Whim Independent Studios - Development Log #50

Hey all! Welcome to the 50th development log for the studio. It's been almost three months since the last one. But first, I want to start off by saying that this will be the final development log we'll be doing in this format on my personal blog -- We've grown quite a bit since the first development log back when we started this in 2012, and future development logs will have more than just me posting about progress in the studio and will be posted on a new section on our whimindie website.

• Our studio is now on Discord!

We've made the leap onto Discord, where we will be posting all kinds of new information about our games. We will be also communicating the progress of the Selatria beta testing.

If you have a discord, please join our channel! We will be doing giveaways over the next few months, as well as other exciting things.


• We are in the process of expanding whimindie into being an independent publisher and developer.

Last year, we completed work on our second mobile game: "The Dastardly Dairy Debacle" which was seen as a test for what we could do with a project pitched to us from outside the company and see it to completion. We learned a lot about this project and made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot of lessons along the way.

Over the past few months, Paul, Matt, and I met with several developers in Southern California and Southern Nevada to pitch their games to us for potential future studio projects. This last weekend we had our last pitch reviews. While I can't go into too much detail about what these games are just yet, this is going to be an exciting next step for the studio. Some of the games are really awesome and are genres we've never worked on before. And we hope to bring these games to PC as well as Mac and consoles!

• We are now self-publishing Selatria on our distribution platforms going forward!

We want to especially thank Aldorlea Games for working with us and being our publisher for the past few years. They've been wonderful in working with us to bring Selatria to Steam as our publisher at a time when publishing on Steam was very difficult and we are grateful to have worked with them for the past two years.

What does this change mean? For the first time, we will be able to better support the players on our Steam platform, and make the update timings more consistent with our other release avenues. For players who purchase Selatria through itch.io, we will be able to provide a steam key with your purchase. In the coming days, we'll be moderating the Steam discussion boards with our usernames with developer tags to better assist and patch problems.

You can buy a copy of Selatria on Steam here.

We're also looking into people who have purchased a copy of our game in the past and providing steam keys retroactively. Although I can't promise we will be able to do this, we're going to look into it. We will also for the first time be able to sell Steam codes for Selatria: Advent of the Dakk'rian Empire at conventions. We're working very hard to have this ready for LVLUPEXPO. Speaking of which...

• We will be making an appearance at LVLUPEXPO 2019!

We will be making an appearance at this year's LVLUPEXPO at the Las Vegas convention center at the end of April. Players will be able to see a lot of improvements we made to our game, buy steam codes, charms and buttons we'll also be hosting a raffle for a Nintendo Switch gaming attire, and other prizes.

Here's a preview of what the charms and buttons will look like! Photos by EISS Photography.

You can purchase tickets to LVLUPEXPO here.


Selatria

On Saturday, April 13 we plan on putting a new update to Selatria: Advent of the Dakk'rian Empire across all of our platforms. There will be new features, such as unique victory poses for characters, the ability to skip to the title by pressing a button, and Quick Save functionality! Among various other minor bug fixes and tweaks.

Here are some screenshots to show off some of the new content and quality of life improvements.

As for what's coming in the pipeline, I want to show some of our progress in Chapter 4. As of this post, we finished cutscene production, and are currently in the polish and adjustment phase. Here's some footage of what's to come in Chapter 4. And do note that what you see is in development is not final and is still subject to change.

Players who own a copy of Selatria: Advent of the Dakk'rian Empire will be invited via email to beta testing for Chapter 4 of Selatria to try the game! We're aiming for some time after LVLUPEXPO. We're also looking for beta testers as well, and we will be providing more information about beta testing Chapter 4 on our Discord server!

That's all for this development log. Thanks for reading, and see you at LVLUPEXPO or on Discord!

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No meltdown today, but I really got close

Today was the closest I've gotten to another meltdown. People have been telling me I've been doing too much, and working too much, to the point of exhaustion. I think/I thought I could have handled it, but all it took was me forgetting to turn on the heater last night for me to get sick. Although I'm mentally OK, I think my body couldn't handle it any more, so I'm taking time off today to recover and focus on feeling a bit better.

