (fonts, color harmony, body types, etc), plus some help with website accessibility and some general webcomic podcasts.
Desnik
This is not a free resource so I hope it's okay, but in just a couple of days poring over the first two pages of this book, I'm really feeling a difference in the elasticity of my character's poses. It doesn't get bogged down by medical terminology and sorts parts of the body by 'landmark' instead: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23580472-anatomy-for-sculptors-understanding-the-human-figure
this is speaking as someone who has multiple years of figure drawing practice from life...I wish this book had been out much earlier, it's just amazing
JaSketch
https://www.calligraphr.com/en/ Here’s a free to use website that turns your handwriting into a legit text font, and it works too!
keltyzoid!
speaking of fonts i've actually made a few that are free to use. there's a couple of webcomics i know of that use them. should can i post them?
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/r8wmj4kp2566jbn/AACCrP70zPVLr8h2f5F4d6BIa?dl=0
they're free, no license or credit necessary
kayotics
this is a pretty basic level "how I do comics" but i like to reference these how-to's from Mad Rupert sometimes as a refresh on comics: http://mynameismad.tumblr.com/post/163801383099/hello-in-case-you-havent-heard-the-sakana
lonelytuatara
for any fellow photoshop users who wanna get better at perspective, this video's been really helpful for me! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upxBGNcryRs
Delphina
Really helpful Twitter thread about effective paneling! https://twitter.com/h0lysarthole/status/1117464886123089921
Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)
Install old versions of Adobe products for free: https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/cs2-product-downloads.html?promoid=19SCDRQK There are terms & conditions, but the programs don't actually check if you fulfill them. It's up to you to know how much money you've given them, and what you're ethically clear to download in return.
Kabocha
If we're talking about Image Editors, a not-free alternative is Affinity Photo, which is reasonably priced. (I'd look for it to go on sale, but $50 for a perpetual license isn't bad at all!) https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/ Their indesign competitor is in free Beta right now, too: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher/
Paint.net also still exists: https://www.getpaint.net/
https://www.patreon.com/posts/26834357 In the meantime, here's a post for alternatives to adobe.
https://twitter.com/robochai/status/1124044195092672515
JUNK
https://blog.reimenayee.com/graphic-novel-outline-onion-method/ neat
Hey, I'm sure everyone already knows, but clip studio is on sale for $25 right now! It is (imo) one of the best programs out there for making comics! https://twitter.com/clipstudiopaint/status/1169159411304210432?s=19
MJ Massey
if you're looking for a new display tablet, I found this useful site with tons of tablet reviews! They're organized by size and look at several different brands http://brad.site/reviews/wacom-cintiq-alternatives.html
Attila Polyák
How to draw good looking lightning/electricity! https://www.facebook.com/leesartandmore/photos/a.1370091679712083/2411389295582311/?type=3&theater
seetherabbit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk
DaeofthePast
Free to use comic font http://purastik.net/ames/e.html
MJ Massey
If you haven't watched Jake Parker's videos, I highly recommend them. They are very informative AND relaxing and encouraging https://www.youtube.com/user/jakeparker44
MJ Massey
GESTURE DRAWINGS! They're important for art practice, especially if you are looking to improve your forms! https://www.quickposes.com/en is my favorite. It has a feature where you can set it to show you different photos every 30-300 seconds to practice gesture drawing!
mariah (rainy day dreams)
Just saw this on Twitter. Haven't actually gotten a chance to look at it closely, but I thought other people might also want to take a look https://twitter.com/Worstwizard/status/1183475129084329984?s=09
Holmeaa - working on WAYFINDERS
https://twitter.com/noahbradley/status/1185286707819827201?s=09
Attila Polyák
Loads of useful facebbok stuff I meant to post a long time ago, but never got around doing it: https://www.facebook.com/AikaLockheart/photos/a.413147142066258/2235198713194416/?type=3&theater https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=472362883489284&set=a.130547804337462&type=3&theater https://www.facebook.com/geektower/photos/pcb.1089341477902964/1089341267902985/?type=3&theater
MJ Massey
picking pens! From Jake Parker himself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNgYvTI09XE
MJ Massey
for anyone who likes podcasts, I enjoy 3 Point Perspective, particularly their most recent episode on building an online store and making sales https://open.spotify.com/episode/2twCBBjRWZlmzbvWkRoARG?si=N7PiY3UoTJCzq0zZovXsdg
Cronaj ~{Whispers of the Past}~
Here's a good reference generator: https://line-of-action.com/
SAWHAND
Hope this counts as a resource, here's a list of Best Comic Covers in a given month by Paste magazine, it goes up to June 2019. It was really helping me get ideas for covers! https://www.pastemagazine.com/search?t=Best+Comic+Book+Covers&m=Galleries
Cronaj ~{Whispers of the Past}~
This is great!
Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)
Ooh, yeah, those are great.
I did a redraw where I added another 7, for shots that aren't in the original that I also get a ton of use out of: https://www.deviantart.com/erinptah/art/29-Panels-That-Always-Work-748887838
carcarchu
ooooh https://twitter.com/cathygjohn/status/1216093817734139904?s=20
carcarchu
https://twitter.com/ClipStudioTips/status/1217058241613651969
renieplayerone
This may have been shared before but i am a HUGE fan of SenshiStock. Their references are so good and ive used their stock photos for a ton of studies and practice too https://twitter.com/SenshiStock
carcarchu
https://twitter.com/celesse/status/1219674655663042561
carcarchu
https://twitter.com/dankelby/status/1220254171049418752
mariah (rainy day dreams)
https://kingofooo.tumblr.com/post/161105648449/by-storyboard-supervisor-erik-fountain-a-few
Krispy §[Ghost Junk Sickness]§
https://twitter.com/ImRachelBradley/status/1216042005698174977?s=19
carcarchu
https://twitter.com/cyanparade/status/1229450046480867328
Cronaj ~{Whispers of the Past}~
@Feather J. Fern This is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEvMHRgPdyk
Cronaj ~{Whispers of the Past}~
@Javi An oldie I still find useful for learning how to draw people: https://archive.org/details/andrew-loomis-drawing-the-head-hands/mode/2up
Nutty (Court of Roses)
https://twitter.com/Lowtwait/status/1232479451721502725
Artem Ficta (Ring Spell)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlh4PO-ISCA
video that looks into this current humble bundle pack
looks kind of interesting
doomedfrgarden
I'm not sure if Borodante's Over-Paint series has been posted here (I didn't see it, but I don't have my glasses so I can't promise a thorough search), but his digital painting tips have been incredibly helpful and inspiring to me, so I hope it helps someone else here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDKgohjbwY8&list=PL26-CxnLWOfD_h42yjpO44dPAo3-pijgb&index=23
Feather J. Fern
Found something that explains Bleed for comics. https://makingcomics.spiltink.org/pgtemplates/
Cronaj ~{Whispers of the Past}~
A soft-shading demo I made for@Feather J. Fern & @Artem Ficta (Ring Spell) Sorry this took so long to complete! https://youtu.be/Cyc9EVissw0
carcarchu
https://twitter.com/hanari0716/status/931463182354227201
Mei
For people like me who mess up their bleeds and have to fix them in post, I had this lying in my bookmarks! https://twitter.com/TheDamnThinGuy/status/1190321427314032646?s=20
keii’ii (Heart of Keol)
There are lots of guides to tangents, and here is one I like a lot! http://curiousoldlibrary.blogspot.com/2011/10/schweizer-guide-to-spotting-tangents.html
carcarchu
https://twitter.com/Sasquatchiix/status/1236987090874667008 This is a visual novel zine but section 2 on resources actually has a lot of cross-over in terms of usability for comic creators, check it out if you feel like testing out some new tools! Update - I read through the articles now and I actually really recommend checking them out too for advice when it comes to story-writing and how to lay it all out(edited)
Holmeaa - working on WAYFINDERS
Want to share this with you all! https://creatureartteacher.com/product/fundamentals-of-animation/?fbclid=IwAR0ahSOtdTBPmi0cHQlBpyMK7RveLZXptqcLrFX559KQMOkp-oLjGG9JA_0 Fundamentals of Animation Course Aron Blaise a big disney animator, has an animation Course that take you through the princibles of animation. This course is free for a limited time if you want to learn about animation!
Cronaj ~{Whispers of the Past}~
Really cool video I found about pricing your commissions: https://youtu.be/pN4P82Y_3k0
carcarchu
a handy tool for those who work in clip https://twitter.com/2TooToo2/status/1243101802435727360
mariah (rainy day dreams)
I'm not sure if this is the right channel, but I'm going around shouting about how Adobe users can get two months free because of the pandemic this morning. Here's an article about how to do it! https://www.creativebloq.com/news/adobe-payment-holiday?fbclid=IwAR108UH-2fQfvQzyc2STIHZh9H7LOzr1xvOoLPM_7pylHNoQ9isvMDT4wRw
I also made a tweet for easy sharing if you don't want to type your own. https://twitter.com/RainyDayMariah/status/1243573425697742848?s=20
Krispy §[Ghost Junk Sickness]§
https://twitter.com/metalsorcery/status/1247930202073829377?s=19 This is a survey to answer for webcomic creators to get their work featured in this newsletter! Open to every one!
Cronaj ~{Whispers of the Past}~
@Miranda (Into the Swell) This one's pretty good: https://www.deviantart.com/theinkyway/art/Manga-Studio-5-Clip-Studio-Paint-Brush-Pack-619455926
carcarchu
@Miranda (Into the Swell) this is my ultimate fave http://fav.me/d7s799d
carcarchu
this is handy reference image account that only posts pictures of suits and mundane things https://twitter.com/madarameBK
Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]
Follow Art of Webcomics (on Twitter) which help independent creators host a site and share your page updates: https://series.artofwebcomics.com/(edited)
carcarchu
https://assets.clip-studio.com/en-us/detail?id=1725189 a handy sfx brush for clip studio paint that can help save some time with your process (it's got various effects built in the brush itself so you don't have to have several stroke layers to achieve the effect) it costs 2 dollars
SaltySalmonella
I made an SFX (sound effect) booklet for comic artists who are having difficulty visualizing sounds for their comics. It's free to download on Gumroad! https://gumroad.com/SaltySalmonella#VOZQM
Elliot
https://twitter.com/nicparris/status/1253710231781036043
CoppertheCarutor
I'm not sure if this goes in writing or art resources because it's art based, but the focus is on using colors to aid the story, but I thought this was a pretty neat video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXgFcNUWqX0&feature=emb_logo
mariah (rainy day dreams)
I was looking up some moonlight tutorials for an illustration last night. Figured I'd share~ https://tips.clip-studio.com/en-us/articles/1684
https://www.deviantart.com/ryky/art/MOON-easy-tutorial-399161176
carcarchu
https://youtu.be/LokpJy7KHpE Shilin talks about her thought processes when laying out her comic panels
carcarchu
some free flower assets for clip https://assets.clip-studio.com/ko-kr/search?user=miyage3&order=new
carcarchu
Reimena Yee did an interesting thread on the visual language used in comics https://twitter.com/reimenayee/status/1263755464853995521(edited)
sierrabravo (Hans Vogel is Dead)
yess I was hoping someone would put that up here!!! such a good resource
that reminded me of the 22 panels that always work, something I've been trying to utilize more when I get stuck working: https://cloudfour.com/thinks/22-panels-that-always-work-wally-woods-legendary-productivity-hack/
Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)
It's so reliable, last year I was able to recreate the whole thing using only pre-existing panels from Leif & Thorn. (Then added another row because there were a few other shots I keep coming back to...) https://leifandthorn.com/comic/erin-ptahs-29-panels-that-always-work/
(Note, there's a horizontal scrollbar under the image, since I uploaded the big version.)
