Bear Unfiltered ep01

Heya gamers! Bearcore here!

For those who don't know me, I'm one of the 2 lead developers working on Third Crisis Neon Nights. c: I just wanted to reach out unfiltered like this and give a little update about where we're at with 0.3 and how things are looking!

Tldr up front: We're content complete for 0.3! Currently we are waiting for the voice actors to record the 2624 lines of excel sheet we exported from Unity. While that is happening, our sound designer is going through every level, making them sound immersive. Lastly, we are working through a backlog of about 50-100 bugs and minor improvements to the game.

From experience, the VA's take 3-4 weeks to complete recording, after which we still have to take the raw .wav files, post process, cut and get them into the game. If things line up great, we might have the full 0.3 release out by the end of November, but from experience, something always goes wrong, haha. We will do our best to get it into your hands as fast as possible!

With that out of the way, I wanted to just dump my thoughts on how things are going. Here's some music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLQ6Qv393mw

Owners

We have grown. A lot. From just me, Vils and Rated to a team of roughly 25 people. The amount of organising it takes to make sure that our studio runs well has increased by an insane amount. In the past, we usually didn't have a plan beyond a 2-page word document outlining the rough story beats for the entire game. Nowadays, planning has evolved a lot to feature things like flowcharts, progress trackers and more.

0.4 production pipeline

I didn't want these things at first. My ideal version of a dev team was a bunch of friends cracking away at a fun project, piece by piece. We tried that. It didn't go well. While it's amazing to work on a project with friends, when there's disagreements and no structure in place to help solve them, it is fertile ground for frustrations. These in turn makes it impossible to be productive.

A very simple example of this: An artist posts something in their channel. Three developers chime in and give different opinions. What should the artist do? No matter what ends up happening, someone's opinion needs to not be acted on, so that some decision is made at the end of the day. Who makes this decision?

This is easy when there's only 3 people on the team. If 2 have a disagreement, it's solved by talking a few sentences in the voice chat you're hanging out in anyways. But when there's 25 people, those who disagree likely don't have that luxury.

It only gets more difficult with a hierarchy in place. What if you disagree with your boss? While I like to think that hierarchies are rather flat in our team, I have seen this happen first hand.

To try and ease these issues, we're trying something new next update, which is having "owners" for pieces of content.

Illustration by LenChi

The idea behind this is to have someone who's tasked with bringing a part of the update to a releasable state. Someone who is looking after and keeping track of a piece of content. Not to make solo decisions on everything, but to compile the feedback and help the team make decisions.

It's completely new to us to have workflows like this, but I hope it helps with staying on track more.

Quality

Looking at the game we are creating makes me incredibly proud. The jump in quality from TC to TCNN that the team is pulling off is insane. From environment art over dialogue sprites to overworld sprites, writing, UI, sound, music, stability, user experience... While in TC we learned skills, we are now using them. Seeing gameplay of Third Crisis feels a bit surreal by now.

And yet, all this quality has its price.

I worry as likely almost every creator on Patreon worries: are we doing enough? Do we release enough content to keep you all happy? Are we doing the right thing in sacrificing some speed for quality? We are blessed with you all being such a stable and positive community supporting us. I know gamedevs in less fortunate positions. Tight deadlines, publishers, money people. In comparison we live a much calmer life.

In the later stages of creating Third Crisis, we were in a rhythm that allowed us to release nearly monthly. We did sacrifice quality for it. Often times content was basically unfinished before a later update would clean it up. We cut corners, almost always unintentionally. We just wanted to make story and lewd content and followed our instincts.

Now, our priorities have shifted a lot. Updates feel almost like DLC. Everything is playtested by many people over many iterations. Professionalism comes to mind. What we do now feels professional. It's nice to know that what we release is in a different universe when it comes to quality. But there is less of it. I hope you all supporting us are happy with what we are creating.

This update is only the second content update yet, so we have a lot to prove still.

I do believe that we will get faster as time moves on. Can we get back to a monthly release schedule? Probably not. But I do believe that it is possible to be faster than what we manage now. Especially once we reach the state in the story where we are planning to have a much more open experience in which adding smaller chunks of content will be much easier.

There's a lot more thoughts in my head. I've been thinking about recording devlog videos. But I do worry that my time is better spent creating content. Either way. Thank you for reading this collection of unfiltered bear thoughts! <3

If you have any thoughts, please leave them in the comments. I will read every single one.