#I think your blog is cool Sven is just mean sometimes

[the-gimmick-secret-agent]

Hello, it’s nice to meet you. You can call me Lynn, I look forward to potentially working together in the future.

-@gimmick-cwmd

....Ew. Ew. Its homeland security....

HAHA, i'm joking, but at the same time I'm not.... Anyways, hi! Sorry, I'm kinda dead right now...

[familyofpaladins]

Galra empire, Weblum, Slav and Paladin for the Voltron ask meme if you're still doing it of course! (also, ty so much for following me and liking a bunch of my posts, it really means a lot for me

AHHH yeah more questions!!! I’m always up for ask memes or any questions. I loved your blog, and I’m happy that you followed me!!

Galra empire (Who is your favorite Galra character?) Oooohhh that’s a tough one. Can I cheat and say Keith? I like Kolivan, he’s pretty cool, but I think I actually like Fanon Kolivan as opposed to canon Kolivan, cause people write awesome fics where he’s protective of the paladins once he realizes how young they are, and just flips on the “Protective Dad” Switch. I REALLY like Thace though, cause he deactivated the barrier so Voltron could escape even though he knew he’d probably get caught for it. And then he went through fudging TORTURE and still went to shut down the ship, and he fought along side Keith, and then he DIED SO THAT KEITH COULD ESCAPE AND VOLTRON COULD DEFEAT THE EMPIRE AND just *sniff sniff* he was such a good character and he’s gone now…    But then there’s the new galra ladies, who seem pretty bada$$ and they’re cool. Zethrid (the big one) is really growing on me, cause she’s just so straight forward about blowing stuff up and taking down the enemy. There’s no secret twisted plans coming from her, which I greatly appreciate. Cause Ezor (the one that can be invisible) is also fairly straight forward, but the fact that she can be invisible and you never know where she’s at is a little suspicious/nerve-raking to me. then there’s Nati/Nadi (idk how you spell it, the blind one with the cat) is just super mysterious and can control people which is cool, but also creepy and evil. And then there’s Acxa (space azula/weblum galra) who I’m pretty sure is a deep uncover spy. So who knows what her motives are.     

But in all honesty pre-evil Zarkon is my favorite, cause he was such a crushing mess over Honerva and gets scared by cats, and willing to risk his life to save his wife, and was a good friend that got Alfor out of messes, and he got baby allura that helmet which is just too cute, and he was all nervous about it too, and just, uggghh pre-evil Zarkon is the best.

Weblum (What is your favorite Voltron episode?) Omg you’re asking all the really hard ones lol!! I really like Space Mall cause it’s just a lot of good fun. Some Assembly Required is also good. I like the beginning of Greening the Cube, cause of the squishy asteroid fight. Blade of Marmora is also amazing because of the way Keith is drawn in that episode (his hair is so beautiful, I cry everytime), and the fact that we see that Keith really wants to be part of a family. Just every episode is amazing and I like parts from each of them.  But from the new season I really like Hole in the Sky, cause Sven and Slav. Just- Sven and Slav were amazing and adorable, and good lord Sven you are not allowed to fudging die jfosiehfljbvjhsoeihf. Also the last episode where we finally learn about the old paladins is great.

Slav (What are your ships? No discourse allowed) OOooh boy. Alright. First of all I’m just going to say that these are my personal preferences for ships, and that this blog does not post any ships as this is a platonic blog (unless it could be viewed as platonic or just really super cute and sweet* *but that’s still rare for me to post a ship), but that it is also does not put down any other ships. :)

