#not devs like e.g. animator writer or programmer etc

[felassan]

Some info on the SAG-AFTRA strike:

Another post

Messages/info from Erika Ishii, Alex Jordan and Jessica Clark

A message from Jennifer Hale

SAG-AFTRA Interactive Media Agreement Negotiating Committee Chair answers a fan's question on how fans can show support and solidarity during the strike

SAG-AFTRA's page on the strike | News | FAQ

How creators and streamers can show support

Creators and streamers are not being asked to stop playing certain games

Only the American guild is striking. "The UK union are not able to strike due to LAWS in the UK, but do stand in solidarity! Do NOT attack UK actors for working at this time" [source]

"As far as Dragon Age Veilguard, several of the voice cast are SAG-AFTRA members, this would most likely mean they would not be involved in promotion [after SDCC] or would not be able to record any lines/do mocap moving forward." [source]

Also: "The game actors strike rules are messier than it first seems. They can't work on new projects, or ones recently started, but games in production a year or more ago and live service/ongoing games are excluded from the strike (for now)." [source]

Text in first image reads: "From a SAG-AFTRA spokesperson: Due to certain provisions in the IMA contract, games that were in production at the time that the union provided the company its notice of termination are not currently subject to the strike order. Most notices were sent in September 2022. We served a separate notice relating to live service games, which we can strike in less than 60 days. We will update the membership if we expand the strife order to include those games closer to that time." Text in the second image reads: "The language in the IMA is clear that video games that were already in production prior to August 25, 2024, including live service games, are not subject to the strike and remain covered by the ongoing terms of the 2020-2022 IMA. Performers would not be in violation of the strike order if they continue working on these games." [source]

[dreamharvestgames]

Dev Blog - March 2017

Justin - Creative Director

What a month it's been. It's almost all become a bit of a blur due to the number of different things I've been jumping around doing... I guess that's indie dev for you!

Anyway, my month started off with getting a phone call from a certain someone asking us to pitch our game in front of an investment board with the possibility of securing some of the much-needed funding we've been desperately trying to get for the past 12 months+. With this in mind, we went into "oh shit what are we going to do" mode.

We had to prepare a 20-minute presentation that went into details about the game but more importantly our potential sales figures, monetization model and other business stuff. Luckily, I'm a bit obsessive about all of this so I'd actually already prepared all our numbers months before, though this was a good opportunity to update everything based on how other similar games had been performing over the past 6 months or so.

One of the big issues with the investment board was only two out of ten members were actually from the games industry so we had to work extra hard to explain things that I'm sure most of us understand quite well, such as what a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game is, or what games as a service is.

It was a grueling 20-minute presentation with another 20 minutes of questions from the board.

To take a bit of weight and embarrassment off my shoulders I roped Milcho into coming with me... and he hates public speaking, which I thought was great. I'd be able to take a breather during the presentation and Milcho could take my place shitting in his pants.

All in all, we think it went well and the feedback has been good, though whether we get the money or not is not 100% confirmed yet, at least not officially.

Since the pitch, it's been all hands back on the demo build for Reboot Develop and it's been another great time getting back to my roots of sound design and writing music. One of the most complex sounds I've had to make for the project has been the Transmission Tower level objective for the Skyline level and it's been quite complex getting each of its sounds integrated and triggering exactly how I wanted, but my god it's sounding and looking awesome; though there's still a few tweaks I'd like to make to the sounds and transitions between elements.

I've also been working on new UI sounds in unison for the work that's currently being done on the player feedback systems. Player feedback is super critical and we'd like to be in a position during Reboot Develop where we don’t need to give any help or instructions to people sitting down to test and play the game. It's an ongoing struggle but we'll get there eventually.

Anyway, I've spoken for too long so will let the others take over from now.

Sven - CTO / Lead Programmer

So what have I've been doing since the last update? A lot of different things, what comes to mind right now is:

backend server systems

the game server

replacing some old effects with Unity's new "Post Processing Stack"

a new menu system

some fixes to some old systems

helping with preparing the presentation

Can't really write about everything here as it would end up in a big wall of text that almost no one is interested in (if you are, sorry for not writing about everything). So, I'll just pick two topics, which have been part of my focus this month.

Menu system

Never really took the time to work on a menu system with the 'new' Unity UI system (it has been out for something like 3 years, so it's hard to still call it new). But, it was interesting to play around with it and figure out how to best make transitions between different menu screens (hint: good starting point is here - https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/HOWTO-UIScreenTransition.html). As we're currently working on the design of some of the screens - what I've did won't be in the game for some time.

One thing that came out of this was a nice system for Options/Settings where we now have a system which is easy to use, so adding a new option to the menu and using it became really easy as:

This also takes care of loading/saving the values. Getting the values and getting notified about changes is also really easy:

Maybe I'll polish the code a bit more and make it open source, could be useful for others. The whole thing is a bit more complicated than it seems as it involves code generation (using CodeDOM) which has the big advantage that I can generate all the methods to get the values etc. this makes it easy to use and makes sure you can't really do anything wrong when using it.

