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xenocorp-devblog-blog · 7 years ago

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The Formidable Tale of Xenophever, Part 2

Yaaay the first day of production at last.

I was genuinely excited by the whole process of working for a year on my very own videogame concept with very nice working conditions and a team of people I really enjoyed. Genuinely terrified too. I was the coding spirit of the team, and that's a lot of responsibilities I wasn't sure I could handle on my own.

We had our own room shared with another working group, and now was the time to develop Xenophever for real.

(yeeeeee)

Our first challenge as a team was to prove our vision for Xenophever was not only interesting but also technically viable. The summer prototype I had built on Game Maker helped communication with our teachers, but one issue remained ; we saw the game camera as isometric, and some of the teachers were still doubtful. Nothing in Game Maker makes the process easy, so improvisation was key. Now I know there is a lot of clever math tricks to be done to convert distance into things and whatnot, but I had not taken a math class for years and never had the best time with this discipline. So my very un-spanish self ended up following a spanish tutorial so I could make the magic happen in the engine while the artists were learning to twist characters and settings to an isometric grid Game Maker did not technically took into account. Despite our various problems, we created the first version of the Bartender, built blocs and props, developed two different moving systems (arrow keys and point&click since we were not that sure) and finally got an approval on the camera matters.

(thanks spanish person, you probably saved Xenophever)

The next major difficulty to come in code was the actual AI. I had pulled together a solid first draft with the summer prototype, but the pathfinding system was to become more difficult given the sets of rule we had went for in the level design. Again, almost no math notion here. I had very difficult days plucking off my hair trying to find a solution.

In the animation department, Florian was leading raging battles against various solutions to cover the massive amount of animations we had planned for the game. Eventually he ended up settling for Spine -and that's the beginning of a beautiful tale I would never dare to explore on my own name, because he will probably touch the subject himself soon enough.

During this time Louis, fellow game designer and overall mastermind, scheduled what was to come for us for the whole year according to the deadlines the school demanded us to consider. Valentine, head artist, worked on designing the first aliens while we were implementing the animation system of the first species that covered the entire set of clients in this early stage.

Maxim, our environment and UI artist, was busy conceptualizing and implementing our first Structure, the Bar. Once in the engine, I could fiddle around with depth and integration. The production was starting nicely despite the technical problems we faced.

(my early desk, before it completely drowned under post-its)

So we started to feel homey, but something had yet to be build. I think the first time we actually worked as a team boils down to the concept and execution of the main menu. Not a single person had been left out of the process, and I think even today, the main menu is one of the prototype's strengths when it comes to its universe and hooking the player into the game. Then we decided to rent a photography studio for promotion -and fun-, and we ended up blasting off funk, retrowave and 90's tubes as we tried to get somewhat useable pictures of the crew. We had good fun together, it blew off steam from our personal issues with the project. Many things happened during this event, including (but not limited to) :

(if this doesn’t convince you we’re qualified to work on anything, I don’t know what will)

Afterward, it was all back to those problems with a fresh eye. I ended up getting some help from my mom that probably saved me from being stuck in a bug forever (thanks mooom), and Maxim faced his most resilient problem in the production ; the restroom. We weren't exactly sure how explicit we wanted to tackle certain subjects and how badly we were willing to get PEGI-ed, so Maxim's first designs were slightly tame. Not only he had to design toilets that were supposed to work with a great deal of anatomies (we were not certain about every alien design, but even then we knew it would be no fun if everybody used them the same way), but it had to fit in the octagonal space the level design allowed. After many attempts, Maxim settled for a living plant-monster thing feeding off organic decays, and lovingly named it "Dawyjozon". Flo and I then worked on the animation routine of the two aliens we had, and then I tried to figure out for WAY TOO LONG WHY EXACTLY THE CLIENTS KEPT THE TOILETS WITH THEM OUTSIDE OF THE RESTROOM AND- well. I figured it out eventually, but this bug was the regular thing to expect at each new animation update. I'd say I stopped finding it hilarious reasonably fast, but I'm pretty sure the rest of the team disagrees.

(Fate thou have forsaken me (again))

When we reached our first serious milestone in January, things accelerated fast. At this point artists were not late, we already had 3 of the 4 aliens planned in the final game, 4 of the 6 structures, only one mini game of the 3 we ended up having and... And a serious design problem. In the state it was, the game was not really fun nor challenging. The systems worked but loosing was extremely hard. No tactics nor strategy were required, the world felt a bit flat, and we fell into a lot of lecture and interface issues. The playtests results we gathered that day helped us focus on the big picture a bit more efficiently.

(ultimately we remained excessively purple)

After that day, things get blurry for me. We were close to the deadline our teachers had set that forbade us to include any more design tweaks. I had until then to bend the system from an alien-observer simulator to an actual game. Louis worked hard on this with me, crafting two systems next to the first one. We brought the drinks into the game with various effects -they were a huge game-changer-, the last species made its way into the prototype and Maxim, now finished with most of the level design, slaved over the interface until we had something viable to show. My whole life became a programming battlefield night and day, but eventually, during the beta session our school had planned on an E-sport bar, we were somewhat ready. (okay the game crashed twice) (at least no unexpected toilet showed up) (so there's that)

(thanks to the people who tried the game and gave us feedback!)

Things were still not over. Not only we were entering the dreaded stage of debugging and tweaking, pixel-perfect territory and other annoyingly precise tasks, but Louis and I started tackling the dialogue bits of the game. Good bits. I had fun. It still was a very hard week of work. Over 800 possible dialogues were written for each species and nature.

About that time I also needed to tackle everything in the sound department. Originally I had great plans for a very complex soundtrack and tons of spatially localized VFX to bring the nightclub to life, and of course I had to cut my expectations drastically. I focused mostly on the feedback and the bare minimum for the aliens to be distinct from each other. And as for the original soundtrack, I had been working on finding the right type of ambiance for the game since the past year, but nothing truly satisfied me and time was running low. I settled for the main theme from "Messing With The Wrong Tentacle" and a few other themes to build around, and ended up with a decent amount of music that covered the game from intro sequence to the various types of game over the player could tumble upon. The code had been hard, but I'd say music had been one of my greatest enemies during the production. Yet I am still satisfied with the work I've put into the soundtrack with the limitations I had (Logic 5.5 on PC for the dinosaurs that have any idea of which version I'm talking about). And the deadline don't wait for your changes of heart.