DaeofthePast
found this tutorial/tips on drawing scars that I found useful https://jetfeather.tumblr.com/post/163383759536/i-have-a-hard-time-drawing-scars-how-do-you-do
carcarchu
For those who suffer from pain while drawing: https://twitter.com/lost_paw/status/1271540123688210433
Evil_Chippy (My Hero!)
https://twitter.com/Darchala/status/1272257378881175552?s=20
Cronaj ~{Whispers of the Past}~
@Krispy §[Ghost Junk Sickness]§ Here's the brush pack. The one I used is called "Pensona": https://www.deviantart.com/theinkyway/art/Manga-Studio-5-Clip-Studio-Paint-Brush-Pack-619455926
carcarchu
How to draw a lot of books https://twitter.com/yoshida_seiji/status/1200432951671939073
carcarchu
Mentorship directory for this interested in that kind of thing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vfcr_F0utixw7D-rsbUoId1kwU2Ee_c_jXy2r5df-Jc/edit?usp=sharing
shadowhood {SunnyxRain}
https://www.lackadaisy.com/exhibit.php?exhibitid=333 A fun tutorial on drawing expressions
carcarchu
A really comprehensive look into the panel border tool in clip https://professorfaf.tumblr.com/post/178927411355/comic-paneling-tools-in-clip-studio-paint Great for beginners but even if you're already acquainted with them it's helpful for finding out things you may not have even realized
Krispy §[Ghost Junk Sickness]§
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED289uthfNQ&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1ka0j6gwtFcj5aXS8wIj-zpgwaYiI2ncP-g4Tn6hL0h4VFa-rKn6MM_1Q this is my old illustration instructor who did a tutorial on watercolour if anyone was interested in the medium! her stuff is so vibrant and solid, and i was so happy to have her as my old prof!
CoppertheCarutor
Light bounce! https://twitter.com/KikiDoodleTweet/status/1276565894051753984?s=19
carcarchu
https://twitter.com/Ghadaaax/status/1277158331761807360 helpful tips!
cAPSLOCK (Tailslide)
Colorist K Michael Russell has been streaming nightly as he colors pages from comics he's working on, while giving tips and insight into his thought process: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCps08eOJfFRm00TE5LStIIg
carcarchu
Advice on how to utilize speedlines https://youtu.be/Y_3Rbjn_0r0
Cronaj ~{Whispers of the Past}~
I just have to plug this amazing program here: https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/publisher/ It's basically a replacement program for Adobe inDesign, but waaay cheaper. If you're like me and have sworn off Adobe, I highly recommend it. I've been messing with it all day to begin setting up my first volume for print, and I love it so far, especially after trying other budget publishing softwares. Can't recommend it enough.
Holmeaa - working on WAYFINDERS
hii! https://www.dropbox.com/sh/m8yv10gevqv2x5s/AACVoWTvK-B7qB1yRGUZadB5a?dl=0 Here is a little gallery of fat bodies!
carcarchu
world building tool thing https://www.worldanvil.com/artist i haven't tried it out yet but it looks interesting!
carcarchu
https://twitter.com/soteikat/status/1285036231592558592 takie made some free to use comic resources!
carcarchu
https://twitter.com/aeipathea/status/1285048061518061569
carcarchu
it is a website that shares dimensions for things. Helpful for referencing proportions https://www.dimensions.com/(edited)
Cronaj ~{Whispers of the Past}~
I don't necessarily agreed with everything they said, but it's still a good video, and I definitely agree with many of the points they brought up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZQKeHnKK90
Especically the "stop drawing _" advice
I dealt with that a lot in school
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Final Fantasy 8: An Amazing Story Hidden Behind Weird Mechanics
So it should be said that there is one thing that I love and that is some good narrative in gaming. I love it, give me a game with a good narrative and at least decent gameplay and I am in there, and a good narrative doesn't mean oscar level writing because I love Deadly Premonition, a notoriously weird game, but a golden game in my heart. Its story is weird and unique and at times outright strange, but it's endearing and I love how wild the story gets as it goes on. Now why am I talking about this? Why it's because of my lovely new bad gameplay good narrative obsession, Final Fantasy 8. That's right, gamer boys and girls we are going back to another old game, and that's because I just played it, and the remastered just got announced at E3 this year.
Alright so if you know nothing about the Final Fantasy series, let alone the 8th installment, let me help you out. Final Fantasy is an old franchise, it started in 1987 and got its name because the original name Fighting Fantasy was taken by a board game in the states, the myth of it being called Final Fantasy because it was a last ditch effort to make a successful game is just that, a myth. The game is prolific, being one of the granddaddy's of the JRPG genre and helping bring that good ol fashion turn based combat system popular in tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) to videogames. Final Fantasy 1 is a classic of gaming and also is kind of like D&D, you have classes similar to the previously mentioned board game; Warrior, Monk, Thief, Paladin; with a few of its own unique classes; Red mage, Black mage and White mage. The games story was very simple, worlds ending, killing these fiends and go back in time and stop Chaos from doing this over again, also at some point the game explains that you are from another universe and that's why you just start outside the beginning kingdom, Final Fantasy stories like to be a little wild at times.
Like D&D you gained levels in this game by fighting monsters, getting stronger with each fight and eventually being strong enough to be able to face the final boss on even grounds, or maybe a little above them if you grind out yourself to max level. This system, if you are into the RPG genre, is incredibly rewarding as you get to see your team of lowly nothings evolve into masters of combat who can slay gods. The best part, to me at least, is going back to the starting area or an area that gave you trouble and stomping on those monsters who thought they were so cool 20 levels ago. Now in Final Fantasy series this system is in most of them, fight monsters, get exp, level up and your stats go up with it, the special cases are Final Fantasy 2,6,8 and 10, and of these the worst offenders of weird leveling are 2, 6 and 8. That's right, I said it, 6 has a weird leveling system with level not raising stats and needing summons equipped to level stats, I personally don't believe that it deserves its spot as one of the best Final Fantasys but that is an article for another time. I could explain why each is weird and 10 is fun and different in a good way, but forget all that and let's get into the focus of this piece, Final Fantasy 8.
Now even though it is my new obsession in good story bad gameplay, my fascination for this game goes way back to when I was a 3 year old with a pizza hut demo disc. Yeah you bet that was a thing, you would order a large pizza and it would come with a playstation demo disc that had a couple of games, but the only one that mattered to little old me was the demo for Final Fantasy 8, or that game with the guy with the cool sword and big water snake, as I was 3 and couldn't read that well. Seriously, if you have played a Final Fantasy game before you would know that you can use summons by clicking the tab they are in and then selecting the one you want, well ol kid me thought it was random as I was just picking things at random. So what I am saying is, I have always had a special place for this game in my heart, so there might be a bit of bias.
So I spent some time flip flopping over what I wanted to discuss and explain first, story or gameplay, on the one hand I wanted you to know what FF8 had to offer narratively, but on the other hand I feel I should let you guys know what you're getting into when you play this. So I decided to compliment sandwich this one, but like a subway compliment sandwich where the teenager who doesn't really want to work there barely tries to cut your bread so the top part is like really thin. So thin that what I am going to give you is this, FF8 is a great story of a young man learning to overcome his own weaknesses to understand that strength can be found in companions, listen I know that sounds cliche but I need more space to talk about the amazing character development and got to tell you about this bad gameplay.
So remember when I said that old Final Fantasy's had a nice leveling system based on fighting enemies, getting exp and raising stats? Throw it all out the window, because like I told you earlier FF8 is one of the weird ones. So for some reason FF8 has a whole system based around equipping "Guardian Forces" (summons) and then through this unlocking the ability to junction (equip) magic to your stats; like strength, magic, hp and the other classics; while also being able to junction magic to element and status attack and defense, allowing you to be able to either protect or do damage based on said elements and statuses. Now you might be thinking how does this work, because magic is usually used based on magic points (mp) well there is no mp in FF8. This is due to the narrative stating that it is very rare for people to do raw magic instead they need to draw magic from nature and creatures/people and use it that way. This means that in FF8 magic is a finite resource and instead of regaining mp you have to spend time drawing magic that is randomized to be either 2 or 12 magic, so it can take awhile. If this sounds a bit weird and confusing, don't worry it kind of is, there are tutorials to explain it, but man is it a weird system. So why is this all necessary? Well unlike other Final Fantasy's, in FF8 leveling raises your stats by the littlest amount, so to be able to do decent damage and also defend against it you need to junction magic. Also to make things even worse, leveling can be a problem as monsters level with you, so if an enemy is tough for you at level 20, raising your level to 30 won't help you as they will be doing more damage and have more health. The game does try to offset this by making it so if an enemy had fire to be drawn at lvl 10, at lvl 30 they would have fira to be drawn, which would make it so that you can junction a more powerful magic and do more damage. FF8 also gives you the option to just cast magic instead of drawing it from enemies, and can be useful since most bosses have healing magic to draw from them meaning you can go in without a huge stock of cure's.
Alright so we have a confusing system with a bad mechanic of monsters getting stronger with you as you level, is that all that is weird? Nope. So remember the guardian forces I mentioned earlier? Well they are necessary to be able to junction spells to stats and make your party stronger, but there are a limited number of them and that usually means only three of the six party members will have guardian forces so you can make a decent party for fighting. The problem is that the game likes to switch around who is playable a lot, and while it is fun and interesting in the narrative, it sucks gameplay wise. The game does make it easy by letting you be able to switch who has what guardian forces in a menu, but it gets tedious after the 15th time you have to do it and especially when the game switches between two perspectives like 4 times in 30 minutes. Also sometimes you have dream sequences where you play as another team and when you come back to your main party everyone but Squall, the main character, has everything unequipped, so you have to go back and re-junction everything and it's just a waste of time. Listen I could keep going on the weird aspects of this game, but I don't want it to take up this whole article and we got cool card games to talk about.
FF8 does a lot of things in a weird and bad way, but that doesn't mean it doesn't do things really really right, and thats with Triple Triad baby! Triple Triad is the super fun card game that exist within FF8, a game so good that you can also play it in FF14. The game is easy to get into and can get pretty hard with each area of the game map have unique rules, yet you can game the system by going to areas and abolishing rules and bring rules from other regions to new regions. Well except for one region, it is the king of rules, no exceptions! The fun of this game is not just showing the npc's of FF8 why you are the Yugi Muto of Triple Triad, you see you can learn an ability to turn cards you win from Triple Triad into items, which in turn can be turned into spells, powerful spells, I'm talking spells you are not meant to gain until like lvl 45 or 50. This means that if you want to you can spend time in the starting area at lvl 7 and leave a powerhouse that level thanks to Triple Triad. But there is a problem, this method is not quick, it takes hours to do this and also to even be able to get the ability to do this you will need to get AP for your Guardian Forces, which means either fighting fights normally or carding enemies which kills them but doesn' give exp, it can only be done at low health so be careful not to accidentally kill them.