Graphics and Post Processing

A few words on Unity's new "Post Processing Stack". If you're a developer who is thinking about upgrading to the "Cinematic Image Effects", which is now considered to be legacy, be aware that some stuff still isn't in there e.g. the included Fog doesn't support height fog yet, also it completely takes control over the fog settings, so once you add the "Post Processing Stack" to your project you won't be able to use the fog settings in the lighting settings. Bloom is missing the "High Quality" mode too.

In our case, we had to mix the old effects and the new stack so we don't use some features, like the height fog. Overall it seems nice and should be the way to go forward. For me the most important thing is that everything is now integrated into one 'effect' and it's no longer a collection of separate effects. This alone should make it possible to gain a bit of performance, simply because some steps can be reused for multiple effects. I'm not worried about the missing stuff as I assume all that will be added at some point and if it isn't the whole thing is open source so you can add whatever you want yourself.

Milcho - Lead Designer / Programmer

Salutations, lots has happened since last time so let's quickly go through it.

Reboot Develop

Reboot Develop is happening next month and we have so much to go through to get a stable build ready. We’ve spent the last two-week crushing bugs and making improvements, like adding unit paths on placement for example:

Upgrades

Currently, we don't have many upgrades designed for our abilities. I've designed at least one upgrade for each ability that we're planning to get in for the develop build. One of them will be on our Artillery building, which will let you launch units across the board.

But that's it from me for today. I hope you got your monthly fix of enlightenment.

Until the end of time, Milcho.

Loic - Art Director / Designer

Following last month’s work on the final look of units, we now have all our in-game playable assets that went from mock-up modelling to their final form, with textures and animations.

I polished some concepts for each of them:

I started concept work on a new environment, the Red Lights District, which you can have a glimpse here:

An additional lead on a Zen Garden environment, where I focused on optimising the number of assets to produce to obtain a harmonious moody enviro at reasonable costs.

I then helped to brainstorm on the UI discussion, focusing on our card system to convey clearly all the information about playable elements, while taking as less space as possible and aiming for a slicker sci-fi look than traditional cards.

We are still finding ideas to compress information in a smarter way, and these cards should soon be very comfortable to read, giving precise information so the player can really understand, by themselves, how the game works, but never overwhelmed or distracted by icons or numbers.

Finally, the next goal is to polish our main environment further, the City Scape, so we can have a benchmark of what the game will look like.

Here is a WIP progression screenshot:

Kelvin - VFX Artist

It's been a really busy month! I've only been able to work part-part-time for Failure, because I'm doing another full-time role elsewhere, so I haven't had much time to check everything off my list. But with the little time I did have, I could create the Transmission Tower's capture FX, the Artillery projectile, and some work in progress Nanite elements.

The Transmission Tower's capture FX was a challenge. We already had an existing FX, but with the addition of Loic's tower animations and Justin's sound design, it really pushed the vision even more. After seeing all the pieces together, we knew we wanted to add even more to the FX, it had to be more epic! While playing Justin's sounds in the background, I was pushing forward with the FX until we got something that felt like it was hitting the field very hard. I'm happy to see where it is right now. We have some adjustments to make to sound and code now that I've adjusted the FX, but I can't wait to see it. I'm also really excited to see Artillery's projectiles flying around the map. The battlefield was really missing something like that, and I can't wait to see what it'll add to the game.

Amelie – UX Designer & Writer

Hello, everyone, I'm the team newbie I guess. So my name is Amélie and I do both writing and UX research, I've been doing UX for about 12 years now, only working in games for the last four or so, and that's when I started developing my skills as a creative writer as well.

For the moment, I'm honestly just really trying to catch up with the number of things the team has done so far and familiarising with the gameplay mechanics and the flow, asking many questions and doing my best to see where the player experience can be optimised. I've written some UX reviews which the team has already implemented or planned to include those recommendations for the next build.

This month I've helped reorganize the information on the Script cards and defining when and how does the player need to access each piece on information about his script, I'm currently working on a wireframe for the Deck builder and very soon I will be doing the lobby. (Read More about the UI Stuff here) 

I love how the team is super welcoming to fresh ideas and suggestions and how everybody is so driven to deliver the best possible game experience, we're all looking forward to this next build and I'll be meeting the guys too in Kings Landing as I go with another very small indie team to present another indie game called Fractal Space, (http://store.steampowered.com/app/435410/), how exciting!

There I hope we can meet a lot of potential players and have them test the game. There is no better UX research than field research, guerrilla style: just have a player sit there and look at what he struggles to understand and how fast he alone adjusts to this new environment. Testing the game in Dubrovnik will give us plenty of material to iterate on the next version of the UI and to validate the stuff we worked hard to do well.

There is plenty more UI and UX improvements that we will be doing before travelling there so this and test preparation should keep me fairly busy, but I look forward to quieter times when I'll be able to dive into the NeuroNet universe and start writing missions and dialogues and find a good voice to fit the fascinating narrative that awaits you!