(f you’re french you might get a song stuck in the head forever by staring too long at this GIF)

We also had to come to term with some of our mistakes. In design, the very limited moveset of the Bartender was thrown away to allow the player more reactivity and freedom, and we had to admit the hybrid tablet/PC thing we were going for simply did not work that well on PC, that ended up being our only platform. It's not as smooth an experience to drag and drop things with a mouse than with a finger. Many overcomplicated layers of User Interface were left in, as it was a bit too late to refine now. Visual feedback was clearly not as strong as what it should have been, the NPC/NPC dialogue system was a bit off and glitchy, and the dynamic light system never ended up in the final prototype. Still, we had a pretty solid game. So solid, in fact, the engine had troubles handling it. I had many concerns as to potential memory leaks or infinite loops, and as an honest confession I never properly learned how to code, so I could have been making critical mistakes without even knowing. As it turned out, and despite all the flaws in my code, our integration method that saved countless time on my part was actually destroying the engine's capacity. The direct consequence of that implied an utter inability for the game to load and run on various PC configurations. We rattled our brains to disarm the disaster, but despite a week of hard work re-cutting every sprite and reworking the texture packs until they ended up into somewhat acceptable range, the game could not run properly on many configurations regardless of any identifiable pattern. In the end, we gave up. I don't think Game Maker is the best engine to for an artstyle such as ours and the visual ambition we had (and despite all the blood, sweat, tears and overall blast I had working with it -it actually gave us plenty of other advantages that I'm really grateful for). In the end, what mattered was bringing this prototype to our end of the year reception and making it run. We tried the installer on the local computers. It ran. We had to accept the situation, at least for a time.

We packed the final prototype a Friday. But technically they were not checked until next Monday. Which was good given I found out one last bug the Saturday that made me run under a raging storm with clearly not enough clothing to re-upload the corrected version in the school.

Never piss off the Deadline Gods.

And at last. The first version of Xenophever was completed.

Then we had a month.

During this month, several things happened. First off we had to prepare the game presentation in front of professional guests, we finished the trailer properly, and then the dreaded question of "and what next ?" started peering from our empty taskboards.

We have been questioning the possibility of pursuing the game for several months now, but June was the deciding time in which the team agreed on its future.

In the end, Maxim and Valentine wanted to pursue their path on their own, and the rest of the team wishes them the best of luck in this decision and many great and inspiring projects to work on. For the rest of us, well... It seemed like we were going to be stuck together for a bit longer. The final day came at last. We were back in the Final Spot again, same place in which we had our open betas. During the morning, professionals played our games and exchanged feedbacks (and we are forever grateful for those, they're incredibly useful in our current refont -but more on that later). Then we finally presented our postmortem in front of a compact crowd alongside our classmates and their projects Bloom, Rio 2050 and Arashi. The burning afternoon passed by with a glass of custom Xenophever cocktail the adorable staff prepared for the occasion, and we ended the journey the evening on a french beach and even more alcohol. That's a life I can get behind.

(and since this day, Louis became a table and lived very happily ever after)

So yep. Our first attempt at Xenophever was packed and done. I honestly could have hardly dreamed of better production conditions and a better team. Many thanks to ArtFX and our teachers for making this happen, many thanks to our classmates for running the race alongside us -especially to the Bloom team who bared with us daily through our various debates on insect reproduction, politics, toilet and strip tease reunions or animation reference research (Florian probably wishes he could unsee a thing or two), many thanks to our families, friends, and everybody that followed us on social medias at the time. And at last, thanks to the team. Valentine and Maxim have been formidable companions and will always have a special place in the heart of Xenocorp. Here's a link to their respective Artstation platforms in case you want to show them some love anyway, because these guys deserve it : Valentine : https://www.artstation.com/ardal Max : https://www.artstation.com/tortosambrosini And then... Then we took July off. I was exhausted beyond anything possible, and if we were to take the hazardous road of indie development... We'd need some strengths.

Tomorrow, I'll uncover the last part of our journey ; the aftermath, and what the hell we've been doing with all that. Thanks for the read. Wow. This post is really long.

See you tomorrow ! Raquel (and Xenocorp as a whole), out.

#video games #game development #game dev blog #game maker #post mortem #xenophever #xenocorp

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sellinout · 6 years ago

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TRANSCRIPT for EPISODE 2

[music]

MICHAEL PFOHL: I can totally see people that are super married to DIY eethics being like, “you sold out,” but like...if DIY means that I should put in a ton of effort so that you can do what you want and not have to pay me anything, then fuck DIY.

MIKE MOSCHETTO: Sounds harsh, I know, but when real life and gig life collide, it’s not pretty. I’m Mike Moschetto, this is Sellin’ Out.

[music: I’m a casino that pays nothing when you win / please put your money in”]

MIKE: Hi! Hello. How are you? Thanks for tuning in or logging on or surfing the web over to another episode of Sellin’ Out...I don’t really know what the term would be, you don’t really tune anything to find it. It just shows up on your phone, in your feed, whatever. In any case, thanks for listening! I’m Mike Moschetto and my guest today is Michael Pfohl. You might know Michael from his emo band Secret Stuff, got a couple releases out on Spartan Records, a very underrated label. He’s also in a newer band called Low Mass that I’m very excited about, and if you live in the vicinity of Nashville, TN and you’ve gone to see bands play at a DIY space or a house show in the last few years, there’s a good chance you’ve attended a Michael Pfohl joint. So we talked about his old show house Exponent Manor (that I’ve had the pleasure of playing a couple times), and how he actually wound up in court. My dude had to literally fight for his right to party...and he won! So that’s good. Sometimes the system works. We also chatted about ambition and success and what’s fair in DIY and so much more. He’s just a friendly, talented, hardworking, genuine guy. So here’s Michael.