Retiring current savage tier FFXIV raiding - a second time

I've retired from doing current tier savage raiding in FFXIV, probably for good this time. I personally feel as worn out as the Warrior of Light in the Shadowbringers trailer. I think I'm tired of doing the same few arena fights for a few hours every week just for the gear to be obsolete in 6 months as well as the intense pressure to fight and give it 100+ while being exhausted from real life responsibilities.

Unlike the last time in mid-2014 when I had a meltdown (both in real life and in-game), I left this static group on good terms with everyone and now I'm relaxing and playing the game far more casually. I am also remaining in a side group called Backwards Compatible where we clear older content for the same rewards when there's stat boosts and better equipment making the fights a lot less stressful on everyone (including myself). I'm not worried about never getting these battles done, I know I'll complete it sometime in the future, well as long as they keep increasing the gear rewards.

Until Shadowbringers expansion and maybe even past that I'm going to enjoy Final Fantasy XIV with activities that I personally find enjoyable. The main story, leveling up other jobs and their associated stories, Deep Dungeon (why don't they add more 4 player content that's exciting?), learning primal fights, doing older raids and going for their mounts, Eureka (NOT Pagos), and leveling B...Bl....Blu... Now I'm sad.

See ya around in Hydaelyn


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Whim Independent Studios - Development Log #49

Hey all - back with the 49th development log and the final one for 2018! I'm sitting in Christopher Nuño's studio in Los Angeles working on the log while some new music for future content is being created. I hope you are all having a happy holdays so far.

This development log entry will primarily be devoted to the up-to-date progress of Selatria going into the new year.

I'd like to start off the post with a very important announcement. As of 7:32 PM on 12/28/2018, all of the main scenario dialogue has been implemented into Selatria! It's been a long time and with a lot of help from the studio team. The dialogue for all of Selatria is several hundred pages and that's just for the main scenario alone. It took almost eight years of tweaking and editing to get all of the dialogue into the project, and now we can focus on other aspects of the game and not be tied down by having to implement pages upon pages of main scenario content.  That being said...

The focus for the rest of the development cycle is as follows.

• We are prioritizing making parts of dungeons that contain story cut-scenes before completing the rest of the dungeons. Cut-scenes are the most time consuming aspect of Selatria to create and we are creating the areas with cutscenes before finishing other incomplete sections of dungeons.

• We are planning to implement unique victory poses for each character. The art has been completed, but implementation of this will happen in January.

• Expanding the testing team to test Selatria and give feedback on implemented content to minimize the amount of bugs and errors leading into release. Over the course of 2017-2018, we've had two testers, but we're looking to increase it to a team of 4-5 people.

• Research Steam achievement API and see if implementation will be feasible (Q1 2019)

• Finishing and adjusting dungeon content (Ongoing)

• Finishing and adjusting battle content (Ongoing)

• Finishing and adjusting story and cut-scene content with related voiceovers (Ongoing)

• Finishing and adjusting art content (Ongoing)

Here are two shots from one of the dungeons in the later chapters of Selatria. This is from an upcoming dungeon called the Mirage Temple. The team will need to return to a newly discovered section of the Mirage Forest to track down an artifact for the story. 

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For this next part, I'm taking a different PR approach and outline what will NOT make it to the initial launch and what may be designated for post-release content. This is going to be a spoiler-free version of the development timeline for the rest of the game and may still be subject to change leading up to the final launch of the game.

Cuts to the original plan and scope of the game are going to be necessary in order to reasonably finish the game on time. We know there were grand plans for some of the dungeons and obstacles but we are going to be putting focus on what gets the game done while still being fun and enjoyable. So I'd like to dive in on some of the necessary changes coming to the Selatria project in 2019.

What is going to be cut from the vanilla game to make the 2019 deadline for completing the game. This is not a final list, but I’ve been doing a line by line breakdown of what we want to do to get this game done.

• Final chapter dungeons are going to be cut down in scale and reworked with an emphasis on fun over complexity. One major recurring mechanic rather than multiple mechanics.