So I have given a decent way to have fun but let me give you guys, in my opinion, the best way to enjoy FF8's gameplay, cheats. That's right a game that's so weird that the PC port has cheats that you can add to your save. I'm not talking about the normal ones we saw when FF7 and FF9 were ported to modern consoles, like the ability to turn off encounters and have it so you don't lose health in combat and do max 9999 damage. I am talking about the ability to modify a save file so you start with most low and mid level magic at full stock on all characters, and let me tell you it is a blessing. On PC it also allows you to at anytime raise all magic stocks to 100 and max level Guardian Forces, and let me tell you guys if you don't have the patience for the grind or want to try and just enjoy the story I highly suggest using these cheats, it makes things so much easier and I hope that the FF8 port coming to console has these cheats too. Also I should let you guys know I didn't immediately use these cheats, I tried to play it legit about three different times and every time the grind burnt me out, honestly if it wasn't for these cheats I would never had enjoyed FF8's amazing story. Speaking of amazing stories, let's finish off this subway compliment sandwich and talk about the good stuff.
So let me give you guys the easy lore of this world, on this planet, there are two types of people, normal people and sorceress, sorceresses can use magic naturally and a lot of them use this power for world domination especially the last sorceress, Adel, who was in charge of the country of Esthar and almost succeeded, due to this the Gardens were created by a man named Cid with the sole purpose to be able to kill sorceress should one like Adel show up again. The thing is one will show up and I don't mean because of plots need for a main antagonist, I mean because a sorceress can not die until she passes her powers to another female. Our story follows the character of Squall Lionheart, a quiet and distant youth who wants nothing more than to be able to prove that he is strong enough to be on his own, so badly that he actively shuts out other people who try to get close to him. Our boy here is a SeeD candidate in Balamb Garden, which means he is close to graduating and being basically a mercenary for the Garden until the need to fight a Sorceress arrives. And from there that's how the story grows, you have a cast of characters that join over time each interesting in their own right, helping as you deal with a looming sorceresses threat. Sounds pretty standard right? Well let's be real even something standard can be handled masterfully and that is exactly what FF8 does. Before I get into that there are two more characters I need to talk about. Laguna Loire, a soldier of the Galbadian army, who Squall keeps having vivid dreams about, through these dreams you see piece by piece of what he went through and how these events shaped him and the world around him and also how he is connected to Squall. There is also Rinoa Heartilly, a young girl who wishes to free the city of Timber from Galabadian control and in the process acts as the catalyst to what motivates Squall to change, all do to a chance meeting. When you look at the plot of FF8 it is abit generic what with stopping a Sorceress from creating her perfect utopia and most characters, outside of the ones mentioned above, get little depth to them, but what makes this story so engaging and interesting is Squall.
You see Squall starts off as a character who I can say I was disappointed in and didn't really like, a character I had adored since I was a kid due to my memories with that demo. He is angsty, off putting and really annoying, hell it feels like half of Squalls Dialogue is "...", but the thing is, that's the point. Squall is like that because he is afraid of trusting people again, fearing that if he does he will get hurt again and abandoned like he was as a child, so he puts on this cold front to make it easier for him, he doesn't have to worry if people like and rely on him if he is cold and indifferent, they would all just hate him. It is through this premise and his chance meeting with Rinoa that we see how Squall grows and changes, a man who I started off hating and grew to love and it's because it feels natural. Squall isn't cold because he thinks its cool or because he knows he is better than everyone else, he is a kid, a sad kid who went through heartbreak way to young and is afraid to love someone again. He is thrust into a dangerous world and has to come to terms that his lifestyle will not work for him, that he needs and wants to rely on others and he can't just keep ignoring a part of himself. Through the course of FF8 you see a quiet kid with a broken heart, overcome himself and become a real hero and use his new strength to make sure he can protect those close to him as well as himself.
And now we reach a bit of a problem, I would love to explain more, I want to explain why certain scenes moved me so much and why Squall's journey brought me to tears, but then I would need to spoil parts of the story, and that is the last thing I want to do. This is a Final Fantasy story that has incredible character development and I want people to be able to experience it themselves, to see what makes it great. I should also at least mention that the story is not without faults and tropes with Rinoa starting off being your typical manic pixie dream girl and if Squall really wanted to be alone he would have left SeeD after completing his training, and of course the other characters are not given as much screen time as Squall and Rinoa. However, tropes are not always bad and can still have depth, and by the end of the story I would say that Rinoa sheds the trope but it is on the nose in the beginning.
I left a lot of stuff out and with the HD remaster coming out sometime this year I think that if this article intrigued you, pick up a copy and experience it yourself. Experience a masterpiece of character growth that I believe is held back by clunky gameplay choices. I sincerely hope if you do decide to pick up this title that you enjoy Squall's story as much as I did.
#final fantasy#final fantasy viii#final fantasy 8#final fantasy 8 hd#final fantasy 8 remaster#squall#squall leonhart#rinoa#rinoa heartilly#laguna#laguna loire#article#look at at#discussion
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Whispers of a Machine: The Thoughtful Post-Apocalyptic Mystery
(Spoiler free!)
I am a big fan of Kathy Rain, the debut adventure from Clifftop Games released in 2016. So when I learned the developer was working on a new project, I was very excited...albeit, less excited when I discovered that project was not a Kathy Rain sequel. That project actually turned out to be Whispers of a Machine, co-developed with Faravid Interactive (which I know nothing about), and released just three days ago on April 17, 2019. But I was already a fan of Clifftop’s work, and they once again recruited my man Dave Gilbert to direct voice acting (and subsequently bring in a troupe of Wadjet Eye regulars), so how could I say no?
First and foremost, the plot. You play as Special Agent Vera Englund who is called to the small town of Nordsund in order to solve a series of murders. In this future, all CPUs have been outlawed and most of the population is terrified of artificial intelligence. However, police like Vera from the big city are augmented with a special nanotech serum called Blue, which gives them the ability to scan for forensic substances, monitor people’s heart rate (aka built in lie detector), and more. After a little investigation, Vera finds connections between the murders and a group of radicals trying to bring artificial intelligence back.
There is also an attribute diagram that keeps track of certain responses - either logical, aggressive, or empathetic - to dialogue trees. Upon first reading of the tutorial of this mechanic, I thought it was supposed to alter how other characters acted around Vera based on what attribute was stronger at any given time. However, looking at this screenshot above I found, I now realize that what changes are the augmentations you receive as time goes on. In addition to multiple endings, this definitely provides some replayability as the puzzles felt tailor-made for the augmentations I was given.
These mechanics that you work with are definitely the most unique aspect of this whole game for me. They can feel a bit overwhelming when you’re still in the tutorial scene and you’re trying to use everything at once in case you missed something, but it gets easier once you get into the rhythm of the game.
Visually speaking, the game is absolutely gorgeous. Particularly the backgrounds. That scene above where you see the edge of the town and the disc it’s suspended on? With no railing? My stomach plummeted the first time I saw it.
Speaking of, instead of a travel screen with a handful of locations to hop to, you have to manually navigate your way through the town itself to get anything done. The maps are beautiful and have great use of perspective, but like the augmentations can feel a bit overwhelming at first sight. My advice is to just take a few minutes to explore and get used to the layout before you do any serious detective work.
The game’s setting is also unapologetically Scandinavian and I love it, even moreso knowing that Clifftop Games is based in Sweden. There’s a special kind of heart woven into things when it’s set in the homeland of the writer (I’m still very confused and sad that the GameHouse Original Stories aren’t set in The Netherlands). And as far as I can tell, post-disaster stories aren’t often set in a specific, real world place, so this is refreshing. Yes, Nordsund is a fictional town, but it’s very easy to find its geographic neighborhood on a map.
There are, unfortunately, two kinda significant problems that I have with this game. One is that I couldn’t get as emotionally invested as I would have liked to, or as I have gotten with similar games. The worldbuilding is cool and thought-provoking, but the characters left me a tad underwhelmed (except for Valter, he’s perfect and I love him).
I really couldn’t find myself getting attached to Vera at all. And with other games, I can usually let that go, but Vera just nags at me because the rest of this game is so cool. The writing and dialogue really tries to make her a sympathetic character in the “heavier” scenes, but doesn’t really follow through in the smaller interactions.
In fact, the dialogue has a tendency of going...a bit too heavy handed at times? Like the characters don’t leave enough to subtext. Vera especially gets a little Shakespearean-monologue at times. Kathy Rain faced a bit of that as well, but was able to balance it out with Kathy’s off-color sense of humor. The humorous moments in Whispers are very few and far between. (Like, Valter pretty much exists as a hole of humor to escape to for a little while.)
This leads into my other issue which is a lack of direction, particularly toward the middle of the game when you’re well into tracking down leads about the murders. Not in that they just let you roam free with no direction at all, but your direction often comes in a long-winded explanation from one of your superiors in which a lot of other information is being thrown at you, and it’s difficult to know what your priorities are.
But in the end, what do I know? Not every game needs to rip your heart out of your chest, and I could just be a dumb adventure gamer who needs a bit more hand holding. I definitely think that the augmentation mechanic and the worldbuilding are this game’s biggest strengths, and I would happily recommend it based on them.
If I had to compare Whispers of a Machine to anything, tonally speaking, imagine if Technobabylon and Primordia had a love child. The augmented cops with cool forensic tech mixed with the soft-spoken weirdness, longing, and religious overtones of a post-cataclysmic society.
This game took me about seven hours to complete, but I got stuck many times, so your playtime may vary. Also, if you already own Kathy Rain, Whispers of a Machine comes at a 10% discount on Steam!
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After playing through Hiveswap Act 2, and reading a bit about the controversies since I haven’t kept up with its production at all, I can see why people are upset with it, though as usual I feel some people are being a bit too harsh with it.
I’m gonna add a read-more just in case this ends up in any tags, don’t want a rambling post clogging up anything! This is mostly focused on my thoughts about Act 2, not so much about fan reactions as that first bit might imply.
The whole not crediting workers thing is terrible, I agree with that. Their excuse about not encouraging harassment sounds reasonable on paper, but the trade off of straight up not crediting people and the implication that they’re covering their own ass is just too much. I don’t know enough about the situation to form any real in-depth opinion about it, but man... I just hope WP gets their shit together soon if they haven’t by now.
However, I don’t think that WP’s messy internal affairs are enough to dismiss the game altogether like I’ve seen people doing. Personally, I had tons of fun with the game and thought its writing was fine, despite the game’s flaws, and from what I’ve seen here on Tumblr, from articles online, and from player reviews, the majority of people seem to feel the same, which is relieving.
The entire game was a blast to play! I actually got all the way to the end of the trial before deciding that I wanted a particular ending and went back to play the entirety of Act 1 just so I could import a completed save with the batteries, and I think it was worth it! I uninstalled Act 1 shortly after I played it 3 years ago, but it was nice to get a refresher. It let me appreciate Joey and Xefros in the parts I played and replayed during Act 2 a lot more. It also gave me the opportunity to go and inspect things from Xefros’s perspective, which I didn’t start doing until I was on the train during my first run.
I’m not going to lie, this game made me like Joey a little bit less and Xefros a bit more. This was by no fault of the game, just me getting to know the characters better and forming a more solid opinion. In Act 1, Joey felt very “little girl, big sister” to me which was adorable, but removed from her home and from Jude she lost that a bit. Her relationship with Xefros is really nice though! Seeing her urge him to make certain realizations about Dammek was sweet. I’m also wondering how long it’ll be until her comphet wears off and she realizes she can h*ld h*nds with other g*rls.