[music]

MIKE: So you do a lot of different things, central to music and DIY and underground and all that. When you introduce yourself...I guess it depends situationally, but how do you think of yourself?

MICHAEL: I guess recently I’ve been pivoting a little...I haven’t been doing as much promoting or booking in Nashville as I used to because I don’t have the house that I lived at anymore, so whenever you don’t have control over the calendar it’s a lot harder to do as much work for as many people. So I’ve been focusing a lot more on Secret Stuff, and then I joined another band called Low Mass. So I’ve been focusing a lot more on the music aspect of it than the business side, which has been nice because there’s been a ton of stuff that’s been happening in my personal life that if I was in control of so many people’s touring schedules like I used to be, then it just would’ve been a recipe for disaster.

MIKE: Right, because at least at one point you had the house, Exponent Manor. You were booking presumably other places around Nashville, not exclusively the house – though that’s a great thing to have. You were booking other people’s tours, AND you had your own music projects-

MICHAEL: At that point I was still in college, too.

MIKE: Jeez! And then probably working…

MICHAEL: Yeah, I was working 30 hours a week at a barbecue restaurant.

MIKE: So...did you sleep? Will you doze off in the middle of this?

MICHAEL: [laughs] It was very fun. I didn’t have as much responsibility in terms of personal relationships or, now I’ve got a dog – which is...not crazy, like “oh dogs are trainers for babies” like some people say, but it is still a lot of work.

MIKE: I can see it, I can see it...So what came first in all of this? My guess would be that it was playing music.

MICHAEL: Yeah, sort of...I played in a band in high school in Christiansburg, VA, which is kind of in the middle of nowhere-

MIKE: That’s right, because I was gonna say the first time I met you before I knew that you did music, it was as a concertgoer - and I mean that not in a passive “I go to shows once in a while” sense. We were in Blacksburg playing I Got Brains Fest – I think that’s where we met right?

MICHAEL: Yeah, yeah.

MIKE: That’s right. And I don’t think you were still living there, I think you had moved to Nashville but you came back.

MICHAEL: I’d moved to Nashville but I came back for that. I definitely credit those two festivals, I Got Brains Fest 1 + 2, as my biggest entryway into DIY and into understanding what DIY really was.

MIKE: Wow, I caught you early.

MICHAEL: Yeah you did, because before I played in a band in high school and I was still doing a lot of sports then so it wasn’t my main focus, but when you’re in high school and you’re not in a town that other tours come through, you kind of have to book your own shows and so that’s what we would do. My best friend at the time, his dad was the pastor of a church and so we would use space in the church to throw shows and the businessman side of me was like, “oh this is cool, I can buy some pizzas for cheap, sell ‘em for a little more, blah blah blah, capitalism yaaay…”

MIKE: [laughs] So you kind of fell into, like you said, the business out of necessity.

MICHAEL: Exactly, and a similar thing happened once I went to college. I went to Belmont in Nashville and it was a similar thing where I started a band and I didn’t have the relationships yet of “who do I hit up to open these shows?” So I just started booking our own shows. There was a place on campus called Boulevard which was just a music store, and I convinced the owner there to let us move some of the gear out of the way and throw shows there. It was a lot of fun, and people eventually started coming to me being like, “Hey, can you book us shows?” and itt just organically grew from there. I started doing more stuff at a venue called Rocketown and when their room fee went up to a point which was unsustainable, I got involved with this DIY spot called the Owl Farm. And how Exponent came about was, there were probably 14 other promoters that were booking at the Owl Farm at the time, so there weren’t days available on the calendar all the time. People would hit me up and I’d be like, “I can’t do it...” I wanted to avoid that happening as often as possible, so I set out whenever I moved out of my dorm room to find a house that I could conceivably throw house shows at, and I happened to stumble upon the perfect one, honestly.

MIKE: You did.

MICHAEL: A lot of rooms upstairs, downstairs was its own thing...We had our own world upstairs where everyone lived and then downstairs there was a room for all the gear, a room to play, a living where everyone could chill, a back porch and then a kitchen where everyone would sell merch and we’d put out the pizzas we got for free because Two Boots Pizza sponsored our house.

MIKE: That’s right!

MICHAEL: It was crazy, yeah.

MIKE: I don’t want to say that was the best part, but…

MICHAEL: No, but it’s definitely-

MIKE: Huge perk, yeah.

MICHAEL: Whenever you’re on tour and you don’t have to pay for food, and when it’s like...not just Little Caesar’s, it’s really great.

MIKE: It’s almost surprising to me in a city like Nashville which is so renowned as being a music city that there would be all this congestion around one venue. Is it maybe a hostility to underground music or were there other spots that were equally backed up?

MICHAEL: Sort of? I mean that was really one of the only DIY spots at the time.

MIKE: That was the one that I heard about.

MICHAEL: There were certainly some other houses that were doing stuff, but they were a lot more...niche. So I think the Owl Farm’s openness to a wide variety of genres is what made it so indispensable.

MIKE: So who actually ran it? I mean you guys booked it in sort of a collective, but whose space was it?

MICHAEL: A person called Rose and another person called Jazzy who both do their own thing now – I believe Jazzy moved to Richmond with their partner. Once the Owl Farm was done we were all looking for our own spaces and our own things and they started doing some stuff at some other spaces I can’t remember the exact names of because they operated in another different world than I typically did. But it was great because they managed the Owl Farm and they managed all the funds for it. It was kind of a trust thing, like “make sure you leave 25% of whatever is made in this cash box” and stuff, so it was definitely not super heavily-monitored. It was a “you have the privilege to use this space, please make sure we can keep the lights on” sort of thing.

MIKE: That’s good, because as opposed to just having a flat room cost, if the show doesn’t do well you’re not on the hook for it. Obviously it incentivizes you to get people there and through the door and everything – not only for the band’s purposes, but for the people who own the space.

MICHAEL: And I always did a similar thing at my house where obviously if a show didn’t do super well, you know if there’s 10 paid at $5, I’m gonna give all $50 to the band. But say we throw a show where it’s $5 and 100 people come, I’ll give the band $400 and keep $100 and use it to pay for all the shit that gets broken in my house.