• We are planning on cutting down the planned level for which the game is to be completed. This will help us balance the characters and make every few levels gained to be meaningful.

• Redundant/underused abilities are going to be removed from the game for all characters. Taking feedback from Selatria: Advent of the Dakk'rian Empire release, we as designers don’t utilize all the different status effects enough and it’s difficult to make one spell for each specific instance. Paralypur, Poispur, Sealpur, etc, is going to be consolidated to one single target spell called “Purify” and the area spell “Purify 2” will be changed to “Cleanse”. We also want to avoid long ability lists as players will be inclined to not use weaker abilities at later levels. For those who plan on carrying their save data over from Selatria: Advent of the Dakk'rian Empire, these changes will be automatically applied when the save data is loaded into the full game.

• We plan on having post-release content that expand on character backstories. These updates will be FREE and will not be marketed as purchasable downloadable content. I cannot promise the backstory content will have voiceovers. That will depend on how Selatria performs sales-wise.

• There will be one optional super difficult dungeon at launch and one optional super difficult dungeon in one of the free updates post-launch. More details on these dungeons will come in development updates in 2019.

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There's a lot of exciting announcements coming for our studio in 2019. As of January 3, it will have been 8 years of development on Selatria, and 2019 will be our final year of working on the full-initial launch, with more post-release content to come after. I'm glad we're on the last stretch to the development of this project and I can't wait to show you what else we have planned come next year. Happy New Year and I'll follow-up more in 2019!


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Happy 6 years to whimindie!

Six years ago I asked my friends to help me clean out the Groove Time building so I could start a small video game development studio. Only Paul and Matt showed up. Wouldn't have been able to start or go this far without them and I am very grateful for that.

And thus whimindie was born! Setting up the studio changed my life in many ways for the better. Opened up new opportunities for myself and those have worked with us over the years. Not to mention we released three games in the process. Happy 6 years! We will finish Selatria soon!

Gaming Laptop Keyboards (Or not even gaming laptop keyboards ... just laptop keyboards)

My one big gripe with gaming laptop keyboards is that companies want to sacrifice either the size of the shift key or the arrow keys to make things fit (and they can keep a rectangular design). Both shift keys should be large, rectangular and consistent on both sides. Arrow keys need to be large and square shape with all four directions being consistent in size!

The only non-compromised gaming laptop keyboard I can seem to find is Alienware (Dell) - and that's really unfortunate. Please don't sacrifice the integrity of the shift key, arrow keys, or any other commonly used key. Our niche audience needs you!

Current Toshiba Qosmio laptop. Most of the keyboard is good but they put some keys into really weird locations. (Print Screen requiring FN key). Toshiba has left the market for good laptops so replacement parts and repairs get worse as time goes on

Also small arrow keys.

Studio touch screen laptop for big mobile game demonstrations. What's up with that arrow key design, HP?

Forgive the dust, this is a really old retired Toshiba laptop from college

Full keyboard, no compromise in key sizes. The important keys have their own keys. Arrow keys decent size. Shift key and numeric keys aren't compromised

All I ask is for some consistency and care when designing keyboards for laptops and test popular and commonly used keys before trying to design a good layout.


I'm not getting into the debate between gaming laptops and gaming desktops. Please save that for a different discussion. There are many reasons why I don't have a Desktop including but not limited to: Game jams, IGDA meetings, game dev meetups, and back and forth between California and Nevada every two weeks. Just because I travel a lot does not mean I shouldn't have to deal with poorly thought out laptop keyboard designs.

Get yourself out there

I just got out of a 2-hour conversation with a female friend of mine who is frustrated that she cannot get anyone to date her.

It frustrates her when I tell her she's not doing enough to put herself out there to find anyone, but I honestly feel like she's not putting enough effort in. Go to meetups, converse with people, get to know them. Go on dating sites, lower your standards. Find what you like and don't like.

If you want someone to date, there is someone out there for everyone. I don't understand how she finds it to be difficult.

Go vote.