I bet every writer took it upon themselves to be a seething, combative sensitivity reader as well and that's why everyone on the writing team got the boot and was replaced. Showing them the door is much safer than telling them to shut the fuck up and do their job, the latter will count as harassment+abuse.
I really don't think it's something like that, it kinda seems there's just nobody really steering their ship at all. I'm kinda getting an impression that there's nobody really controlling these guys, so they're just doing a whole "Yeah..yeah...I'll get on it..at some point."
having actual leadership would mean they'd have someone to blame and label as a fascist though!
I'm sure it would stress these artists out to see their liberal work Stonetoss'd:
>implying it wasn't one to begin with
I know Quebec offers grants to game companies operating here, but I'm ensure if any of the other provinces offer similar grants.
Nah it's just what a fucking trigga does.
Hey i lack talent but work ethic is something you learn by interacting with people.
2021 Wrap-Up, Plus Bonus Holiday GVH Colouring Page! (A)
They don't go here but they're cool, I swear.
In this newsletter:
Monthly Dev Update
Marty
Editor in Chief of the Yearbook
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Welcome to the Dev Update
If you're intrigued by the characters in the above screenshot, then join the club because I too am pining for their aesthetics and overall vibes. I'll save the deets on this squad for another time but suffice to say, they make music too. Their demo is pretty chill, it reminds me of early-era Tectonic Shakes, I'll play it for you sometime.
In addition to this cool crew, there are a whole bunch of new character designs we've got in the works! Should we show them off in a video for you? Respond to this email or talk to us on our Discord if you'd like us to do a feature on our extras!
This month's dev updates are all about seeing Volcano High from a new perspective because the character and background art team have been drawing up the gymnasium and the student council office! Seeing more of the school come together is deeply rewarding, plus it's nice to see more of where Naomi spends most of her time (aka... the student council office). The design department's been taking a look at the game's mechanics and creating a thematic throughline with all the interactions.
What else? Integration is back on track (and more optimized than ever), as you'll learn more about in our feature! So! Keep reading!
Oh sorry, didn't mean to ignore you, ini. This month ini took charge of debugging and our localization validation program (whew, that's a mouthful!) Thank you ini, we appreciate you.
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It's an Integration Automation Celebration!
Let get into how we've streamlined our integration process. Buckle your butts up because I'm about to take you on a friggin journey. Also, for some 101 in case you're already like "I'm lost, bro." Integration is the process of taking all of the assets our artists have made and putting them into the game (aka integrating them in-engine).
A shot of our Miro board that makes us look like we're singlehandedly causing shortages of red conspiracy thread
The first automation we've added to our process is in the platform Miro: our programmer Jacob developed a script that reads Sweet Baby's Ink script for the "episode" (we internally call game levels episodes or chapters) in question and automatically generates a Miro skeleton from it. That skeleton includes dialogue, branches, and empty storyboard thumbnails. Originally, our producer Robin did this whole process by hand (he'd copy-paste the script over, shot by shot and draw all the branches...)
Once that's all set up, we open up our storyboards spreadsheet, which automatically populates with our storyboard thumbnails and information, and then we assign the different shots and views (more on views later).
You won't catch me slippin' on these storyboard showcases: no spoilers here!
Another automation lurks within this spreadsheet: once everything has been organized in there, the spreadsheet spits out a field that gets copy-pasted into the Ink script! It's essentially a script annotation with shot calls and other relevant info.
Above is what that script looks like once it's pasted into Ink. This lil script allows all the Unity steps I'll mention later to happen, so we love this lil script.Well we love all these lil scripts.
Every camera cut is labelled as a new shot; that shot is given a number and referenced by the animators when they do their work. As you can see in the previously-mentioned Miro screenshot, that is a lot of shots. And with that many shots, you end up with duplicates. Those duplicates slow down Unity and are honestly just a hassle to deal with:
Attack of the Reed/Trish clones. Also don't bring up Fang's giant guitar, they're sensitive about it.
The solution? Views! No, not the 2016 album by problematic Toronto-representative Drake. We're using views to classify any shot that contains the same content (ie: background and character) but may use different animations or dialogue. Those shots are assigned a one-time unique View. Each shot is still referenced in the timeline, but think of it as like a "linked image" in InDesign: the system knows how to find it when it needs it, but it otherwise stays out of the way.
We've also got some snazzy new Timeline tools in Unity, like "Ink to New Timeline," which loads up the script information into the scene, and an animation call-up tool that allows you to cycle through all available animations for that particular Spine prefab.