MIKE: I think some people get weirded out at the concept of house venues and people who operate those things taking any cut of it because it’s all profit margin, but what do you say to those people?

MICHAEL: I spent the vast majority of my time for three years putting on shows at the house.

MIKE: And you put on some huge shows...did you have Counterparts?

MICHAEL: Yeah, Counterparts played, that was a free show we announced four hours ahead of time and 250 people showed up. It was totally insane. On the other side of that we did a show for Beartooth...there was a contract, Red Bull sent out a film team from Australia to film the whole thing, and I did an interview for AP in my living room. It was very weird. So there are totally different sides and I can totally see people who are super married to DIY ethics being like, “you sold out” or whatever. But I managed to make that band a ton of money and sure, I made a cut from that, but should I not for all the work that I did?

MIKE: Right, and it’s a personal liability thing too because you don’t own the place, you’re renting it. You could get thrown out anytime.

MICHAEL: There was a show where the floor collapsed and I spent money-

MIKE: In your living room?!

MICHAEL: In my living room.

MIKE: Jeez.

MICHAEL: The floor collapsed and I spent money putting up new floor supports and everything like that. When we moved out on bad terms – not due to shows at all, simply due to the rapid gentrification of Nashville and the fact that the owner could sell the house for five times what they bought it for in four years of ownership-

MIKE: Thanks in no small part to your replacement of some floor supports. Probably had “new floors!” on the listing.

MICHAEL: I did a ton of stuff right before they attempted to evict us to fix it all up. I was on tour and I got a call from my roommate and he’s like “hey, there’s an inspector here.” Which is illegal in our lease – they’re supposed to give us at least 24 hours notice. And technically there were only two of us on the lease, five people living there. It was a four-bedroom, four-living room house so one of the living rooms was a bedroom. There were five people living there, but technically those other three people were not supposed to be there. We were only allowed to have at max three people on the lease, which is very strange for a house that has more bedrooms than that. But the inspector never saw those people, they just saw the house was kind of in shambles and they were like, “fix all this stuff.” We were like, “okay,” so we fixed everything. They came back and did another inspection. I got the email that said “you have two weeks to fix it,” while I was on tour for another ten days. I came back, stayed up four days straight, repainted the whole house, did a ton of work making it look very, very nice. They came back and they were like, “...this is great.” “So we can stay?” “Yeah, sure.” “Awesome, cool.” A month goes by, I’m at home in Virginia and I get a call on Christmas day: “Hey, they just nailed an eviction notice to our door.”

MIKE: Get the fuck out…

MICHAEL: Yeah. I get back a week later and like, a day after I get back we go to court. I just watch this lawyer for this realty company – because it wasn’t the owner who managed it; it was a realty company that managed it – they just call case after case after case where they’re evicting these people, and the people aren’t there so it’s just like, “Tandem Realty wins.” Boom, boom, boom, boom. And they call our case, our lawyer stands up, their lawyer looks over at our lawyer and is like, “oh shit.” He’s like, “could I have a sidebar, your honor?” And they walk outside, come back in? Our lawyer’s like, “Yeah, they’ll drop the case and give you your security deposit back if you guys leave by the end of the month.” We had two shows after it happened: one for my buds in Ivadell-

MIKE: OUR buds in Ivadell!

MICHAEL: Yeah! And then the last show that ever happened there was for this powerviolence band, ACxDC. The house looked great, I took a ton of pictures from it – they actually used those pictures in the Craigslist listing for rent now. When I lived there it was $975/month total. Now it’s $2500/month total, plus $2500 security deposit, first and last month’s rent due at move-in.

MIKE: And is it still capped at three people living there?

MICHAEL: I don’t know, I actually delivered a pizza there the other day-

MIKE: Oh man, that’s brutal.

MICHAEL: I knocked on the door and I was like, “this is weird but could I come in and take a look around for a second? I used to live here.” And they were like, “holy shit...you’re the dude!” And I’m like, “what?” And they’re like, “we know about you.” So I walked in and hung out. It was just a bunch of Vanderbilt college kids smoking weed in there, and I really wanna knock on the door and be like, “Hey...I will pay half of your rent for a month – let me do another show here.” It would be amazing. I’m not saying that it’s going to happen but it’d be very, very fun to do a throwback, you know? Have a bunch of bands that were very important to me playing there. All that to say, the house was super important to me and I think it’s definitely one of the most foundational parts of who I am. I learned way more running that house, throwing almost 400 shows in three years there than I did in four years of music business school. So I guess to circle back around to your question of, “what do you say to people that are uncomfortable with a house taking a cut?” Why am I required to give of myself for three and a half years – so much effort, so much time, honestly so much money – so that other people can have a good time? Why should the burden only fall on one person? Whenever another house in Nashville called The Other Basement fell apart – not really “fell apart,” Belmont bought the house and caused them to move out – they needed a place to throw shows, I let them throw shows at my house. I was like, “you guys take 70% of the money, I’ll take 30% of the money because it’s my house just so we can make sure that everything stays above board.” I remember the person who I let throw shows there, one time at a show two of our inputs got broken and I had to hunt them down for like…$40 or something. Like the band still made a decent amount of money; they only had to pay one touring band. And I wake up the next day, and they and all of their friends had just flamed me on the internet. “Fake DIY, bullshit, capitalist taking money, blah blah blah.” They even brought it up in an interview with a magazine. They didn’t call me out specifically by name but they were like, “there are some houses in Nashville that are masquerading as DIY and they totally are not.” And I’m like...if DIY means that I should put in a ton of effort so that you can do what you want and not have to pay me anything, then fuck DIY.

[music]

MIKE: How much do you think that same mindset spills over into...I think people expect a lot from artists now. I don’t know exactly what caused the sea change, I want to say maybe it was Radiohead “pay-what-you-want,” maybe that kind of opened the floodgates to this expectation that art should free. And I think that it should be accessible and affordable, but there’s a cost to all of it. How do you navigate that mindset?