Alright!! For me my OTP is Kidge. It could also be just a Brotp and I’d be totally fine with that, but I feel that they would work so well together and it’s just and adorable ship that I love (but they need more on-screen interaction that’s not them just talking through the comms in their lions!) If Klance were to happen in canon I’d be cool with it, but I much more prefer them as BROTP. and fanon klance/hardcore klance shippers get on my nerves sometimes, and make me not like the ship at all. I also really like the irony of plance/pidgance, cause Lance “mister I flirt with pretty much every girl I meet” ending up with the person who he no idea was a girl, is hilarious to me, and I think they also get along very well. When I first joined the fandom and I saw that shallura was a top ship, I thought it was weird, but then it grew on me, and now I love it with all my heart screw all the age discourse. I don’t really like the shaladin ships, but sometimes the art and fics are really cute, so I don’t mind too much. (I see shiro as too much of a brother/father figure to the rest of the paladins for me to properly ship him with any of them) Shidge is my personal Notp, but I know the people who do ship it are respectful with it and do not make it pedophilia (for the large majority, there could be some gross people out there, but I haven’t run across anything so far) and I usually just ignore it if I come across it (cause that’s what ya should do when there is a ship you don’t like!). But mostly everything is space family and brotps between all the paladins. Coran is permanent space uncle. And pre-evil Zarkon and Honerva are adorable.

(if you want to know how I view anyother ship in perticular you can ask or message me, and I’ll tell you what I think about it!! :) cause I’m open to a lot of the ships)

Paladin (When did you start watching Voltron?) I started watching shortly after season 2 came out. Like Jan 22?? or 24th?? Anyway I saw that the How to Train Your Dragon page that I followed on facebook shared a trailer or add promoting season 2, and once I realized that the show was made by Dreamworks, I wanted to watch it, and once I did I became OBSESSED. 

Bonus: when I watched the season 1 finale I was like “thank goodness I didn’t have to wait to see what happened.”  Watching season 2 finale “well what the fudge that’s even worse.” 

Thank goodness this season didn’t have a cliff hanger ending, but still a lot of unanswered questions and weird going ons *side eyes “shiro”*

Voltron ask meme ask me questions! :D

[dreamharvestgames]

Dev Blog - June 2017

Justin - Creative Director

Hi lovely readers, I hope you've been enjoying the summer weather we've been having.

This month I've been working on wire-framing our menu and game systems. This is everything that happens outside of matches including our contract system.

What's the Contract system you say? Well, this is something that's very much still in the concept stage, but in theory, it’s a mission system that allows us to deliver both narrative-driven objectives for each of the levels we'll be launching with, training missions for each of the scripts, daily/monthly events and more. It’ll be wrapped up in a cool narrative package that will hopefully envelope you in the world of Failure: NeuroSlicers and your role as an unstoppable Slicer in the NeuroNet.

With this system, we'll be able to give you a constant flow of evolving narrative, cool progression based rewards for completing contracts that allow you to customize your avatar and scripts and allow you to grow your character as you spend more time in the network, but most importantly will allow us to expand on the game even after full release in super interesting ways.

We'll have lots more to share in regard to this system and more down the line, but for the time being, here are some amazing fun to look at wireframes (I promise, they're fun to look at 😊)

Until next month…

PS. Don’t forget to join our Discord Channel if you want to discuss anything about the game with us; we'd love your input.

Sven - CTO / Lead Programmer

Yay, another time to forget what I did last month.

From what I can remember, I mostly focused on porting our game server from C# to Java. In case that seems like a stupid idea to you (because you think C# is much nicer, which I agree) let me elaborate a bit why this was necessary.

First, the original server was never really intended for production use and was mostly a prototype to test the network functionality, so it had to be redone. This open question is why do it in Java instead of C#. There were a few reasons for this:

The rest of the backend systems are already written in Java which was mostly done because a lot of frameworks only exist for Java.

After doing some benchmarks comparing Netty and DotNetty I concluded that Netty was performing a lot better than DotNetty (with the same load Netty used 10% CPU vs. DotNetty which used 25% CPU and quite a bit more ram). While this would, in many cases, this doesn’t really matter that much in most server applications, our game server is meant to handle a lot of concurrent games, therefore, network performance was really important.

<bias> I assume it’s easier to run Java than .net on servers. I should mention here that I worked as a sysadmin for a long time and I’m used to running Java applications. So, I’ve got a lot experience doing that but very little running .net applications. </bias>

To annoy Milcho.

