#462 Corporate Meddling

Trust me, I've watched Bob Ross

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Well, Rooster Teeth just got shut down.

Everyone's fired.

Warner Brothers is looking to sell RWBY and Red vs. Blue.

Today sucks.

Halo fans: Why don’t 343 Industries do THIS!

343 Industries: Okay then. *does EXACTLY what the fans want for the content update*

Halo fans: Disgraceful! 343 industries has gone TOO far! Halo is dead! (What, again?) Unbravo Vince! Unvrabo Bince! Hire fans! Fire Hans! DISGRACEFUL! The series has been RUINED!

Like I said.

Unpleasable.

PREDICTION POLL: Which will be finished first, Hiveswap or Andrew Hussie's natural lifespan?

Important notes to aid your guess:

Hussie is currently 43 years old, meaning he's about halfway through a typical human lifespan, give or take. This is assuming no huge medical advances occur within the next few decades that bump up the average a significant amount.

Hussie's net worth is estimated at over $1 million, which is nothing to sniff at but also nothing mind-blowing, so he's not getting any cyborg upgrades or anything. Given the dismal state of his franchise and the not-nonexistent possibility of a lawsuit based on the undelivered promises of his multimillion dollar Kickstarter, this number can only be expected to go down over time, further cementing a standard human lifespan.

If Hiveswap is cancelled, for the purposes of this poll, it will be considered "finished" and Hussie will be declared the winner by default. (Also he'll like 100% get sued into oblivion, but that's irrelevant)

Work is *allegedly* being done on the project, but then again, that's the case for Homestuck 2, and that's not even worth a poll because it's currently set to "outlive" the heat death of the universe. That's a little unfair, though, as there is very real evidence of development (character art, backgrounds), and What Pumpkin objectively does exist as a company with employees that do work of some kind. Still, it remains a distinct possibility that this is all a front for an intentionally meandering, aimless development process so Hussie can run out the clock and not have to face the repurcussions of somehow misplacing $2.5 million.

War Stories: Endless Eight

Not all war stories are fun or amusing. This is a story about one of my forays into development hell. My employer assigned me to a small team that was building a new game out of an existing, though decommissioned, game base. The game had many constraints - minimal budget for new art assets and almost no tribal knowledge from the original team remained. Our essential marching orders were to build a new game out of old parts. The combination of constraints - small team, minimal budget, reusing an old game - essentially dictated some kind of system-based randomization-centric core gameplay in order to create enough content for players to feel they were obtaining sufficient value from the game. 

It’s important to note that I think our creative director was actually quite good at his job - he was very knowledgeable about the original game and thought about everything from a systemic perspective. His ideas and vision for the game were good - I could always understand where he was coming from, what his goals were, and how his new ideas were in service to those goals. Through his leadership, I could see the team carving out gameplay that worked within the heavy constraints while still following the lore of the franchise. If I had the opportunity to work with him again under different circumstances, I would consider it. Despite these strengths, however, the game we delivered ended up being a mess and team morale had fallen off a cliff by the end of the project and much of this was because of our creative director.

The biggest issue wasn’t the quality of the ideas that the creative director had, but the pace at which we were handed our assignments and the obsoleting of old work on a regular basis and we were only a few months away from launch. We lacked a strong producer to push back on our creative director so his ideas were pushed on the rest of the team unchallenged. This tanked morale - it was tremendously difficult for me to feel engaged with my work when I knew that most of the work I was doing would likely be thrown out by the next week because another new design directive would be assigned and a huge amount of existing work would need to be redone. It was fine at first - the ideas made sense and were good and our director’s reasoning was sound, so we did them. But as time rolled on, we became trapped in a vicious cycle - throw out the old stuff, build the new stuff, have our weekly design review meeting and repeat the process. It felt like we were trapped in a time loop, except our ship date kept getting closer. The game finally launched and we were still regularly rebuilding large parts of core gameplay as part of post-launch content updates. 

Normally, I’m fine with this kind of iteration early in the development process - it’s totally normal to try a lot of things with prototypes when you’re in preproduction. That’s what preproduction is for. The problem here wasn’t that we were iterating so much, the problem was that we were still iterating like it was preproduction after the game had already launched. The rapid changes meant that new bugs were constantly being introduced because our systems and content didn’t really last long enough for bugs to be identified and fixed before they were changed again. We were essentially rebuilding the core gameplay each week while trying to build new post-launch content updates and it took a clear toll on the player base. The team really needed stronger leadership to figure out (and stick to) a better solution than “let’s rebuild it again”.