Another neat tidbit? The timeline that gets generated from the Ink script allots a default amount of time for each shot! This is easy to edit and change as needed, but it provides a nice foundation to build from for whoever is integrating the scene is setting it up (*cough* Saleem).
So much of this process is about... pure, unencumbered trust
Ok. Now that the backgrounds are set, we add the characters. Within each View, a Spine prefab is added, and then the specific character's skeleton data for the scene is slotted in. Once the animations get imported, the character's pose will snap to where it should be to better emulate the storyboards and what's happening in the script.
What's important is referring to the storyboards and adjusting assets in a way that reflects them best. This is where the manual elements factor in to align with the storyboard: the integrator has to manually scale, layer effects like blur, things like that.The artsy, fun parts, if you will.
Now it's time for the animations! There's another Timeline Tool in our GVH Scene Tools called "Try Placing Animations" (aren't we all just trying, Unity!), and this places all the properly named animations into the shots they're associated with. Et voila! A little example (minus lip-sync) below!
Almost the entirety of this process used to be done manually; from importing the Ink script to Miro, to bringing that into Unity, to setting up each shot by hand, it was an arduous and time-consuming process. It introduced human error constantly and was honestly just draining (time-wise... and soul-wise).
So this—among the countless other reasons—is why we love and cherish our programmers. Hope and Jacob put the majority of these automation tools into place, so let this be a love letter to them. These additions have taken the process of integrating a scene from a week's worth of work to a THIRTY MINUTE WALK IN THE PARK.
It's no wonder our integrator in chief Saleem is now obsessed with automating everything.
We hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes look at our new integration process!! You can respond to this email or talk to us online (whether it's on our Discord, TikTok, Twitter, or Instagram) about what else you'd like us to show you! Whether it's behind the scenes dev processes or features on the cast of GVH, we wanna hear about what interests you the most so we can show it to you!
PS! Everyone seemed so keen on our Fang Character Sheet that we decided to let our newsletter subscribers have a high-res versionIf you end up drawing fan art with this, do give us a tag, will ya?
How KO_OP uses version control to foster better teamwork (A)
Marty
Editor in Chief of the Yearbook
It's already mid-December? Excuse me? Was it not June last week? Whatever you say, dude... guess that means we're closing out our second year of working through a pandemic! Let’s get into it, shall we?
We are virtually high-fiving over the fact that we spent yet another year developing games from our living rooms/bedrooms/kitchens/porches, talking to ourselves, and popping in the laundry in between making TikToks (just me?) We’re not going to lie: it was a hard year, and we are really starting to miss being in the same room with each other, crackin’ jokes and eating Mr. Puffs. Hopefully, by this time next year, we won’t be developing games during an active pandemic, but if we are, just know we’ll still be keeping each other company online, even when things get hard.
Besides the continued complications of working through a pandemic, this was a hard year in many other ways too: rampant inequality in our industry continues unabated, reports of abuse and exploitation remain an industry standard. In 2022 we want to focus energy on using more of our time, experience, and money investing in the many communities we’re a part of, as well as supporting workers-rights initiatives in our fields. Workers make any of the games you play possible, and workers are people who deserve safety, wellness, and fair pay. It should go without saying, but unfortunately, we’re all always having to say it.
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Earlier this year, we announced that Goodbye Volcano High would be delayed to 2022, a decision we went into in-depth here. Among the many reasons for taking more time (rebooting our narrative, making a game during a still-ongoing major historical event) was that we are constantly trying to find ways to balance our health with our responsibilities as devs. We weren’t going to push ourselves above and beyond our physical and emotional limits to finish this game for 2021. It just wasn’t worth the health of the team.
Crunch is a common practice in games, and it's one we’re always trying to avoid. We try to find different ways to make things easier on ourselves: lots of vacation days per year, unlimited sick days, emergency funds. These practices are important to the creative/professional processes we’re striving towards—ways of putting ourselves before a product, even though it’s—of course—complicated to do that when you’re working within capitalism.
In April 2020, we started working 4 day weeks (with no effect on salary and without longer days, a couple of common practices we’ve heard about), and even though we temporarily switched back to 5 day work weeks to meet a deadline, as soon as that deadline passed, we unanimously voted to put into place 4 day weeks. Bless the co-op system, truly, where we can all make the decision to improve our health and wellness with what, in retrospect, seems like a pretty easy choice. You can read more about that process and other studios who have made similar decisions in this Game Developer piece, this Casa Rara interview, and this Yahoo article we were profiled for this year.