Xefros though... this game just solidified him even more as “son boy”. Usually I don’t feel this way about characters, but he really feels like a young teen to me! I guess it’s sort of the same feeling I get about my own little sister who is about his age. It helps that I enjoyed all the character animations a lot in this, and his trial sprite was especially nice, even if he didn’t show up during it all that much. Watching him try to process everything he’s seeing about his own culture and about how others deal with interpersonal relationships hurt a lot, too... and that bit near the very end was shocking, but sadly familiar. That was incredibly rough to watch.
Now, as for the game itself, it certainly did feel different from Act 1. From what I understand, a lot of content got cut out of it, like meeting Charun and Zebede. That is really disappointing, but I was fine with what we got. One thing I really don’t get is everyone complaining about the bee game. Just put your fingers on the corresponding keys! I guess it would be hard doing that whole thing with your mouse like it suggests, but I switched over after the tutorial and it immediately clicked, like, to the point that I want to play more rhythm games with that specific set up of vertical visuals and inputs. The music was really fun too. I didn’t even realize Xefros was beatboxing during it until my second time through, after I saw James Raoch comment about it! That was a really cute touch, the mental image of Xefros beatboxing while Joey does her weird little bee dance.
Before I get into the rest of the game, I guess I’ll address how the supporting cast is written in this. From what I understand, these are each of the Friendsim trolls’ original personalities, written before Friendsim ever came out. While looking through the tag on here, I saw people were super frustrated and even angry about this, expecting them to go back and rewrite these characters... after they even had to cut entire characters from the game... I don’t know, I can understand where these criticisms are coming from, but Hiveswap Friendsim is still there if you want to see their more developed counterparts. As the trolls exist in this game, they’re more so their bulletpoints of personality that you don’t even see that much of. Personally, I enjoy seeing the differences, and makes me appreciate Friendsim even more! There were a couple of spots where I /was/ disappointed with them though, specifically with Fozzer and Boldir... Boldir at least has the animation where she looks at the player and talks about the... universal re-convergence? Was that it? While Fozzer says and does nothing of import. I somehow expected them to be something more with what their roles were in Friendsim. The same can be said of Marvus, I suppose. But overall the characters remained largely the same, and you don’t speak to many of them for long anyhow.
The ticket machine area didn’t have much to it, especially in terms of interactions, which I would have hoped would be fleshed out a bit in lieu of narrative importance. Fozzer didn’t add much, you were seeing Folkyl again later anyways, and I have no idea what that other teal’s reason for being there was. The couple of tracks that loop in this area getting constantly cut off by an announcer was pretty funny though.
The loading platform was I think my favorite area in the game. I liked how the characters were presented, and how they interacted. “Gaegrl Elwurd” or whatever she said was incredibly funny, and now that I type it out I realize that the name she uses is probably supposed to be “L-Word” or lesbian. Feel silly for not realizing that earlier. Anyhoo I still despise Zebruh even if he’s incredibly funny, especially that walk cycle. I didn’t get the scene where Marvus blows a kiss at him though in either of my runs, which is sad. Is that another way to give him confidence besides the mic? I hope so. The bit with Chixie was nice too, as was Marvus’s introduction. I liked the tip-off where he said he knew Joey would be able to get onto the train. I think there’s a bit more left for me to do in that area, though I’ll leave it for when I inevitably have to replay Act 2 whenever Act 3 comes out so I can save some item or other.
The Burgundy/Bronze car had my favorite of the Ticket to Ride tracks, probably because it was the base for all the others, and its origin story is pretty funny. I really wish there had been more interactions with the trolls presented. Diemen was a joke character even in Friendsim, but I wish Joey hadn’t completely dismissed Vikare who had I think my favorite sprite/idle animation in the game. The convo with Skylla was nice though I fear for her lusus now, and Marsti was about what I expected. While I was going through the game I had a guide up mostly because of the trial and it was funny to see how the author referred to the characters. I couldn’t tell if they hadn’t read Homestuck before this or just skipped Friendsim, but how they referred to some of the characters was pretty funny, like calling Skylla a zookeeper, or thinking Marsti was a guy for some reason. I guess she was never referred to much in the third person, so that’s fair.
The Yellow/Olive car had my least favorite Ticket to Ride track, mostly because I’m not a big fan of chip tune and think the Olives should have been represented in the song as well. Folkyl and Kuprum were still super funny even if they didn’t have much to add past introducing the player to their blood color’s traditional role. Polypa and Boldir were neat, and I loved the scenes with Azdaja and Konyyl! The part where Xefros floors Azdaja after he hurt Joey was stunning, especially after seeing how powerful he really is through Friendsim. It wouldn’t surprise me if bugandies’ and bronzes’ powers were much stronger than they realize but triggered by emotion or something and that’s part of the reason they’re so downtrodden, to keep them depressed and placid, which would also tie into the supposed purpose of lime bloods.
I had a lot of fun in the Jade/Teal car, even if it /did/ drag on a bit too long like I’ve seen a lot of people say. Its rendition of Ticket to Ride rubbed me the wrong way, too, though mostly a certain part of it, and it might just be because I listened to it for so long. I liked how each of the characters were presented, as well as all of the drama. I saw some people criticizing this part as just being the Jades throwing venom at one another and... yeah? They are? I don’t see why that’s bad, it was to exemplify toxic interpersonal relationships and to show that even the trolls’ caregiver caste could still be terrible. Anyways, the first time I went around I didn’t have the battery nor the pogs which I traded for tickets earlier, but I only realized I needed them when I got to the recess. I’d been experiencing several bugs in this room specifically, including Xefros’s trial sprite disappearing, the screen becoming solid black after accusing someone, and basic dialogue bugging out. This was all very frustrating. Also, while I did end up having fun with the trial, it was a slog to figure out. I enjoy the Ace Attorney games, but what I like the least are the leaps in logic you have to make when figuring what to present and where. This trial took that aspect and made it five times worse. I did love having Tyzias by Joey’s side though, and the ending I got was super worth it. I’m still not sure who did it. I saw a video of Lanque chucking Joey off the train, so I guess it was him? Though I don’t know how or any of the specifics. I know you can implicate Lynera too as a scapegoat.
The Cobalt/Indigo car was pretty underwhelming. I’m sad I only remembered to click on Galehk’s footnotes after I’d done his task. That whole sequence was very funny through, and I’m curious to see the other ways you could’ve gotten through. All of the characters were pretty fun, and I loved seeing Elwurd again and having her save Joey from Ardata and all. Xefros and Joey’s conversation about the revolution afterwards was really nice too.
The clown car was, understandably, horrifying. I’m going to be hearing that stock honk for the rest of eternity. It was a very fun room, and its gimmick was super interesting. I loved the animations for the wheel! I also didn’t realize that the uh, clown religion involved the red and green snakes, though it makes sense that they do. I looked back at some backgrounds for Friendsim, and while Chahut’s clown church didn’t have the red and green, Marvus’s festival DID have red and green balloons, which was interesting. This entire sequence was incredibly tense, obviously trying to make you worry it would land on Burgandy. I’m also curious about some of the alternate stuff you could do during this, like that video with Tegiri being dramatic. Also, seeing Xefros kill Baizli was super upsetting, and I think another spot where having played Friendsim could make this game a little frustrating, since in Friendsim Barzum and Baizli are just lost, fun-loving clown twins that never directly kill MSPA reader. It was surprising to see Baizli come out and approach Joey alone. It was also terrible to see what Baizli dying did to Barzum. I wonder if that’s the last we’ll see of Marvus... I’ll be disappointed if it is. It feels like he should be more important.
Now, that last section I’ll admit was pretty bad. Literally the only action section in the game and you get so little direction and nothing interesting really happens. I did in fact use a guide for this because I simply did not care. It was a super anti climactic ending sequence.
And of course, there was the train blowing up and Joey and Xefros being impeded again. There was that droopy looking dragon thingy? That shot something suspiciously bright green at the train. It’s also curious how Chahut and Marvus seem mostly disinterested or at least unrattled by the explosion.
Well, that was... a review of the whole game! I loved it a lot, even if it wasn’t what it could have been. It had some bugs, which were annoying, and issues with content, a lot of which I’m willing to chalk up to the crew getting shuffled around and people leaving and the while switch over to Viz Media. Of course, there is once again the issue of people not getting credited. But, despite all of this, I think Act 2 was an enjoyable game, and I think there was love put into it, even if the people who put love into it were put in unfair and shitty situations because of WP. I’m hoping that things have straightened out with them after that fiasco and that Act 3 will turn out a bit better, and hopefully sooner than Act 2!
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So, uh... that FFXV was a thing, wasn’t it?
It sure was, Bill... it sure as shit was.
So, yeah, I finally played and, just a moment ago, beat Final Fantasy XV.
I’m about to sum up my feelings on the game, many of which are shared with the general gaming community, so I might have nothing new to add at this point... But I feel strongly enough to keep writing, anyhow.
If you’re bothered by that sort of thing, scroll on.
Sometimes, in grade schools across the world, teachers feel the need to give every single child an award. Usually there’s nothing to it. Some might spring for a ribbon, others might give out trophies, and even fewer might elect to have other students create rewards for the recipients. The latter was my personal case in middle school. A boy, whose name escapes me because the entire affair was almost forgettable except for the reward, gave me the Most Potential award. Every other student made small bundles of candy or bought some small token for their reward recipient. I got... A small piece of notebook paper cut into the shape of a ribbon.
Most Potential.
I’m not sure if a more insulting award exists in the entire world.
What does this have to do with anything? I think you’re smart enough to see where I’m going.
Final Fantasy is quite possibly the franchise that made me a gamer. I played the first one the NES when I was a child, and I’m certain it was one of the first RPGs I had ever played. By middle school, when I was playing FF3 (really VI), I was knee deep in love with the genre and carving my path with a shovel made out of Blockbuster rental cases.
What I’m getting at is that my opinion on the franchise carries weight because I’m getting to be an old fart. I’ve seen the good, the bad, the ugly. I started out as Relm, and now I am becoming Cid (pick one).
When the game loads, the screen tells you that XV is for fans and first timers. My gut reaction to this was a big, fat, pessimistic, “Yeah, we’ll see.” XIII left me feeling like someone clipped my purse strings and ran off cackling into the night. Must stay on subject.... must... not... rant...
Well, I saw. I came, I saw, I conquered.
I didn’t hate it.
I didn’t love it, either. And here’s where the award comes in.
You, Final Fantasy XV, are the proud recipient of the Most Potential award. I’m even going the extra mile and writing this in a digital format rather than on notebook paper, so you can cherish it forever... as long as you have electricity.
What a hot-ass mess. Here are my beefs in broad strokes:
The combat feels sloppy. I know SE is trying desperately to get into the action RPG thing with FF because they feel like turn-based games are archaic and no one wants to play them. Fine. Whatever. That’s what made you a thing... but whatever. The problem is that they didn’t do a very good job with this. Kingdom Hearts does it amazingly well. Any Tales game puts it to shame.
Can I tell you a secret? You can laugh at me; it’s okay. I didn’t know you could just hold O to fight until I already had 80 hours on the game. Yep. I played that much just mashing O and square and warping. I spent untold minutes grinding my teeth during the Leviathan fight because nothing was happening. I kept missing an invisible quick-time event, apparently. IDK. (I researched it and others had the same problem? No clue.)
As a whole, the combat just felt very clunky and almost as if the AI was too smart. Maybe I should have played all the tutorials at the beginning. Who knows!