The numbers continuing to worsen and the higher ups eventually decided to pull the plug. The team was disbanded and the game itself was quietly placed into maintenance mode. By the end, most of the dev team had disengaged and were doing only the bare minimum of what was asked of them. I was assigned to another project - this one with a producer who enforced a strong development schedule. After joining that team and seeing the familiar processes in place to make sure that things were done on time and at a reasonable quality level, the phrase running through my head was “It’s nice working with proper villains again.” 

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Planet of the Apes (2001, Tim Burton)

31/03/2024

Planet of the Apes is a 2001 film directed by Tim Burton.

It is a remake of the 1968 film of the same name, based on the novel Planet of the Apes (La Planète des singes) di Pierre Boulle.

In the year 2029, the daring astrounat Leo Davidson works in the Oberon space base in close contact with primates trained to carry out space missions; His favorite is Pericles, a chimpanzee. Once inside, Leo loses all contact with the Oberon and ends up crash-landing in the swamp of the alien planet of Ashlar, in the year 5021.

Leo will soon discover that this planet is populated by talking, evolved anthropomorphic apes who treat humans like slaves. The astrounat, captured by the apes, is later bought by a human trader named Limbo, a greedy and inept orangutan.

Due to a series of circumstances Leo manges to escape from prison and frees other humans and slaves, including the gorilla ex-soldier Krull, whose military career was destroyed by the evil general Thade, a chimpanzee, who manages the hunt to humans since the death of his father Zaius and is assisted by the ferocious gorilla Colonel Attar. The destination of the escape is "Calima", a sacred place for the monkeys, the temple of their god Seamus: according to their religion, in that place the god gave rise to the life of the monkeys.

In the finale, Leo reaches Earth in what he believes is his time, crashing near Washington. Walking inside the Lincoln Memorial, Leo is horrified to discover that the giant statue of the president possesses the face of General Thade.

The film came to light after a very intense development hell: ideas for a remake of Planet of the Apes date back to the 1980s, when Adam Rifkin was brought to 20th Century Fox studios with the desire to make a new film about apes. His film was to be called Return to the Planet of the Apes and described apes in Greco-Roman customs and habits fighting against a society of intelligent humans, the lineage of the protagonists of the 1968 classic, inspired by films such as Spartacus.

Peter Jackson later wanted to adapt a similar project in which the ape society was modeled after Renaissance culture and Roddy McDowall, the actor who had played Cornelius and Caesar in the original films, was open to the idea of having a part in the role of a monkey with an appearance inspired by Leonardo da Vinci. Jackson, however, dedicated himself to the creation of heavenly Creatures and only decided to resume the project in 1998, only to abandon it again when McDowall's death took away his enthusiasm.

^^me fighting the urge to just refer to guns vaguely because ive spent the last hour looking at time accurate ones and literally cant tell them apart

Y'know, it's actually a little disappointing that the only ideas that seem to be going around for System Shock 3 are "nostalgia bait time travel story."

Like, SS2 is basically a completely separate story from 1 aside from a SHODAN cameo.

me: alright all I need to do is make the banner and the pfp for the ask blog and I’ll be done that’s it.

also me: *procrastinates my own passion project by making Will in a sweater with puppies for a wholesome boob joke*

A tale of a writer in development hell, faking he likes an IP, but missing the process as the strike drags on. Worthy of pity or scorn? You make the call.

@missmiyukidreams , thoughts on my stories?

Oh yes of course! Blame the developers!

Sure it’s NEVER the fault of shitty, incompetent publishers.

Oh no!

Fucking hell!

TOMMOROW!

after 1 year, a name change, botched releases and a lot of other shitdungle WORLD S E R I E S //1986// is out DECEMBER 31ST AKA NEW YEARS EVE!!

gonna be updating some of the animations in the game for a bit, along with tweaking some bits of the moveset.

inspite of development hell, this game WILL be better than FNF

Hi! I just today noticed your intro post and your book sounds intriguing. ☺️ But I have problem reading it because I get headache when I read white text on black background.

I wanted to ask if you are going to make light mode available? No pressure either way.

Have a nice day! ☺️

hi!! i am working on a light mode dont worry<3. ive never really coded anything before so its taking me some time to figure everything out. But i promise that a light mode is coming