Slightly off-topic: does anyone know a good Raspberry Pi alternative (or some other cheap computer) with a lot more ram (something like 4GB+)? I was trying to find something simple/cheap where I could install the whole server backend + game server for testing and having something we can easily take with us when going to events. If you have any good suggestion contact me on Twitter: @i_gamedev

Milcho - Lead Designer / Gameplay Programmer

Salutations, “I am here, ready to enlighten you, but are you ready to be enlightened?” 

I don’t know why you thought this might be an actual quote, but it definitely isn’t. I make up things all the time. In any case, let’s go over what’s been happening in the gameplay department of Failure for the last month. 

First, we’ve always been planning this massive meta-game on top of the RTS that’s we’re making to add a whole different layer on which you can focus on. The first few weeks of the month involved figuring exactly how that system might work and how it would integrate with our other systems. We got pretty far, but as game development often goes, we’ve put that on holds since it was too awestriking and dangerous for the rest of the team. We’re going to revisit it in a few months and prototype a few versions to get the best out of it. 

The rest of the time I spent thinking about how much I like doughnuts and how to get them in my diet without my dentist going after me with a stick. During that time, I also started prototyping a new and improved resource systems for the game, which was a huge task. We’re talking about changing something that has been fundamental for a game that has been around for almost 3 years and making sure that everything works in the aftermath. The main reasons for this redesign is to reduce the effect of snowballing, making sure that players that are losing a match have a chance to come back from possible defeat, though we also want to make sure that our matches stay within the 5 - 10-minute length. So far, it’s going great though and we’re definitely on the right track. I’ll update you on its progress next month. 

Speaking of next month, I guess that’s when I’ll be talking to you again. Until then, make sure to keep your doughnut intake healthy (whatever that means for you).

Loïc - Art Director / Designer

This month I’ve been focusing on polishing our UI and feedback, along with work on the new deck system.

In term of preproduction, I wrote and sketched concepts for all our nine environments and subsequent levels, tying the specific objectives of each level to the themes of the environment it takes place in. 

These are just quick prototypes of possible levels and are in no way the final look, layout or colour/theme scheme, but this is all part of our process.

Kelvin - VFX Artist / UI Artist

Yo! More UI going on this month! We really had to figure out a type of UI frame/theme to use. We wanted it to be modern, stylized, and minimal. Both Loic and I had to work together, throwing sketches back and forth, to get to the iteration that we are at now.

There were tons of iterations beforehand but we got to this. We've designed a pattern for the background of the frames also that connected organically but with strong and strict lines.

Another exciting thing we added is the notification system! There are times you're focusing on a part of the map and you don't notice your buildings being attacked. DO NOT FRET! I worked with Milcho on this system that will notify you when something is being attacked and which direction it's in! It's extremely helpful and will really help you on your game.

Adding to the notification system, we added a very, very simple change that shows feedback on your units being attacked. When a unit is attacked, it should flash white now. Simple, but awesome 😊

I also worked on an FX this month! Woo! It took a bit to get it right, but once you spend tech, the tech fragment will shatter in this cool flash of glitchiness! It's a very small part of the screen, but it turned out very nice.

Amelie - UX Researcher / Writer

So, what happened on my side since the last time, well, mostly to be honest holidays 😊 I drafted some wireframes for the deck builder and some other menus before leaving and while I was gone Justin polished those and the guys discussed it, made some improvements and I came back only to have to say "Wow that's awesome! Let's put this all in and test it!" So, Georgia was really cool, I encourage everybody who likes mountaineering and good wine to visit, trust the French girl even just the wine is worth it! 

In Georgia every time you drink, someone makes a toast, it's tradition and if it may seem a little funny to us (especially because the toasts can be really long) they take it really seriously. And then, if you drink often I mean, you get used to it and you learn to enjoy it, you know to learn to be grateful for something in your life every day (or 4 times a day depending how much you like their wine...) so here is my toast, despite Creative England really not getting how video games work and putting us in a really shitty position, and our boss being really rather britishly cross you know... the team is still there 😊

Everybody is still super motivated to make a good game, we're not here for the money we're here for the passion of creating an experience that we really hope you will enjoy and remember. So, to passion and to the sleepless nerds in this team who make this game come to life! Cheers bros!