And magic sucked. So much suck. Friendly fire? REALLY? REALLY? THAT’S THE ROAD YOU CHOSE?
Hmm. what else.
Oh, you know how in some console RPGs, you can change the tactics in the menu to control the behavior of other characters in your party? Or you can switch who you want to play? None of that here. The other bros forget they have a spell equipped most of the time. But when they remember, you can be sure it’s when you’re in the thick of things so you can take that friendly fire. MMM Mmm. Good stuff.
Speaking of bros... the male gaze stuff was gross. They changed Ignis’ outfit so hit butt wasn’t hanging out, sure. But Cindy... the mechanic... boobs. Does not compute. Girl, get you some damn overalls so you don’t get burned.
I guess this Fantasy includes spark free machines.
So, then there’s the story. I won’t spoil what little story there is for folks that haven’t played it. I might spoil your urge to play it if you haven’t been able to yet. Sorry.
The game has some pretty amazing world-building. That’s not the same as the story, so don’t get excited. You get a general sense of history and a little bit of mythos. But it needed so much more to aid the story. People are so damned thirsty for lore that they’re theorycrafting THE FUCKING STORY for XV. It’s not in the game. They’re pulling shit out of thin air. Check Youtube, and you’ll get lost in a sea of “Ardyn’s TRUE name,” “The meaning of the true ending,” or “Eos Explained!” Yeah, okay, reeeeeeach for it.
And let’s not forget Kingsglaive and Brotherhood. Kingsglaive is a CG movie that accompanies the game. I enjoyed it. I watched it before I played the game (months before oops), because I was gifted both as a package deal. Problem is, Kingsglaive has some precious story that the game so desperately needed, it should have been IN THE GAME. And Brotherhood, the anime, should have been in the game as well. Maybe as flashbacks while camping. Yet even with both of these optional purchases, it’s still missing a truckload of substance.
Sadly, I think they tried to make up for it by putting a pace car in the game. That’s not even a cute metaphor; they really physically put in crap to slow you down. There’s a stamina bar for running, there’s a stamina bar on chocobos, and the Regalia has a set speed it cannot exceed (unless you get parts like the turbocharger several hours into the game). You can fast travel to your car, and you can get in your car and sometimes fast travel to quests or destinations (which, after chapter 13 seemed to be much more frequent unless I’m imagining it). However, sometimes you are forced to sit through minutes and minutes of scenic driving. And even that gets interrupted by a certain bro with a camera fetish. It felt very forced, and I fast traveled everywhere when given the opportunity. I somehow still wound up with 100+ hours on the game. Curse you, gambling and fishing.
The DLC episodes for each bro could have provided the game with a little more substance, too, but SE decided to nickel and dime their patrons for those. It’s becoming a trend that I hate. It’s like selling a jigsaw puzzle and then charging extra for 2-3 pieces that would complete the picture. Fuck a bunch of that.
Another thing that I felt was intentionally annoying stretched out: maps. Lestallam, or however you spell it, was laid out like a street gang’s fantasy. Lots of dead ends, terrible mini-map... just... please.. where’s my car... why is the big market tucked into the ass end of of Satan’s colon instead of on the main circuit WHERE A MARKET BELONGS?
My final Final Fantasy XV beef: TIME TRAVELING! choo choo all aboard the-woops-we-can’t-fix-this-shit train. No, there isn’t actual time-traveling in the game. Not really. Beyond a certain chapter, there is no way to return to Altissia or Lucis. SE handled this the way a dog does when it has a dingleberry. They dragged their ass on the floor until... no, no, I kid. They put in a menu that let’s you zip back to those two places without any explanation. You can do quests and hunts and get exp and items. Then, you can zip back to the “present” with all of those rewards. Hahahaha makes perfect sense, right? Riiiiiight? lolno.
It’s not part of the canon. You’re not dreaming or having a flashback or pulling an Assassin’s creed. They just added it in because otherwise you could plow through several chapters with no way of going back. It would be impossible to go back to those places (for lolstory reasons). They put in a point of no return and then were like, “Just kidding?”
Imagine if in VI you could play all the way to Kefka’s Tower and then, with zero explanation, a save point gives you the option to return to the World of Balance. Bit of a head-scratcher, eh?
They had to do it, though. Remember that substance thing? A lot of it comes from the sparse side quests, fishing, hunting, optional junk-getting. If you’re not interested in any of that, you could skip returning to the “past” altogether.
It had a lot of potential. Unlike a person getting that award, it doesn’t get a chance to better itself. They continue to drop patches on it but nothing that can fix the story.
I’m not sorry I played it. I did put 100+ hours on it, after all. I liked the characters (even if Noctis appears to grow into a Caucasian man and his eyes change color... um... what?). I liked the world. It needed a lot more fine-tuning and character development, though. As I said to a few people already: it felt like a love letter to Final Fantasy rather than an actual Final Fantasy game.
It sort of suffered that same thing XIII did with FF mythos being tacked on but not nearly as badly. Throw in some chocobos. Bitches love chocobos. And a moogle. Just the one; don’t get carried away.
Bravely Default was a damn good Final Fantasy game (if you can get over the repetition) and it wasn’t even a FINAL FANTASY GAME.
Yeah, I’ll shutup now.
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The Witch Cult Kickstarter Postmortem
With my Kickstarter wrapping up and only reaching five percent of its funding target I think we can safely say that it failed to achieve its goal. So now is the time to learn from this, and just as the entirety of the project up to this point has been public, I will also make this post-mortem public, in the hope others can learn from my mistakes. Below the cut is a lengthy read. Time to own some mistakes.
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What do I think were the failings of the project.
Audience: The limited size of my reach / audience
This I feel was the largest issue contributing to the Kickstarter failing to get funded. In some of these areas I personally needed to do better. While others areas were down to the vagaries of fortune. However it was such a big one that I will break it into several sub categories.
Audience: My existing fan base was not large enough to support the funding needed.
A year ago when I quit my job to commence work on this project I understood that if it was going to get funded, I needed an audience. With that in mind I read books on expanding your audience and implemented as many of the tips as I was able.
Daily updates, free content, tutorials, engaging with audience etc. Some of these I was doing anyway, but others embraced and implemented. Some others I lacked the money and /or free time to implement, such as competitions. This may have been an effort to reward miscalculation.
But there was always going to be an uncontrollable element here. By and large people who see my work like it. It is, without being immodest, of professional quality. It has after all been my profession for quite some time. Of those that see and like my work a percentage hang around to see more. But I have never gone viral, I have never had the fortune of cracking the number of fans that snowballs into a solid, interested, financially supporting, fan base of size. That is one nut I just don’t know how to crack. But I kept plugging away in to hope of it happening.
By the end of the year I had approximately doubled my reach with 500+ followers both on Facebook and Tumblr and another 300+ on Twitter.
But 1300 followers was just not enough for a project with such a low product price per unit but high overall needed funding to succeed. Even if everyone had financially engaged (a big ask there) at $15 each I was going to need 4500 to hit the funding goal. That number would now require a sizable uptake from previously not engaged people. Too much as it would turn out.
Audience: Advertising and paid reach.
Which brings me to the second way to get interested eyes on your project, advertising and promotion. Here my failures were two fold. I do not possess skills in this area, and I did not have the funds to cover realistic advertising costs nor to hire someone who would know what they were doing in this regard.
I do not personally know what advertisements work best, what are the best money to return strategies or the best places to target. I went in totally blind, and that hurt the project. I have seen many posts about this very topic and how foolish it is to go in without a publicist but I had little choice due to the no funds problem.
In the end I spent a small amount, a couple of hundred dollars, on things like Facebook targeted advertising and similar, but only really gained a handful of likes and followers for the money. A very low return on investment as it were.
If I had more money to throw at advertising, I may have gotten more interested people, but even so I probably would have wanted to pour it into the project instead as I do not know where the threshold for more return then investment sits in this regard.
Audience: Journalists and third party coverage.
Another mix of bad lack and poor effort combined here I'm afraid.
Talking to a few journalist friends, few of them if any are interested in covering generic Kickstarters anymore. That hurt my chances. But ultimately it was I who really dropped the ball here.
I have a knee jerk hate of self-promotion. Of spinning my message (even when it requires very little spin). Thus my efforts in contacting people were token at best. And I ignored other avenues as I did not want to 'trade' off hot button topics.
My game features a main character who is a POC with no assigned gender. Yet I failed to reach out to those that might want to cover such things.
My game is about a group of refugees fleeing oppression. Yet I failed to reach out to those that might want to cover such things.
My game is a solo project by a Brisbane local and once again I failed to reach out to those that cover these things.
If there was a ball I dropped, it was this one, all because I feel uncomfortable with that kind of promotion.
Lack of a demo
This is pretty straight forward. I should have had a demo, a vertical slice. And I did not. While I was working on my own dime, I wanted to focus on things that would matter, that I enjoyed, even if the project was to fail.
So I focused on art, on reusable in game assets, and on design. I ignored all but the most surface level code, as I viewed it as a chore. A necessary and completable chore, but one that could be done when I was getting 'paid' for the project.
This was a mistake.
By the time I realised it, it was too late to correct. I feel that it affected peoples understanding of the project, and their faith that it could be completed by me, an artist.
And I missed out on the promotion a fun playable demo would have garnered.
Take home - Make a demo, preferably playable.
Lack of novelty / gimmick / stunning original gameplay
Everyone loves a gimmick, some novelty or a truly original gameplay break through.
My game little in the way of these things and those it had I did not highlight.
I felt that the structured and later emergent gameplay of solving platform puzzles and challenges through the manipulation of a personal light source and sound in an oblique view dungeon crawl was interesting in its own right. But I did a terrible job of drawing attention to this.
A demo would have helped, as would have more concrete examples.
But this was another dropped ball and a bad one to drop when the market is saturated with cookie cutter clones and cash -ins, I needed to stand out, but I failed to do so.
Saturation of the market.
This is obviously beyond my control but I would be remiss not to mention it.
At the moment every person and their dog is pumping out indie titles. Some are solid passion projects, others shameless 2 month re-skin cash ins. Consumers are both spoiled for choice and risk adverse and that's just in regards to products already on the market, not ones that require a chancy investment.
This made the challenge of getting my project funded greater, and unfortunately I failed to meet that challenge.
The little things
There are also a few minor things that I felt hurt my chances.
Not detailing my costs.
I got some general feedback from people who felt I was asking for too much funding at 70k for a solo project. It probably would have helped to do a break down that showed how once you took out the fees (10%) and the GST (10%) it dropped the amount of funding to $56k Australian over 1.5 years and that funding would also attract income tax. Meaning for that development period I would be working at a substantial pay cut. But without making that info clear and public people saw 70k and some thought it was an excessive money grab.
No physical assets
I went digital assets for simple reasons: cost control and available time.
I could not afford the time needed to deal with having physical products made, sent out, dealing with refunds, damages and returns, faulty products, overseas postage estimates and blowouts. I have no experience with any of these things and the financial margins were already so narrow that they could have collapsed the project. The risk seemed too great and I gave it a pass.
But people do love physical rewards, so it most likely cost me backers, but I cannot accurately predict how much.
Going it alone.
Yeah, this hurt me. Given the one bit of journalism about my project highlighted this as a major risk, it would be silly in retrospect to not accept that it would of influenced people faith in the project.