MICHAEL: The world that we live in is currently set up in a capitalistic way and if you truly value the art that your favorite artists are creating, then you should want them to be able to live a sustainable life off that. I’m not asking to be rich. I’m asking to be able to pay my rent and bills off of my art, and people don’t get that a lot of times. They think that artists themselves are being exploitative and I would argue that oftentimes it’s fanbases’ unreasonable expectations that creates the real exploitation.

MIKE: Like…“exploitative” of what? Like a gas tank worth of money? I think you could just as easily say to anyone who’s saying “this house is fake DIY” or whatever…“Yo, why don’t you come see me at the pizza place that I work at because obviously the house show thing isn’t paying the bills. I’m not raking it in from Secret Stuff money.”

MICHAEL: Exactly.

MIKE: So here’s another venture that I wanna bring up is More Than Me Touring – booking tours for other people.

MICHAEL: Yes.

MIKE: You have to like doing it. You have to find some kind of satisfaction because it’s not a lot of fun.

MICHAEL: I joke around a lot with my friends that are promoters and especially my friends that are also agents that booking is the worst part of the music industry. It’s the most thankless job and it’s a ton of work.

MIKE: When does that come in? When do you decide to start not necessarily Doing It Yourself...I mean I guess YOU’RE doing it YOURself…

MICHAEL: Helping other people Do It Themselves...Together. [laughs]

MIKE: Does that speak to a larger aspirational mindset? Like, “DIY is cool, but…” everybody wants to get to the point where somebody’s doing stuff for them.

MICHAEL: I was literally having this conversation with Tyler from Save Face on the drive over here. We were talking about...honestly the biggest reason why I would want to get to a point where our bands were “big” and we had a team around us is that it would free up more time to be able to create more meaningful art. Like that’s honestly my whole endgame. I want to be able to create art that matters to people, and I don’t want it to just be like, “oh I have to go home and I have to work 70 hours a week delivering food” and all this stuff where I don’t have time to make the album that I want. And that’s literally the story of my summer. We recorded all these instrumental demos in May over three days. I had half the songs done lyrically and it took me like...three and a half months because I just did not have time to sit down and try to make art. I literally finished the last two songs’ lyrics the day before we left for this tour because it was just like, “I have to get it done so we can go and shop these demos around, because otherwise I’m going to have to postpone studio time until I personally can pull in the thousands of dollars that it’s going to take to create this thing the way I want.”

MIKE: You’re telling me.

MICHAEL: I basically would use the money that I made booking tours to be like, “okay, this is my savings. I’m putting this into a mutual fund or Bitcoin because it’s essentially money that I don’t need immediately to be able to live,” that’s why I have a job.

MIKE: “Funny money.”

MICHAEL: This other stuff I can put away so that I can feel like, “okay, I can still chase these creative endeavors and not wreck my 40s through 70s.”

MIKE: Just in doing that you’re leagues ahead of most other folks doing this because I haven’t been in a regular touring rotation since March of 2016, that was the last long run I went on. I’ve done a week here, a week there, but since then...I have a savings account now. [laughs] It’s not much, but that should’ve started when I got out of college,

MICHAEL: Yeah, and it feels good too honestly. Having that safety net provides so much mental comfort and emotional support. They say “money can’t buy happiness,” but it sure as hell can keep some anxiety away.

MIKE: I don’t know that it necessarily feels better than being out doing what you’re doing and getting out there.

MICHAEL: And that’s the gamble that I’m taking is that I don’t think it does. Otherwise I’d like to think I’m a fairly logical person and if I thought that music was not going to be as fulfilling as working a full-time job at home and spending all my time with my girlfriend and dog, then I wouldn’t do music. No reasonable person would.

MIKE: Opportunity cost...yeah I don’t know how much of it I would consider to be “rational.” But in terms of booking other people’s shit, are you still doing it?

MICHAEL: Yeah I’m still doing it. I’m about to get started on doing some more stuff for next year. Like I said, I took a little bit of a break. It’s been a rough year, I’ve had a lot of bad things happen to people in my family...car wrecks, etc. Like I said before, it’s nice to not have that responsibility on my shoulders but I think I’m ready to take on more, which is not something I thought I would be saying [laughs]

MIKE: So you kind of ramped up for a while, got really into it and then scaled back?

MICHAEL: Yeah, I had a roster that was a lot bigger. Some of my bands have been poached, moved onto larger agencies-

MIKE: That’s good!

MICHAEL: It’s good! I mean, it’s something you know will happen, and you just have ot hope that you did a good enough job that they’ll be loyal for as long as they feasibly can be. I don’t want anyone’s careers or their pursuit of art to be held back by any loyalty to me if I’m not doing a good enough job. And I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve totally fumbled some tours and stuff, but everyone does.

MIKE: I’ve had my own experiences with folks doing that. And it’s funny because the person who...well, he didn’t actually fumble our tour, but everyone else around us that was working with this individual –

MICHAEL: I think I know who you’re talking about.

MIKE: I think you probably do. So we actually got a tour out of it, which is crazy.

MICHAEL: That person’s fumbles I would credit as being what started More Than Me Touring.

MIKE: Really?

MICHAEL: Yeah. A lot of my friends were working with them and had very negative experiences and were left hanging. At the time, I was pretty much just booking for Secret Stuff and I was like, “I have these contacts, I know how to put together tours.” We toured a lot more than a lot of similar bands in our bracket, I would say, so why I don’t put these to work helping my friends? And that’s kind of where the name More Than Me came from too. I wanted to give back to more than just me, and ironically enough it has pretty consistently always been just me doing it though. I’ve had some people that I’ve worked with but they’ve come and gone for various reasons and it can be definitely stressful to have all that fall right on only one person’s shoulders.

MIKE: Absolutely. It’s kind of funny – did you find when you were booking other people’s tours, were you more effective at it or at least more able to devote time when you were on tour yourself? That was the experience that I had.

MICHAEL: Really?

MIKE: So the guy who booked us – it was hard to get in touch with him or at least it was hard to hear back until his band was on this full US run and he would respond like [snaps fingers] that, because he was sitting in a van doing nothing.