This year we also developed some really neat systems for making our processes quicker, systems that we hope we’ll be able to share with other devs and artists, whether those artists work in games, animation, project management, or writing! One of the exciting things about having such a hybrid style game (also known as a cinematic narrative/rhythm game/coming of age/interactive movie experience, naturally) is that a lot of these processes can be used in other fields, and we can connect with other creators who are doing similarly interdisciplinary things. You can read about some of our automation systems in last month’s newsletter or in this case study Unity ran on us! So that's the recap, now go wishlist the gay dinosaur game! What? I had to get one last plug in, can you blame me?
We've got other exciting non-GVH projects in the works, but I don't think I'm allowed to talk about them yet. Let me try... █████ ████ ████████. Ya that's what I thought. We'll check back in later, though, k?
View attachment 462d766c-e450-9322-710a-d29b8dc11e19.gif
One Last Dev Update for 2021
The past few weeks have seen our programming and design team collaborating on UI and FTUX. The UI in question are our screens and menus, and FTUX, for those who may not be familiar with the term, stands for first-time user experience. There’s a sneak peek above for ya, cuties! Damn… those fire particles really sparkle, don’t they? From the outside, it always feels like magic to watch design briefs become a programming reality.
The character artists (one of whom made the header's supremely cute holiday card, but more on that later) have been working on building block additions—things like hand sketches and designs to round out assets needed for new scenes. The scenes in question will be integrated in the new year, but in the meantime, here they are people…
𝒽𝒶𝓃𝒹𝓈
An update that felt like an end-of-year gift to general morale was our newest character artist Max creating a whole slew of Goodbye Volcano High extras based on the team’s likenesses. We’d decided a while back that the dinosonas of any staff who wanted them were gonna be a must, but it’s a totally different feeling to see them all together; it’s so cute to absolutely lose it in a Slack thread over how accurate everyone’s dino is. We’ll show you in the new year; you really gotta see ‘em. Guys, I can’t believe KO_OP and the SweetBaby dinos are all gonna graduate together; I’m gonna cry! Sign my yearbook!
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A FINAL TREAT
One of Goodbye Volcano High’s character artists, Oriana designed our holiday card for us (Sam made it into the gif you see in the header!), and Ramona had the idea of turning it into a colouring pageSo here is your special treat: a colouring book page of some of our favourite dinos! Yet another example of this supremely cute and talented group of people coming together to make something wonderful. Literally, I will be colouring this in while I watch those 4K Yule log videos, drink cola de mono (Chilean eggnog), and listen to Vince Guaraldi this weekend, and I hope all you dinos will be similarly cozy and warm this end of year. We’re off as of today, so don’t expect to hear from us till twenny twenny two, babyyyyy
Stay safe, rest up, and we’ll see you in 2022!! Didn’t I hear that a meteor was scheduled to land that year? (Too soon?)
Marty also did a podcast about the game. (A)
Some more screenshots from GVH's Discord server, some old and some recent.
Christ, they added even more bullshit to the genre list!? It's a Choose Your Own Adventure VN. Just call it what it is instead of this adjective salad of nonsense.
>no dino nuggies
See, that shit's bad, but lemme ask you this: how is there somehow stuttering in this scene when all Trish is doing is bobbing her head? I can't be the only one who's noticing that, right? Or is this an "artistic decision" to make it more "movie-like" because this game is so deep and cultural and atmospheric maaaaaaaan.This honestly seems like they're creating far more work than is even remotely necessary for the sake of having a visual novel.
Two things came to mind when looking at this gif:
1: Mass Effect. I guess that's just the game that comes to mind when I see dialogue options like this.
2: Dear god those stills are bad. Particularly trish's "I don't know what to say so my mouth is just hanging open" thing.
The fact that this is the part they show probably means this is the closest to complete they've got any dialogue. Which is fang's face moves, and then it instantly cuts to trish before you even have time to read the dialogue. And absolutely no lip flaps.
The dinosaurs are gonna go extinct long before the meteor hits.
There's a reason why a lot of VNs aren't animated even though there is the ability to make them these days. Honestly if GVH was just a VN I think it could really make use of the characters being 3D models to give it a lot more variety in scenes and expressions that you wouldn't get with 2D but instead they're using fancy words to say that they're a discount Telltale or LiS clone.
From what they said, I think they plan on adding the lip sync after recording the dialogue. in which case, why don't they do that first before animating anything?