I was blinded by the desire to make my project. I did not want to have to convince someone else to shoulder the risk of my passion project and work on it for a year with me on that basis. I certainly did not have the money to pay someone. So I went it alone, and this hurt the project. I still think overall it was the right choice, but it was a factor the projects funding failure.
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What do I think were the success of the project.
Quality of the promotional art
Having a year is which to work on a lot of illustration and concept probably gave me the biggest skill jump I have had since I was studying it back in 2003. This showed in the quality of the promotional work for 'The Witch Cult' which was some of the best work I have ever done.
I felt it was effective at communicating the mood and tone of the game. As well as some of the novelty of the setting, such as the chicken huts striding over a Victorian London type setting.
The art did its job as well as I could of hoped, and was a definite successful part of the project.
Volume of Existing Assets
I felt the volume of assets I was able to create prior to the Kickstarter going live and throughout its existence helped foster faith in the project.
I felt it showed that the scope and detail that the project would encapsulate. That it was indicative of and communicated the expected final quality of the project. And that it was within my ability to deliver.
In retrospect, as mentioned above, the project should of cut back a bit in this area and added more on the code front. But I am still placing the effect of having these assets going in as something that affected the Kickstarter in a positive way.
The volume and scope of concept work.
Similar to above, having a large catalogue of concept art assets helped communicate the themes, tone and feel of the game.
They were also instrumental is generating interest, especially via the drip feed over time in the year leading up to the launch. They are probably primarily responsible for the increase in my audience size over the time leading up to the launch.
Thus they served the dual process of providing me with necessary concept and served a second promotional function. I count this as one of the projects most successful parts.
Personal discipline
Over the duration of this project, while working from home and living off my own savings I managed to put in a solid 8 hours per day, 5 days a week for almost the entire year.
And beyond this being a point of personal pride, I felt that helped build backer faith that I would be able to deliver the project; that it would not fail through lack of effort or due to my depression (an illness that I have always been public about). That this was communicated through the number and quality of existing assets being produced by a me as solo developer. I feel this helped the project immensely and was a definite win.
The Kickstarter video and pitch itself
I researched a number of successful Kickstarters, especially around projects I personally loved like 'Sunless Sea' and took on board their basic structure.
I invested time into making little visual assets such a subject headers to give the entire pitch a polished feel.
I tested with my existing audience the kind of rewards that they liked and ones they were not so keen on and price points for them.
I made the pitch video the same way as I intended to do in game cut scenes, to communicate to backers the setting and its themes. Bought licences for music and at the risk of blowing my own horn, my own experiences with performance helped me with the quality of the overall video and its voice over narrative.
I feel all of this went as well as I could have hoped
Within a few days I was endorsed as a 'Project we Love' by Kickstarter.
Over 25 percent of backers pledged enough to get the 'art of' book, the comic or both’.
15% of people who watched the video, watched it to completion all 3.5min of it.
This area was in my opinion one of the successful ones.
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Conclusions
In the end the Kickstarter failed to achieve is funding goal. Although I personally had faith in the product, I failed to inspire others to the necessary levels through some promotional failing on my behalf and due to some elements beyond my direct control.
If I was to hit one big take home from this: You need an audience!
I still don't know how to get one. Good product, advertising, luck with journalists, luck with something going viral a mixture of all these things or something I have not yet considered. It is a hurdle, in my opinion, the biggest.
But much good that came out of this, despite its failure to get funded. I made some new contacts with other games makers and indie peers.
I gained new audience and extended my reach.
I felt part of the games industry again, in a way I had not since the big Australian crash.
I got to experience a year in which I was my own boss and got to make my own creative decisions. An entire year to work on my art: that was pretty amazing.
I also leave the Kickstarter with general good feelings about the attempt. People were willing to back my project, to pay for my art. Being a solo artist, you can often feel the yoke of impostor syndrome. But a bunch of folk, the majority of them strangers, put money forward saying 'I like your work, your project.'
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Where to now
In the short term I will need to take a step away from the project proper. My self-funding has come to an end and through necessity I must again seek employment. Preferably back in the games and general art industries, as creating things is the only satisfying path for me.
I would still like to see the game itself become a reality. It will most likely happen by me working on it part time as my hobby project. But thought of pitching it at a publisher or existing game company may be other paths I could try.
I would also still like to tell the story of the cult, and always intended to make a comic about it, so that’s probably the next step for it. Who knows, maybe through comics, further art and demos I might gain that elusive beast called Audience and Kickstarter the whole thing over again, successfully this time.
To those who came on this journey with me, especially those that backed the project. Thank you. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
Michael Fitzhywel and The Witch Cult.
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The Rise Of TikTok | Explained By The News Cover
The News Cover: 2020 has been a year of chaos, uncertainty and grief. A global pandemic, record unemployment and nationwide protests have left people reeling. Through it all though, there's been TikTok, providing moments of levity and new dance crazes, interspersed with more serious commentary on the issues that we face. TikTok, it's like the party you want to be at, a t the moment.
You'll see hair tutorials, cooking tutorials. People can create challenges, they can create duets, th ey can interact, they can engage. T ikTok is the most downloaded app of 2020. Since its global release less than two years ago, TikTok and its Chinese counterpart, Douyin, have amassed 800 million monthly active users, more than Reddit, Snapchat or Twitter. Its parent company, ByteDance, is the most valuable startup in the world. Its reach might surprise you unless you're a member of Gen Z or the parent of one. But as millions scramble for connection amidst quarantines, more and more users of all ages are hopping aboard.
We're all just kind of going through the same thing together. And we happen to be documenting it all through TikTok. It's not all rosy, though. The Chinese-owned app faces a slew of regulatory hurdles, privacy concerns and allegations of censorship. Amidst these struggles, it's brought in a new CEO. This guy is Kevin Mayer. Formerly the Head of Streaming at Disney. That's basically what Kevin Mayer's first priority needs to be, is to make sure that Americans trust TikTok. In the long run, t hat may prove complicated. But in the short term, it hasn't prevented tens of thousands of new users from signing up.
The predecessor to TikTok was an app called Musical.ly. Founded in 2014, it provided a platform for users to create short, 15 second videos set to a song of their choice. The content mostly involved lip-syncing and dancing, and it took off quickly among preteens and teens in the U.S. This is an app that was built around the fact that there was music that was licensed to be used on this app. This was something that Musical.ly decided really to invest in, because they knew that music and sharing music was inherently social.
By July 2015, a year after its launch, Musical.ly reached number one in the iTunes app store. It continued to grow and was bought by the Beijing-based startup ByteDance for one billion dollars in 2017. ByteDance already owned Tik Tok, a similar video sharing platform, and merged the two apps less than a year later. Now TikTok's main office is in Los Angeles, California. They're essentially an American startup that is subsidized by a successful Chinese tech company. As the app has grown, it's given rise to a whole new pack of social media celebrities.
Content is public by default on TikTok, and the algorithm that determines what appears on a user's home page gives every creator the chance to put their video in front of millions. Really what we saw was a different style of humor. It wasn't the sketches that you saw on Vine, and it wasn't longer-form YouTube videos. It was meme culture or like the general public's take on a meme. What I enjoyed about it is there was some deeper humor in there if you were paying attention to the trends that were happening.
On TikTok, King uses creative video editing to make it look like he's performing magic tricks, a skill which has earned him over 44 million followers, the second most on the app as of June 2020. But at 30, King represents the rare millennial that's broken into TikTok's top ranks. Many of the most followed users are in their teens, and lip syncing and dancing remain wildly popular. So I originally started when I was 14 years old, and so I started using my facial expressions and hand motions to make these like larger than life lip sync videos. And as I grew up, I think the app also grew up. Now there's so much more that you can do.
While Martin has found her niche with dancing and lifestyle content, she says there's something out there for everyone. There's like creators who are huge when it comes to comedy, some still do lip syncing, some cooking videos, tutorials. You can do whatever you want as long as it's fun, it's quick and it catches people's eye. Stay at home orders have propelled the app's rapid growth in the United States. So between October and March, according to research fro m Comscore, its unique visitors has grown from 27 million to 52 million, so doubled in the past five months.
And within that time period, just in March alone, according to Comscore TikTok added 12 million new unique visitors. People in the U.S. on TikTok spent more time on TikTok than Instagram users spent on Instagram or Snapchat users spent on Snapchat in the month of March. That's a big deal since Snap and Instagram are two of the app's main competitors. They're all extremely popular among young users, b ut in the U.S. at least, TikTok still has some catching up to do. We estimate that this year TikTok will have 45 million users.
But Instagram, we're estimating will have over 110 million and Snapchat will have 85 million users. But TikTok is also huge abroad, especially in India and China. In China, it operates as a technically separate but very similar app called Douyin. And in the first quarter of 2020, TikTok and Douyin were downloaded 315 million times globally, a 68 percent increase over the previous year. In April, the company reached two billion overall downloads.
India is by far the app's largest market when it comes to downloads, accounting for 30.3 percent of the total. But China is definitely the largest from a revenue standpoint, accounting for about 72 percent of total spending on the app. The U.S. is third in terms of downloads and second in terms of revenue, and its influence continues to grow. Viral dances and memes have propelled a number of songs to the top of the U.S. charts, most famously, Old Town Road in 2019 . And now the moms, dads and siblings of the TikTok o bsessed have started to get in on the trends as well, learning dances and performing challenges together.
You're still laughing at them, but actually the fact that parents are getting on it, I mean they needed that demo so badly to even make it to this level that they're at now. In order to build out a sustainable revenue model, e xperts say that TikTok eventually needs to attract older users. Advertisers are going after broader demographics and especially those with purchasing power. But TikTok is not under immediate pressure to make money just yet. Its parent company ByteDance is valued at over 100 billion dollars and made three billion dollars in revenue last year.
That's because it owns a host of other, more profitable Chinese apps, most notably Douyin and a news aggregator called Toutiao. TikTok's revenue model is still very, very nascent. This is a company that has some advertising, we have some of the users starting to do sponsorships. But at the end of the day, this is a company with hundreds of millions of users here in the U.S. that's still not making as much money as it could some day. Monetization aside, many say that CEO Kevin Mayer's first priority needs to be the regulatory and privacy concerns facing the app, which stem from its Chinese ownership as well as its popularity among children.
You know, it's never been the case that so many Americans are putting so much of their visual data in the hands of a Chinese company. And as we know, the relationship between the Chinese government and Chinese corporations is a pretty tight one. While TikTok claims that all American user's data is stored within the U.S. and is not subject to Chinese law, many security experts remain skeptical. Similar concerns exists in India, where data protection laws are weaker and thus citizens are more vulnerable. Regulators are going to be very weary of that separation.
Where's the data held? What's the cross-pollination look like? A number of incidents over the years have provided ample reason for worry. An investigation by The Guardian last September revealed that TikTok moderators were instructed to censor videos related to Tiananmen Square and other content deemed sensitive by the Chinese government.
While the company claimed that these guidelines had been phased out by the time of the investigation, it still helped spur the Federal Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to open an ongoing review into ByteDance's acquisition of Musical.ly. It seems unlikely that ByteDance would be forced to divest itself of what was Musical.ly, now is TikTok. But I do think that this all speaks to the great amount of concern and oversight over this app that's gone from a tiny little thing to this huge powerhouse.
Most recently, the app received criticism for what it said was a technical glitch, in which post tagged with #BlackLivesMatter and #GeorgeFloyd appeared to have zero views when they actually have over two billion. And in the past, both India and Indonesia have instituted brief bans on the app due to concerns over inappropriate content like violence and pornography.