MICHAEL: He just had time in the van. I honestly had kind of an opposite experience? I do get that feeling especially the first week of being on tour, like “okay, I have time in a van and if I’m riding with another band or whatever, then yeah.” Other times, touring takes up a lot of your mental energy and you give a lot. You’re very emotionally invested in your sets, so sometimes I don’t want to be in constant communication with a ton of other people. I’m already being very outgoing and extroverted at a show; I don’t want to have to do that in my alone time so I’d just rather read or play Civilizations 5 on my computer.

MIKE: So how much in a year are you on the road? Could be just you, and it could be you with a band, Secret Stuff full band?

MICHAEL: Over the past three years where we’ve been fairly active it’s been over 100 days a year. Last year we broke 150...this year [2017] I purposely scaled back because I knew that I was getting a dog-

MIKE: And you were writing a record.

MICHAEL: Exactly, I’m writing a record and I know that realistically it’ll be out in the summer, so I’m expecting for the second half of 2018 to be out almost the entire time, because I want to really push it as hard as I can and maybe hit the next level if possible. But like I said before, I just want to be able to create art in a sustainable way.

MIKE: You’ve gotta be like me where you plan out a whole year, like we’ll do a month at the beginning of the year, take a few months off to recoup – is that kind of how you structure it?

MICHAEL: Yeah, and I kinda take it comes sometimes too, because I want to be on tour with bands that I really like.

MIKE: So you get offers?

MICHAEL: Yeah, so if other people are going out on tours...For this tour, for example, I’ve been Save Face’s agent for like three years and they were going to be on a west coast tour right before, but it ended up not working out. Some stuff wasn’t coming together and they were like, “we should definitely take some time for ourselves,” because they hit it hard. They’ve done like 220 days in the past 17 months or something.

MIKE: Jesus Christ.

MICHAEL: It’s pretty crazy. They’re true road warriors, so this is pretty nice because they’re about to be at the end of their album cycle and they’ve got a new record, and it was just like, “let’s just go on tour with people that we really like and not worry so much about whether or not the shows are good or bad, just be out there and enjoy the process.” So I would say yeah, I plan my year, but I leave myself more open than some other people.

MIKE: And is part of it that, as Secret Stuff, you’re adaptable to play solo or with your band?

MICHAEL: Definitely, and if I had my way I’d be playing full band every tour except for the tours that are specifically marketed as “solo tours,” because I really like those. But whenever I’m doing solo on a tour that was booked for me to be full band, sometimes the venues are different. Sometimes I’m playing with a bunch of fuckin’ loud rock bands, so it’s like, “oh are these people that are here to rock out really going to care about this guy whining on the mic over ultra reverby guitar by himself?” And a lot of times I’m surprised that people stay inside; they don’t just go smoke the whole time. But sometimes they do, and it’s super disheartening when that happens.

MIKE: No, what they want to hear is an ultra whiny guy on the mic with a bassist and a drummer.

MICHAEL: Yes, exactly. See, they’re like, “where’s...where’s the rhythm?”

MIKE: Changes everything.

MICHAEL: My dad would listen to my music and say, “it’s gotta have a beat, son. It’s gotta have a beat!”

[music]

MIKE: So do you come from a musical family?

MICHAEL: Not at all. Like, I love my parents so, so much, but they are so tone deaf. [laughs] My sister can sing very well, but I do not know where either of us got it, at all. We’re not a musical family, like at all.

MIKE: What got you into it then?

MICHAEL: It’s gonna sound super cheesy, but listening to The Devil And God in sixth grade…

[v/o slow down]

MIKE: Whoops! Hey everybody, Mike here...obviously now you can tell that this episode of Sellin’ Out was recorded conveniently right before we found out that Jesse Lacey is a great big piece of shit. Maybe you already knew that. I left this once reference in; I thought it was contextually important, but if you hear any choppy edits between here and the rest of the interview, that would be me removing any extraneous, superfluous references to unsavory characters like that. If you have any questions, concerns, any pause about editorial decisions that I’ve made in cutting these shows, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected]. I think we’re clear of that from here on out though. Should be out of the woods, so enjoy of the rest of the interview thanks byeeeee

[v/o speed up]

MICHAEL: And there came a time in my life in junior year of high school where...I was a pretty good lacrosse player in high school and I was getting some college offers, and I was thinking, “do I want to pursue this and go into medicine? Or do I want to go to Belmont and pursue music and music business?” And I was just thinking, “what is going to be more different every day? What can I do longer and still feel fresh?” And I thought music, and certainly that’s the a lot harder, less sustainable choice, but I don’t regret it at all. So that’s really how that all came about.

MIKE: Does that still factor in today? What’s your ideal situation? What are you working toward or is it just a constant work?

MICHAEL: It’s a constant work. I just want to be able to create music, and I said this on...my buddy Alex hosts a podcast called The Local Wave-

MIKE: Oh yeah, I listened to it in preparation for this so I wouldn’t go over the same shit. That was the one little thing I did.

MICHAEL: [laughs] Nice!

MIKE: I tried.

MICHAEL: Yeah, so like I said on there before...I want to be the biggest fuckin’ band in the world. And yeah, that might be like, “oh wow, who’s this asshole?” but...I don’t know! I want to create meaningful art and I want my art to be meaningful to as many people as possible. That doesn’t mean that I won’t be happy if that’s not what happens.

MIKE: When you get right down to it, that’s got to be everybody. I don’t think they would admit it, necessarily; I think there’s this aversion to – and I kind of get it too, because have you ever heard something that just...wicked fucking sucks? And you’re like, “I don’t want any crossover with this whole segment of people who like this thing.” But that’s such a learned way to think because in theory, music is art; you’ve got to share it. It’s sustained and given new meaning through osmosis and from person to person, especially at a larger scale. So I heard that, that was something where my ears pricked up. It’s an unusually unapologetic attitude.

MICHAEL: And I think specifically in DIY there is this aversion to desiring success, or aversion to publicly proclaiming your desire for success.

MIKE: Yeah! There’s an aloofness, a devil-may-care-

MICHAEL: Which, like, cool – *you* might not care, but this is the most important thing in the entire world to me.

MIKE: I wonder if part of that comes from...what you and I do, musically it’s still a niche. Maybe there’s a lot of kids who are into it, and that’s cool, but it’s not enough to coast by. You’re not selling millions of albums or anything like that, so I wonder if that “limited audience” thing has been internalized to say, “there’s a ceiling on this.”