Writing wise I had made a good start on the faction’s motivations and identity, I also worked on our main character background, started to imagine what brought him to become a slicer...

So now that I'm back I have loads of testing to do, and my objective for the next week will be to take the time to read the mountain of level design the team has produced, see how the maps objectives can fit into mission stories and last but not least nail the first version of our intro narrative!

Daniel - Composer

Coffee shops. Who would have thought that the music of Failure NeuroSlicers would sound like coffee shops?

Now, re-read that first sentence in the voice of Christopher Walken and you begin to enter the rabbit hole of strange that I've entered since the last newsletter. While 'the rabbit hole of strange' sounds like a particularly psychedelic category of pornography, I'm in fact referring to a world of sound that surrounds most of us each and every day: the inner workings of our electrical goods.

By using an induction coil pick up (a device similar to the pick-ups on an electric guitar), I've been able to record the electronic signals of just about the entire contents of my house and — to the concern of some patrons — most of my local shops. It transpires that many of our electrical goods are host to wonderful, bizarre and, sometimes, frightening sounds; many of these sounds can be very rhythmical and full of unusual accents and musical phrases. By 'frightening' I don't mean that our devices are low-key telling us to worship Satan, but that they create sounds you wouldn't expect (particularly the payment terminal at my local coffee shop). If you happen to have an induction coil mic and nothing better to do, try recording a PS4 while you turn it off from the system menu — it really is hours of fun for all the family.

By recording all of this information with the coil pick up, I've been able to transcribe the rhythms of some electrical items and assign those rhythms to different musical instruments to create sonic fragments that cross the boundary between natural and man-made — much like the Neuro Net. For some of the less rhythmical recordings, I've been able to alter, distort and pitch the electronic sounds in Pro Tools and create some interesting instruments (my favourite so far is the synth I've created from my beard trimmer). It is this blend of natural and un-natural, of 'above the line' and 'below the line', that will form the music of Failure NeuroSlicers and, sometimes, that will even include the sounds of my local coffee shop.

Until next time.

Bobby - Communications Manager

I'm used to being the behind the scenes guy for Justin and the team and, on occasion, the doting fanboy of Failure: NeuroSlicers as it evolves. Watching the team work, extremely, hard makes you want to try and do more and one of my tasks is to try and identify community opportunities, specific to the game, and connect with a wider audience; not just from game genre perspective, like RTS, but think about the style and story of the world that will pull fans from all areas of the gaming community to keep them up to date with what's going on within the game.

I'm hoping those already reading this will be subscribed to all our various communication channels, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and our newsletter but sometimes these can be dependent on, you, the community to scroll by it in your news feed, which, if you're like me subscribe to a lot of feeds, and will sometimes miss content as it becomes, what I like to dub, a complacent channel we go into autopilot when using.

How to prioritise communication channels? It's a daily thought for me. How many users are subscribed to each channel, what to publish to first can be difficult as it's a changing landscape but recently Discord is becoming more and more popular with the gaming community because of its real-time forum nature. The younger generation these days, the millennials, are used to instant messaging, they don't want to wait for emails or a post reply, they want to know someone is on the other end of the window ready to engage and that's why we're going to start pushing a ton of content there on a daily basis.

It's a great platform with so much control, not only with chat but voice too. We get asked about Alpha testing all the time and one of our recent meetings play testing came up. As you can imagine we're a small team and everyone getting time together across multiple time zones can be tricky so if it's something you'd love to get involved with please come and join our Discord group. We'll be approaching active users who really want to get their hands on an early alpha build, help playtest and provide valuable feedback to continue to evolve the game leading up to its release.

Also, share, it's so important to us we get the game out there and you're all instrumental in helping us do that.