Lastly, there are ongoing issues regarding children's privacy. Users under 13 are technically not allowed on TikTok, but there's not much really preventing them from signing up. In February 2019, the company paid 5.7 million dollars to the FTC to settle charges that it was illegally collecting children's personal information. This then prompted the U.K. to conduct their own investigation into the matter. While TikTok said it would make changes, in May 2020 a coalition of consumer groups filed a complaint stating that TikTok had not kept its promises.
It's all undoubtedly a lot for Mayer to inherit. But given his background at Disney, some say he may be exactly the right person to address these concerns. So he is someone who has experience dealing with regulation, dealing with oversight, and especially dealing with online security issues, which are certainly front of mind for TikTok as they navigate their relationship with the FTC. If Mayer can secure the trust of U.S. consumers and investors, Byt eDance could be well positioned for an IPO in the next year or two. Beyond that, experts say that TikTok's long-term prospects depend upon its ability to keep users engaged while building out a sustainable monetization strategy.
YouTube could be seen as a model in the way that YouTube shares advertising revenue with its content creators. Mayer's background in streaming services also has both analysts and creators excited about what new forms of content may lie on the horizon. I have been begging TikTok to get into the streaming game. People have speculated that TikTok might get involved in original programming.
To make TikTok sustainable, you're going to have to do long-form content. I don't see a version where you make 60 second videos forever and it stays cool for another two to three years. King also says TikTok's live-streaming feature has room to grow. It's super popular in China, but hasn't yet taken off in the U.S. I think what's next for TikTok is how they figure out how to make money, how they figure out how to create a home for advertisers, and how they make sure that content creators themselves want to stick around and don't want to go jump off to whatever the next cool app is going to be.
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Bioware’s high-flying ‘Anthem’ falls flat
Anthem is the first attempt by Bioware (of Mass Effect and Dragon Age fame) to tap into the well of cash supposedly to be found in the “game as platform” trend that has grown over the last few years, with Destiny, Warframe and Fortnite as preeminent exemplars. After a botched demo weekend dampened fan expectations, the final game is here — and while it’s a lot better than the broken mess we saw a few weeks ago, it’s still very hard to recommend.
I delayed my review to evaluate the game’s progress after an enormous day-one patch. While it is always premature to judge a game meant to grow and evolve by how it is immediately after launch, there are serious problems here that anyone thinking of dropping the $60 or more on it should be aware of. Perhaps they’ll all be fixed eventually, but you better believe it’s going to take a while.
I’d estimate this is about half the game it’s clearly intended to be; it seems to me we must soon find out that most of Anthem, supposedly in development for five years or more, was scrapped not long ago and this shell substituted on short notice.
The basic idea of Anthem is that you, a “freelancer” who pilots a mechanized suit called a “javelin,” fly around a big, beautiful world and blast the hell out of anything with a red hostility indicator over its head, which in practice is damn near everything. Once you’re done, you collect your new guns and gadgets and head back to base to improve your javelin, take on new missions and so on.
If it sounds familiar, it’s basically an extremely shiny version of Diablo, which established this gameplay loop more than 20 years ago; its sequels and the innumerable imitators it spawned have refined the concept, bolstering it with MMO-style online integration, “seasons” of gameplay and, of course, the inevitable microtransactions. People play them simply because it’s fun to kill monsters and see your character grow more powerful.
So Anthem is in good company, though of course for every success there are probably two or three failures and mediocre titles. Destiny has thrived in a way only because of its fluid and satisfying gunplay, while a game like Path of Exile leans on bulk, with skill trees and content one may never reach the ends of.
Anthem, on the other hand, lacks the charms of either. It is wildly short on content and its moment-to-moment gameplay, while competent and in some ways unique, rarely has you on the edge of your seat. It’s a very mixed bag of interesting concepts and disappointing execution, coupled with some truly baffling user experience issues.
I’ll cover the good parts first: the basics of flying around and shooting guys are for the most part solid. There’s a good variety of weapons, from hand cannons to shotguns and sniper rifles, with meaningful variations within those groups (though they usually boil down to rate of fire). You feel very cool during engagements, picking off enemies, dodging behind cover, flying to a new vantage point and so on.
Each of the four javelins has a good pile of themed special abilities that significantly affect how you play; for instance, the Storm starts out with (basically) non-damaging ice shards that freeze enemies, setting them up for a damaging combo from its lightning strike — but soon you can swap those out for fiery explosions and a charge-up blast of cold, and so on. The synergies are somewhat limited in that some abilities clearly only work with some others, but there’s fun to be had experimenting. I played with three of the four javelins available (more to come, apparently) and they were all very distinct styles.
Damn.
The graphics really are lovely, from the future-past desert chic of Fort Tarsis to the lush jungle cliffs of the world you’ll be exploring. The light and landscapes are beautiful, and the character models are, too. Firefights look chaotic and splashy, which they are. There are also lots of customization options, in terms of colors and materials anyway — there’s a puzzling lack of cosmetics to buy with in-game or real currency; only two or three are available right now.
Unfortunately, that’s pretty much the extent of what Anthem gets right — and to be clear, it really can be fun when you’re actually in the middle of a firefight, blasting away, doing combos with friends, taking on hordes of bad guys. The rest is pretty much a mess. Here’s the greatest hits of how Anthem fails to operate, to respect the player’s time and, generally speaking, to be a good game.
First and perhaps most egregious, the load screens are frequent and long. I timed it at more than five minutes from launch, and at least three or four different load screens, before I could actually play the game.
Get ready for a lot of this! And incidentally, many fire attacks don’t actually set up combos.
A long load time to bring up a huge world like Anthem’s I can understand. But load times to enter the screen where you change your gear? Load screens when you enter a small cave from the map? A load screen when you stray too far from your teammates and have to be teleported to them? A load screen when you finish a mission, then another before you can return to base — and another before you can equip your new gun? Oh my god!
This is compounded by a sluggish and over-complicated UI that somehow manages to show both too much and not enough, while inconsistent keys and interaction elements keep you guessing as to whether you need to press F or space or escape to go forward, hit or hold escape to go back, use Q or E to go through submenus or if you have to escape out to find what you’re looking for.
Equipment and abilities are mystifyingly under-explained: no terms like “+15% gear speed” or “+/-10% shield time” are explained anywhere in the tutorial, documentation or character screen — because there is no character screen! For a game that depends hugely on stats and getting an overall feel for your build and gear, you have to visit five or six screens to get a sense of what you have equipped, its bonuses (if comprehensible) and whether you have anything better to use. Even core game systems like the “primer” and “detonator” abilities are only cursorily referenced, by cryptic icons or throwaway text. The original Diablo did it better, to say nothing of Anthem’s competition at the AAA level.
Navigating these menus and systems is doubly hard because you must do so not by just hitting a key, but by traveling at walking speed through the beautiful but impractical Fort Tarsis. It took a full 30 seconds for me to walk from my suit (the only place where you can launch missions) to a quest giver. And when you start the game, you start in a basement from which you have to walk 20 seconds to get to your suit! Are you kidding me?
A common sight.
Even when you’re doing what the game does best, zooming around and getting in firefights, there’s a disturbing lack of mission variety. Almost without exception you’ll fly to a little arena — some ruins or a base of some kind — and are immediately alerted of enemies in the area. They warp in at a convenient distance, often while you watch, and attack while you stand near a gadget (to advance a progress bar) or collect pieces to bring back. Some more powerful guys warp in and you shoot them. Fly to the next arena, rinse and repeat.
Sure, you could say “well it’s a shooter, what do you expect?” I expect more than that! Where are the aerial chases the intro leads you to believe exist? Enemies all either stand on the ground or hover just above it. They don’t clamber on the walls, get to the top of towers, shoot down on you from cliffs, climb trees, build gun emplacements. You don’t defend a moving target like the “Striders” (obviously AT-ATs) you supposedly travel in; bridges and buildings don’t crumble or explode; you don’t chase a bad guy into a big cave (or if you do, there’s a loading screen); the “boss-type” enemies are often just regular guys with more life or shields that recharge in the time it takes you to reload. Where are the enemy javelins? The enemy Striders? Ninety percent of what you kill will be ground-bound grunts taken down in a flash. For a game in which movement is emphasized and enjoyable, combat involves very little of it.
The campaign, which is surprisingly well acted but forgettable, seems like it was tacked on in a hurry. Amazingly, a major cutscene details a much more interesting story, in which a major city is overrun and destroyed and only a few survive. It struck me at the time that this might have been the original campaign and starting mission, after which you are logically relegated to the nearby Fort Tarsis and forced to fight for scraps. Instead you have a series of samey missions with voice-overs telling you what’s happening while you stand there and watch progress bars fill up.
At one point you are presented with four ancient tombs to track down, only to find that these amazing tombs aren’t missions but simply checklists of basic game activities like opening 15 treasure chests, killing 50 enemies with melee and so on. At a point, increasing these numbers was literally the only “mission” I had available in the game. And when I tried to join other people’s missions to accomplish these chores, half the time they were broken or already finished. Even trying to quit these missions rarely worked! (Some of these bugs and issues have been mitigated by patches, but not all.)
Spoiler warning! What do you think is in the tombs? A taxing dungeon full of traps, monsters and ancient treasure? Nope! Literally just a tiny, empty room. And yes, there’s a loading screen — both in and out.
Oh, and because many of the missions are difficult or tedious to do solo, you’ll want to team up — except if you’re slow to load, the mission will commence without you and you’ll miss the VO. Whoops! And by the way, if you just want to test out a new gun or power, you’ll have to join a multiplayer “freeplay” session to do it, which is another handful of loading screens. I’m not even going to get into the failings of the multiplayer. Because you can’t communicate it’s basically like playing with bots. By the way, there’s no PvP, so forget about skirmishing with your friends or randoms.
Even the loot you get is frustratingly low-quality and unimaginative. Every gun or component is a standard model almost always with just slightly better damage than the last one you found, and perhaps a stat bonus. But the stat bonuses are boring and often nonsensical: do I really want an assault rifle that gives me 10 percent better damage with heavy pistols?
Where’s the fun? For comparison when I was playing Diablo III recently I found a pair of leg armor early on that produced a powerful poison cloud whenever I was touching three or more enemies. Suddenly I played differently, rushing into crowds of monsters and leaping out, then immobilizing them while their life ticked down. I changed out my weapons, focused on physical defense, poison buffs… all because of a pair of pants!
I’ve encountered nothing like that in 25 hours of Anthem. Every new power and gun is the same as the old one but with a higher number. Where’s the lightning bolt that also sets people on fire, or the plasma blast that always knocks down flying guys? The pistol that does double damage against one class of enemy, the sniper rifle that automatically chambers a new round instantly in one out of five shots?
You do eventually find some “Masterwork” items that have unique qualities, but even these are compromised by the fact that their stats are completely random (such as a bonus to the wrong damage type), necessitating a grind to make or find them over and over until you get one with bonuses that make sense.
So much of Anthem seems like it’s just missing. The campaign is half there; the controls and UI are half there; the loot is half there. The multiplayer is half there. Everything lacks a critical piece that makes it more than basically functional, and considering the game’s highly polished competition, this is inexplicable and inexcusable. I find it hard to believe this was in the works for five years when such elementary aspects like a character screen and working item descriptions aren’t included at launch.