MICHAEL: I think so, and you see the same thing happen with...I think people feel threatened that the mainstream is starting to accept this band into their own cultural zeitgeist, and I think that that threatens the “specialness” of the music to some people. I’ll totally admit that I’m guilty of that too, where this band has a lot of hype-

MIKE: Oh, we all are. And I think that threat is maybe warranted to some degree because part of that is an aversion to something like, say, Red Bull showing up at your house and putting you on camera, or maybe like...Vice News doing a writeup about the Springfield, IL scene. I get the aversion to that, but at the end of the day it’s a small community in the larger music community. There’s also a shitload of bands, and as much as I don’t like to frame it in terms of competition, they are competing for a limited amount of resources, so looking into a crystal ball, where does that go? Is it just more and more bands until it’s a fluid barrier between artist and...like, that relationship is certainly not what it was.

MICHAEL: Yeah, and I think the internet is all to blame or to credit for that.

MIKE: Equal parts.

MICHAEL: I think it’s become so much easier to find people that share this niche interest. It’s become much easier to create the music that you want to create. You have a laptop, or you even have an iPhone – there are people that are able to create the music that they want on that.

MIKE: The fucking guy who did the beat for Kendrick on his iPhone…

MICHAEL: Yeah! It’s crazy!

MIKE: What a jerk.

MICHAEL: It will just continue to grow and I don’t necessarily see that as a problem. I don’t think that the barrier between consumer and creator necessarily means that there will be less consumers. I think that people that make art should also be able to appreciate other peoples’ art. I can totally see it when bands are in bands, you can sometimes not want to be as vocally about what some of your friends are doing. But some of the coolest bands I’ve seen and some of the coolest communities I’ve seen have that in it. They have bands that are so vocally about what their friends are doing and are so for it that it is infectious. Like for example, even locally here, Counter Intuitive Records. The bands that are on that are so into the other bands that are on Counter Intuitive. It’s absolutely infectious and viral. It makes you feel good.

MIKE: I will say that that example specifically gives me an optimism about it, and it’s not necessarily a new thing. Growing up – and obviously we’re a couple years separated, but – that’s what I remember about it is the sense of community before...I mean, the internet was always around when I was growing up, but really with social networking it broke open geographic barriers, where not only are there more bands, there are more bands that tour now.

MICHAEL: And that does create a problem with scarcity of resources-

MIKE: Yeah, and that’s why I would frame it as a problem. Because if there are three shows going on in Boston tonight, you’re not gonna put six touring bands on a show.

MICHAEL: That’s another aspect that is good about the greater number of bands coming up. Secret Stuff can’t play local shows the amount of times a year that we used to. We want to play shows in Nashville once every two months. I love playing at home, but if you play too much you’re going to kill your draw, and we totally did that. We totally killed our draw where people were just like, “I don’t care, I’ll go see them next week in their living room.” But the thing is, there are always so many touring bands coming through, so there needs to be bands that do that.

MIKE: Yeah, it’s like a cyclical creation of demand. And it’s not necessarily demand from...maybe kids don’t want to go to shows six nights a week. Because you probably could have them. Boston is a market where that happens.

MICHAEL: Yeah. It happens in Nashville! It used to happen just at my house. Exponent was very blessed to have a sort of built-in crowd of people that would just come. “There’s a show at Exponent, I’m gonna go hang out.” I wanted to make it a space where everyone could feel like they were at home, and the #1 feedback that I always got at Exponent was “it deosn’t feel like a party.” A lot of house shows, you go and it’s all about the party. And it’s supposed to be all about the music there. I don’t drink; that culture beguiles me, so I didn’t necessarily set out to make it *not* a place to go and have these debaucherous parties, but-

MIKE: I think people are gonna do that...

MICHAEL: Yeah, and that’s fine, and there totally were people...Free Throw loves to drink and they’d play shows at my house all the time, but that’s not the main focus.

MIKE: I also think that having a few drunk folks is like, “well, you know, maybe they’ll open the wallet.”

MICHAEL: Exactly! [laughs] I’ve totally sold merch to people that thought I was in a different band because they were drunk. Just another aside, we played a show with The Menzingers right before this tour and this industry person came up to me and talked to me for like, 45 minutes. It’s a person that I know, I definitely know who they are, I tried to get a job as their assistant...they definitely do not know who I am. They thought I was in The Menzingers. They were drunk and thought I was the frontman of The Menzingers, and he introduced me to his fiancée, took me backstage to hang out with Bayside...I went and asked my friend who was the promoter for the show, “he thinks I’m someone else. Should I correct him?”

MIKE: Definitely not.

MICHAEL: He’s like, “You’ll just confuse him, he’s not going to remember who you are in the morning anyway. Just let him roll.”

MIKE: Just roll with it.

MICHAEL: [laughs]

[music]

MIKE: As always, if you like what you heard today I urge you to support Michael however you see fit. I’ll have the pertinent links and info in the description of this episode. If you want to support the show, you can find out how to do that at Patreon.com/sellinout, and I’m still taking submissions for what you want for bonus content at [email protected], or on Twitter @SellinOutAD. Leave a nice rating & review on Apple Podcasts, it helps others find the show – or you can just pick whichever friend has the worst forearm tattoos and the most asymmetrical haircut and hip them to it personally. Our theme song is “No Cab Fare” by Such Gold; photography by Nick DiNatale. I’m Mike Moschetto, this is Sellin’ Out.

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mas-adventure-blog · 7 years ago

Text

8TH WEEK - HOW TO SURVIVE MERCEDES? :)

良い一日！

Honestly, my brain is full of this kind of signs after this tough week, but hope you are doing well, because here we are again. 8th week is over. :-)

Firstly, I just want to give one very important advice to the future Bootcampers: You have to decide your direction as soon as you can, if somebody is disagreeing, let’s vote as a team. Anyway, it was a fantastic week, because the Bootcamp went to Berlin and the second presentation is done and was coupled with a trip to the capital city and a boat trip around Berlin. Yaaay!

