Developer diaries #6 - May 2022

Discussion dans 'Annonces' créé par Amras Anárion, 11 Juin 2022.

  1. Amras Anárion

    Amras Anárion Roi Mythique Membre du personnel Team Phoenix

    Entry 6

    The month of May was not very active. Indeed, a bad alignment of planets made that most of the team members were on break or unavailable (end of year school exams, busy IRL …). So, we said to ourselves: given the little availability, we might as well take a break and not put pressure on ourselves.

    It also explains the small amount of procrastination for this journal entry (it’s June 11), as well as other similar communication-related tasks.

    In spite of this decrease in activity, there was still a significant number of achievements, especially in the field of illustration. Here is the exhaustive list:

    • Artworks:
    Definitive colors for Mega Ho-Oh (Eysselia)
    – Whirlipede (Eysselia) (to be published)
    – Scolipede (Eysselia) + Speed Paint video (to be published)
    – Boldore (SplittingJaws) (to be published)
    Draconic Oak Talisman (me and Eysselia)
    Couple of Innkeepers (KiriariSan)
    – Sketch of Aerouna (KiriariSan)
    – Sketch of Lake guardians’ Augur + primitive sketch of the female Miner (Eysselia)

    • Pixel art:
    – OW of the female innkeeper (Thunungu and me) (to be published)

    • Music:
    Aerouna the Lorekeeper theme (Galax)
    – Giratina Encounter theme (Galax) (to be published)
    – Some sound effects (Pipevanes) (to be published)

    • Coding / Game Design:
    – Game design document of the attack list completed at 60% (me)
    – Some minor bug fixes and attack balancing (me)

    In detail, this is what it looks like:


    The artworks: at cruising speed

    – Eysselia has continued to draw at her usual pace. Thanks to her, we have the complete line of Scolipede, as well as the colors of Mega Ho-Oh.
    – SplittingJaws also designed Boldore, after Roggenrola in April.
    – KiriariSan, on the other hand, has made a beautiful couple of innkeepers and has the final version of the princess of the Draconid People on the way, which will make her an official team member.
    – Finally, Cataclyptic had to step back due to problems in the professional sphere. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to draw until July, so he backed out on the blacksmith in favor of a lesser NPC that won’t block the team.

    The finished but unrevealed artworks are either due to an incomplete lineage (missing Gigalith) or to the Fakemon’s characteristics (lore, stats …) that are not yet written. On this last point, I’m the limiting factor because I’m the only person to write the texts that include the creatures of Keltios.


    The pixel art: we go under

    Thanks to the realization of the innkeeper by Thunungu (and a little help from me because the pencil stroke was a bit lost after 5 months of break^^), the honor is safe and we avoided the absolute zero on this month. And it’s a nice tribute to have KiriariSan’s work come to life in pixel art (the proof that seeing a finished illustration can motivate^^)

    Frillecho is totally out of the running since the beginning of April: after three weeks of exceptional productivity, she had to find a job … a job that takes a lot of her energy and undermines all the motivation she had for pixel art. There is also her personal desire to do other hobbies in the little free time she has: drawing depends on the periods and her inspiration, hence her random periods of activity. Barring a miracle, she does not plan to contribute in the short term.
    As for the other pixel artists helping occasionally and randomly, they did not show up this month.


    Music: a favorable wind but a misadventure

    Galax is very motivated and made the final battle theme against Aerouna under her guise of Lorekeeper. It took no less than 6 versions to find the perfect and epic sounding combination … except that the Youtube copyright bot decided to claim the remix for me and to monetize it … in the name of another remixer, FalKKonE, whose editor systematically “patents” his interpretations, whereas the scores do not belong to him. Let’s add to this that our remixes have nothing to do with each other: Galax does an orchestral style while FalKKonE has a Metal style, which adds a layer of disgust to have been detected by the Content ID bot. I disputed it and it took 30 days for the claim to be cancelled, but it impacted my motivation: it would mean that any player who played my game would risk having a totally unjustified copyright claim. (Fortunately, it’s still music that will only be heard at a single moment).
    This is in contrast to Braxton Burks, who also does commercial remixes of Pokémon themes, but which have never generated a Content ID claim even though they have been featured in Sacred Phoenix since 2018. As for the original music in the official games, The Pokémon Compagny has never requested monetization. We can imagine the bad effect if we deprived the steamers of monetizing the let’s play of their favorite game; while playing, they are doing free advertising for Pokémon!
    Now I’ll have to find the thread of the exchanges between Galax and me after this mishap which destabilized me: while he composed a theme linked to Giratina, I still haven’t answered him.

    Pipevanes, on his side, came back after 45 days of radio silence to propose me some new sound design. I haven’t yet tested what it would sound like in game, because I’m on a break, so I left my musicians a bit unanswered.


    Coding: beaching the ship!

    In my April entry, I anticipated a crunch period with Gas officially announcing that as of May 8, he would be available to begin development on Godot. Due to an unforeseen event, he was completely unavailable, and he recently informed us that he will be unavailable for the whole month of June! Except that we, other members able to code, had counted on Gas to get us started on this new game engine …
    As a result, it was an absolute zero, nothing was done.
    In his absence, we discussed the strategy to adopt. The version of PSDK on which Sacred Phoenix is developed cannot be updated for many reasons, but is starting to age badly. (For example, a player told me that assigning keys with a controller crashes, even though it works perfectly well on the latest version of PSDK). At the same time, we discovered that Pokémon Essentials has been upgraded to version 20 and that this could be an opportunity to migrate …
    But the ideal is Godot in order to have a battle system directly optimized for the specifics of Sacred Phoenix. A migration to Essentials (or Ulix Dexflow) would mean monkey-patching the combat scripts and adding extra columns to the databases, as Sacred Phoenix does not use the same structures. Typically, the kind of changes that will prevent any major updates in the future.
    Until the ship is bailed out, Sacred Phoenix will remain on PSDK: it is impossible to leave the comfort zone without a dedicated and experienced programmer.


    Conclusion: the need to adapt to each person’s availability

    Emulation between team members is not an urban legend and I can see a correlation between activity and overall motivation: driven by Frillecho’s extraordinary productivity at the end of March, everyone - myself first - was enjoying a peak of motivation at that time. Conversely, the blockages on pixel art and coding during the last 60 days quickly made the project lose its inertia.
    This shows that if we are too dependent on others, we get caught in a downward spiral where we in turn block others, who in turn find themselves out of work. Recruitments could have prevented this loss of momentum (announcements were made), but no candidates came forward.

    It is important to work on individual resilience: illustrators have shown their ability to work independently (being upstream of the productivity chain also helps), while those downstream depend on the realization of this work (mapping and event-making require, for example, that the staged pixel art be completed.)

    In any case, I think it was necessary to have some distance and to take a period of rest, without pressure. I just hope that after this period, I will be fully productive again, and that by a ripple effect (or an alignment of favorable planets), we will all be motivated again. But the ball is in my court: as a project leader, it’s up to me to set an example. If I am not present, it will be difficult to motivate the troops.