It’s more than possible that with perhaps half a year of work the Bioware team — which seems to be painfully aware of the game’s shortcomings, if their responses to detailed litanies of complaints on the game’s subreddit are any indication — could make this game worth the price of entry. But right now I couldn’t recommend it to anybody in good conscience, and I’m disappointed that a developer that’s created some of my favorite games dropped the ball so badly.
It’s too bad, because I feel the pull of the game, the basic chaotic fun at the heart of any good looter-shooter, because I feel like this can’t really be it. This can’t really be all my abilities, right? This can’t be every weapon? I liked Anthem when it was at its best, but that was so very little of the time I spent in it, and it took so much effort and patience on my part to even make those moments a possibility. I’ll be checking back in with the game in the hopes that it makes a Destiny-esque turnaround, but for now I have to say Anthem suffers from a failure to launch.
source https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/25/biowares-high-flying-anthem-falls-flat/
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Bioware’s high-flying ‘Anthem’ falls flat
Anthem is the first attempt by Bioware (of Mass Effect and Dragon Age fame) to tap into the well of cash supposedly to be found in the “game as platform” trend that has grown over the last few years, with Destiny, Warframe and Fortnite as preeminent exemplars. After a botched demo weekend dampened fan expectations, the final game is here — and while it’s a lot better than the broken mess we saw a few weeks ago, it’s still very hard to recommend.
I delayed my review to evaluate the game’s progress after an enormous day-one patch. While it is always premature to judge a game meant to grow and evolve by how it is immediately after launch, there are serious problems here that anyone thinking of dropping the $60 or more on it should be aware of. Perhaps they’ll all be fixed eventually, but you better believe it’s going to take a while.
I’d estimate this is about half the game it’s clearly intended to be; it seems to me we must soon find out that most of Anthem, supposedly in development for five years or more, was scrapped not long ago and this shell substituted on short notice.
The basic idea of Anthem is that you, a “freelancer” who pilots a mechanized suit called a “javelin,” fly around a big, beautiful world and blast the hell out of anything with a red hostility indicator over its head, which in practice is damn near everything. Once you’re done, you collect your new guns and gadgets and head back to base to improve your javelin, take on new missions, and so on.
If it sounds familiar, it’s basically an extremely shiny version of Diablo, which established this gameplay loop more than 20 years ago; its sequels and the innumerable imitators it spawned have refined the concept, bolstering it with MMO-style online integration, “seasons” of gameplay, and of course the inevitable microtransactions. People play them simply because it’s fun to kill monsters and see your character grow more powerful.
So Anthem is in good company, though of course for every success there are probably two or three failures and mediocre titles. Destiny has thrived in a way only because of its fluid and satisfying gunplay, while a game like Path of Exile leans on bulk, with skill trees and content one may never reach the ends of.
Anthem, on the other hand, lacks the charms of either. It is wildly short on content and its moment-to-moment gameplay, while competent and in some ways unique, rarely has you on the edge of your seat. It’s a very mixed bag of interesting concepts and disappointing execution, coupled with some truly baffling user experience issues.
I’ll cover the good parts first: the basics of flying around and shooting guys are for the most part solid. There’s a good variety of weapons, from hand cannons to shotguns and sniper rifles, with meaningful variations within those groups (though they usually boil down to rate of fire). You feel very cool during engagements, picking off enemies, dodging behind cover, flying to a new vantage point, and so on.
Each of the four javelins has a good pile of themed special abilities that significantly affect how you play; for instance, the Storm starts out with (basically) non-damaging ice shards that freeze enemies, setting them up for a damaging combo from its lightning strike — but soon you can swap those out for fiery explosions and a charge-up blast of cold, and so on. The synergies are somewhat limited in that some abilities clearly only work with some others, but there’s fun to be had experimenting. I played with three of the four javelins available (more to come, apparently) and they were all very distinct styles.
Damn.
The graphics really are lovely, from the future-past desert chic of Fort Tarsis to the lush jungle cliffs of the world you’ll be exploring. The light and landscapes are beautiful, and the character models are, too. Firefights look chaotic and splashy, which they are. There are also lots of customization options, in terms of colors and materials anyway — there’s a puzzling lack of cosmetics to buy with in-game or real currency, only two or three available right now.
Unfortunately, that’s pretty much the extent of what Anthem gets right — and to be clear, it really can be fun when you’re actually in the middle of a firefight, blasting away, doing combos with friends, taking on hordes of bad guys. The rest is pretty much a mess. Here’s the greatest hits of how Anthem fails to operate, to respect the player’s time, and to generally speaking be a good game.
First and perhaps most egregious, the load screens are frequent and long. I timed it at more than 5 minutes from launch, and at least 3 or 4 different load screens, before I could actually play the game.
Get ready for a lot of this! And incidentally, many fire attacks don’t actually set up combos.
A long load time to bring up a huge world like Anthem’s I can understand. But load times to enter the screen where you change your gear? Load screens when you enter a small cave from the map? A load screen when you stray too far from your teammates and have to be teleported to them? A load screen when you finish a mission, then another before you can return to base — and another before you can equip your new gun? Oh my god!
This is compounded by a sluggish and over-complicated UI that somehow manages to show both too much and not enough, while inconsistent keys and interaction elements keep you guessing as to whether you need to press F or space or escape to go forward, hit or hold escape to go back, use Q or E to go through submenus or if you have to escape out to find what you’re looking for.
Equipment and abilities are mystifyingly under-explained: no terms like “+15% gear speed” or “+/-10% shield time” are explained anywhere, in the tutorial, documentation, or character screen. Because there is no character screen! For a game that depends hugely on stats and getting an overall feel for your build and gear, you have to visit five or six screens to get a sense of what you have equipped, its bonuses (if comprehensible), and whether you have anything better to use. Even core game systems like the “primer” and “detonator” abilities are only cursorily referred to, by cryptic icons or throwaway text. The original Diablo did it better, to say nothing of Anthem’s competition at the AAA level.
Navigating these menus and systems is doubly hard because you must do so not by just hitting a key, but by traveling at walking speed through the beautiful but impractical Fort Tarsis. It took a full 30 seconds for me to walk from my suit (the only place where you can launch missions) to a quest giver. And when you start the game, you start in a basement from which you have to walk 20 seconds to get to your suit! Are you kidding me?
A common sight.
Even when you’re doing what the game does best, zooming around and getting in firefights, there’s a disturbing lack of mission variety. Almost without exception you’ll fly to a little arena — some ruins or a base of some kind — and are immediately alerted of enemies in the area. They warp in at a convenient distance, often while you watch, and attack while you stand near a gadget (to advance a progress bar) or collect pieces to bring back. Some more powerful guys warp in and you shoot them. Fly to next arena, rinse and repeat.
Sure, you could say “well it’s a shooter, what do you expect?” I expect more than that! Where are the aerial chases the intro leads you to believe exist? Enemies all either stand on the ground or hover just above it. They don’t clamber on the walls, get to the top of towers, shoot down on you from cliffs, climb trees, build gun emplacements. You don’t defend a moving target like the “Striders” (obviously AT-ATs) you supposedly travel in; bridges and buildings don’t crumble or explode; you don’t chase a bad guy into a big cave (or if you do, there’s a loading screen); the “boss” type enemies are often just regular guys with more life or shields that recharge in the time it takes you to reload. Where are the enemy javelins? The enemy Striders? 90 percent of what you kill will be groundbound grunts taken down in a flash. For a game in which movement is emphasized and enjoyable, combat involves very little of it.
The campaign, which is surprisingly well acted but forgettable, seems like it was tacked on in a hurry. Amazingly, a major cutscene details a much more interesting story, in which a major city is overrun and destroyed and only a few survive. It struck me at the time that this might have been the original campaign and starting mission, after which you are logically relegated to the nearby Fort Tarsis and forced to fight for scraps. Instead you have a series of samey missions with voice-overs telling you what’s happening while you stand there and watch progress bars fill up.
At one point you are presented with four ancient tombs to track down, only to find that these amazing tombs aren’t missions but simply checklists of basic game activities like opening 15 treasure chests, killing 50 enemies with melee, and so on. At a point increasing these numbers was literally the only “mission” I had available in the game. And when I tried to join other people’s missions to accomplish these chores, half the time they were broken or already finished. Even trying to quit these missions rarely worked! (Some of these bugs and issues have been mitigated by patches, but not all.)
Spoiler warning! What do you think is in the tombs? A taxing dungeon full of traps, monsters, and ancient treasure? Nope! Literally just a tiny, empty room. And yes, there’s a loading screen — both in and out.
Oh, and because many of the missions are difficult or tedious to do solo, you’ll want to team up — except if you’re slow to load, the mission will commence without you and you’ll miss the VO. Whoops! And by the way, if you just want to test out a new gun or power, you’ll have to join a multiplayer “freeplay” session to do it, which is another handful of loading screens. I’m not even going to get into the failings of the multiplayer. Since you can’t communicate it’s basically like playing with bots. By the way, there’s no PvP so forget about skirmishing with your friends or randoms.
Even the loot you get is frustratingly low quality and unimaginative. Every gun or component is a standard model almost always with just slightly better damage than the last one you found, and perhaps a stat bonus. But the stat bonuses are boring and often nonsensical: do I really want an assault rifle that gives me 10 percent better damage with heavy pistols?
Where’s the fun? For comparison when I was playing Diablo III recently I found a pair of leg armor early on that produced a powerful poison cloud whenever I was touching 3 or more enemies. Suddenly I played differently, rushing into crowds of monsters and leaping out, then immobilizing them while their life ticked down. I changed out my weapons, focused on physical defense, poison buffs… all because of a pair of pants!
I’ve encountered nothing like that in 25 hours of Anthem. Every new power and gun is the same as the old one but with a higher number. Where’s the lightning bolt that also sets people on fire, or the plasma blast that always knocks down flying guys? The pistol that does double damage against one class of enemy, the sniper rifle that automatically chambers a new round instantly in one out of five shots?
You do eventually find some “Masterwork” items that have unique qualities, but even these are compromised by the fact that their stats are completely random (such as a bonus to the wrong damage type), necessitating a grind to make or find them over and over until you get one with bonuses that make sense.
So much of Anthem seems like it’s just missing. The campaign is half there; the controls and UI are half there; the loot is half there. The multiplayer is half there. Everything lacks a critical piece that makes it more than basically functional, and considering the game’s highly polished competition, this is inexplicable and inexcusable. I find it hard to believe this was in the works for five years when such elementary aspects like a character screen and working item descriptions aren’t included at launch.
It’s more than possible that with perhaps half a year of work the Bioware team — which seems to be painfully aware of the game’s shortcomings, if their responses to detailed litanies of complaints on the game’s subreddit are any indication — could make this game worth the price of entry. But right now I couldn’t recommend it to anybody in conscience, and I’m disappointed that a developer that’s created some of my favorite games dropped the ball so badly.
It’s too bad, because I feel the pull of the game, the basic chaotic fun at the heart of any good looter-shooter, because I feel like this can’t really be it. This can’t really be all my abilities, right? This can’t be every weapon? I liked Anthem when it was at its best, but that was so very little of the time I spent in it, and it took so much effort and patience on my part to even make those moments a possibility. I’ll be checking back in with the game in the hopes that it makes a Destiny-esque turnaround, but for now I have to say Anthem suffers from a failure to launch.
Via Devin Coldewey https://techcrunch.com
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