Now it’s time to share the classes with you guys:

1. COPY TECHNIQUES (MONDAY // 18:00-21:00, FRIDAY // 17:00-20:00)

I truly love this lesson more and more, because it’s totally different, than our other strategic classes. I guess it’s the spice of the Bootcamp for me. :) So, at the first class we’ve learnt about long copy and my reaction was something like this:

via GIPHY

You need long copy if:

1. YOUR PRODUCT IS EXPENSIVE

2. IT IS HARD TO VISUALIZE YOUR PRODUCT.

3. YOUR PRODUCT IS COMPLEX OR INNOVATIVE

4. YOU WANT TO WRITE A MANIFESTO

5. THERE ARE SOME HARDCORE FACTS UP YOUR SLEEVE

6. YOU WANT TO TELL A STORY

Seriously people still do read long copy, except people do not read bad copy, irrelevant copy and plain boring copy. To convince you, let me show you a Cannes Lions winning long copy print ad:

Unfortunately, because of Mercedes I didn’t do my homework for the first class. I had to work a lot on our presentation and I’ve helped to the others in their parts, because I got the leader role in this project. But at the second class I’ve make up for everything. At this class Vera has checked all of our homework during the Bootcamp. She picked 4 works out of my campaign based headlines and copies to execute them with the help of an Art Director, because these works maybe will get the chance to enter in the Miami Ad School Creative Exhibition in the end of the quarter. Let me share with you my works:

1. Headline for “Builders” strong tea:

“STRONGER THAN HULK’S HALITOISIS.”

2. Headline for DE BEERS diamond brand:

“HOW BADLY DO YOU WANT TO WATCH THE SUPERBOWL AT THE STRIP BAR?”

3. Tagline plus headlines for Altoids mints:

Here I’ve got a tagline and I’ve to work on the headlines and we’ll see what’s going to happen, but my tagline is:

“STRONG MINTS FOR STRONG PEOPLE.”

4. Long copy for Kit Kat brand:

I wrote a fictive story about the ghost Kit Kat army during the second world war. She liked the story, but I’ve to work on the details a lot if I want to take this work onto our FACE2FACE meeting.

As you see, I’ve a lot of to do here, but that’s why I am here to learn and work as hard as I can, because I want to LEAVE MY FOOTPRINT HERE!

2. GUEST SPEECH: PLANNING IN TODAYS AGENCIES (MONDAY // 10:00-13:00)

The class was held by Ryan McLaughlin and was about the future in general. He strongly recommends the design thinking and 10x thinking course to all of the planners, because the industry is continuously developing and we’ve to move on too if we would like to be competitive as a planner. The three best-selling jobs in the future are going to be these in his point of view:

1. Data scientist

2. Digital product manager

3. Creative technologist

What do you think about this and what is your current job in the industry? Maybe it’s time to change maybe not. It depends on you! :)

He had also a very good thought about the Linkedin profiles, let me share it with you:

„I've been a _____for ___ years in _____. I began my career at _____and then became _____at _____and now am at _____. I've won ___awards from _____. I have been named _____and _____by _____and was recently _____ for _____. My background includes a vast skill set of ____ _____ _______ __________ _________. Most LinkedIn summaries are formulaic and filled with previous pursuits and accolades. We might be trusted for what we have done, but we are employed for what we will do. In my years in the strategic and creative disciplines, I've been told that the measure of ourselves (and best gauge for what we will do) is not what we have done, but how we think. „

I think he is right, so thanks Ryan for this amazing and futuristic class!

3. TUTORIAL & PLANNING | AN OVERVIEW (TUESDAY // 12:00-15:00):

It was one of the most helpful tutorial, where we checked our Mercedes presentation. Just in time. (one day before the presentation) The main takeaway was, that we had to add some “connection” and summary slides to optimize the flow of the presentation. It’s a confidential project but let me give you one hint, that after the class we were at the school until 23:00. :D But it was amazing, I felt like I was on a team building and I really enjoyed it!

4. MERCEDES PRESENTATION IN BERLIN (WEDNESDAY // 11:00-15:00):

“The presentation was extremely impressive.” – this was the client feedback after our speech and we were very happy to hear that, because we had a lot of tough time during this project. It was also good to be in a leader role as well, especially because I had a lot of learnings from this project and I also had to lead a very international team, which was quite a unique and new thing/experience to me.

It’s forbidden to say anything about it, but trust me it was a cool ride! But let me show you some photos about Berlin, because we had a lot of time to explore the capital of Germany:

Last but not least thank you Mercedes people for your inspiring brief and amazing welcome in Berlin! :-)

5. GUEST SPEECH: ACCOUNT PLANNING FROM A DIFFERENT POINT OF VIEW (THURSDAY // 10:00-13:00)

Everybody was very exhausted but it was a pretty good deduction of our week. Andreas has come from Antoni Berlin, which is actually the nr. 1 agency of Mercedes-Benz. He’s working as Head of Strategy there. His speech was about strategy in general, but it was very good.

In his point of view strategy is a way to solve problem and defines what to do and it is also the kind of art of finding out how to persuade. He also showed us the Planning cycle, which is the process of planning. The key points of this cycle are:

1. Where we are today? – Situation

2. Where do we want to be? – Vision

3. How do we get there? – Strategy

4. Are we getting there? – Evaluation

In his speech, we also learnt about what are the requirements of a good strategy:

1. A problem and a thought that achieves the objectives

2. Clear, measurable KPIs throughout the process

3. An organisation that commits to the strategy

4. A process to implement and optimise the strategy

To sum it up we’ve learnt a lot of useful things and this class refreshed my mind too, so thank you very much for everything Andreas!

P.s.: I strongly recommend to download the Oblique Strategies application. It was showed by Andreas and it is very helpful if you get caught at a certain point in your thinking:

https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/oblique-productive-strategies/id902143877?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4

So that was our 8th week and now it’s time to work on SIXX. We’ve already started to work and we are going to meet on Saturday at the school to create an amazing stuff! Finger crossed! Keep on reading my blog! See you!

#miamiadschool #maslife #accountplanning #bootcamperlife

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