#developer commentary

[edwardos]

This bullshit is the reason I nerfed diamond items.

[ossyflawol]

Why exactly does Chell tie the jumpsuit around her waist instead of wearing it? I mean I can pretty much guess why but I think I've seen someone say the devs said the exact reason so it would be nice to know that

In Portal 2’s developer commentary, they talk a lil about the design choices for Chell. A developer commentary node by Realm Lovejoy explains a bit of the process behind redoing Chell, and she shares this tidbit about her jumpsuit:

“…we didn't want players to not recognize her, so we kept a lot of the iconic elements like the color orange. She has folded down her jumpsuit to show she has essentially rolled up her sleeves and shed some of the Aperture label...she is awake again to test, but stronger and more determined than ever.”

In short - it’s just to show her independence, she is no longer just another Test Subject at Aperture Science, she is Chell.

[generic-sonic-fan]

when writing for sonic characters, are there any Particular renditions of their voices that you hear?

Interesting question!

I do daydream a lot about these characters (that's where my fics come from!) and each has their own distinct voice in my head, but their voices aren't from any specific voice actor/game! If I have to be more specific, I guess you can say that each voice is a blend of a variety of game voices, tuned to what I think is most pleasant.

What's more important for me while writing, though, is the distinctive phrases or sentence syntaxes that each character uses! It's less about the "sound" and more about the cadence and rhythm. An obvious example with a solid contrast in character voice is the difference between Omega and Sonic's speech in "I Can't Accept All This". Allow me a quick experiment, if you will:

--

“Do you want to stay down here or something?”

“For being the individual responsible for educating Shadow on ‘the power of friendship’, it seems you do not trust your friends.”

“Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?”

“I have activated my emergency transponder. Help is on the way.”

“How do we know the signal’s gotten through all this concrete? Have you got a response from anyone?”

“Negative. There has been no response.”

“Then we could be stuck down here until we do something! Come on, work with me here, dude!”

“Did you inform anyone as to the location of your mission before you arrived here?”

“Did you?”

--

Omega speaks very formally, with long sentences and complete phrasing. Sonic, meanwhile, uses shorter, choppier phrases, sometimes with interjections or other slang words. Omega also doesn't use contractions whereas Sonic does. Even with the removal of Omega's speech quirk of using all caps, it's fairly obvious who's saying what in the dialogue above, even though I tried my damndest to pick dialogue that didn't have other context cues as to who was saying what.

Other characters have different speech quirks. Silver is rambly and has trouble communicating exactly what he means, Rouge uses a TON of cliché phrases and likes punctuating with pet names, and Shadow is actually my most "neutral" character voice, as he speaks evenly, plainly, and with just a slight tinge of formality.

I create these speech patterns for every character that I write with based on observations from canon game lines, but also a heavy dose of fanon from other fics that I read. So really, I guess this answer isn't so different from the one I gave regarding the voices I hear in my head- it's sort of a blend of everything, with a healthy dose of my own fine-tuning to even it out.

I could make a whole other post on how I flesh out a character's internal narration, but that's getting too far away from the question you actually asked, so I'll leave it at that.

[vivavivi]

I got someone who ACTUALLY worked on Shadow the Hedgehog to come on stream and talk about the game! Check it out! Theres some VERY interesting insights, and even a look into SEGA's dire situation back in 2005! Please check it out!

SHADOW THE HEDGEHOG WITH DEVELOPER COMMENTARY

Edited by Luke

Thumbnail art by @rj24-art

More credits in the description!

[jacob-mydear]

Creative Director Ashraf Ismail and Narrative Director Darby McDevitt give in-depth commentary on the Assassin’s Creed Valhalla cinematic trailer

[madoka-magica-rebirth]

thedarkestsalvation replied to your post: Where does this leave other characters? Like...

//I had completely forgotten about her. I’m so glad someone remembers. The name was Venari, but a placeholder mostly. Go ahead, take her, if you want.

( Plops her into the queue of characters and adds you to the credits page )

[cutedork]

here are some of the ~slides~ from my @fantasticarcade talk this yr! if u wanna see how i developed pipsqueak (the floppy egg-loving dog game in FA's 2017 bundle) i urge u to check it out here! 

[lizardhazardgames]

Your Royal Gayness - The journey so far Your Royal Gayness is a humorous (WIP) indie game for PC. You play as a prince who needs to manage his fairytale kingdom, but the prince is gay so you need to come up with excuses to avoid marrying a princess.

Read about how the project morphed from a simple game jam idea to a full, commercial game project under the cut.

A small introduction first. Nice to meet you, I’m Salli Loikkanen, better known as Aviala online. I study game design at university level, but I’m doing a special modified “program” that lets me gain study credits from working in my field. I have a few gamejam titles under my name, and I’ve been involved in a few commercial game projects before (though none of them have been released as of yet). I’m an artist and a designer, but most importantly, the project lead, producer and project manager for Your Royal Gayness.

I started working on Your Royal Gayness in Summer 2016. I was really excited - a game about a gay prince who needs to come up with excuses to avoid marrying a princess! What a great idea!

It was supposed to be a very small game jam project, and I was gonna get an artist friend to help me out a bit, but mostly, I was going to do everything myself - coding, art, writing, design, everything. I’m not quite sure where the summer went and what exactly I was doing, but needless to say that I didn’t get very far with the game - just a half-finished game design document and a few sketches.

However, when autumn came and I needed to start working on a game for a school course, the project popped back into my mind. I pitched the project to some second-year students since my classmates had their own ideas, and managed to gather a team of 6 people (we’ve gained a few more along the way after that!). I tried to give each person a role they’d be happy with, and apparently it was a success, since no-one’s complained! :’) The way we work is that we try to have a meeting each week and discuss our progress, and what needs to be done next. It’s incredebly useful to be able to meet up IRL instead of just online, and I recommend it to everyone who can manage to gather their indie team in one place.

Work has been somewhat slow so far since everyone has been studying and only working on the game on their free time, but we’ve also got a lot of work done. You should see our google drive - it’s full of documents and files and folders and subfolders, worth hundreds of hours of hard work. Too bad it’s all confidental!

What we desperately need from now on is more time for work, so I talked to my study advisor at Uni and she helped me to make time for work - I’ll be able to work on the game almost full time from now on! My team has also promised to work on the game as their practical training, so almost everyone will be able to work full time on May - that’ll be when we get the biggest chunk of work for the actual game done. The next step for us is a crowdfunding campaign. It’s scary and takes a lot of work, but it’s also very exciting. We’re going to keep our goal small, but hope that we reach some stretch goals - the more money we raise, the better the game will be. Wish us luck!