{"id":192,"date":"2017-10-19T12:28:53","date_gmt":"2017-10-19T12:28:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mooneyestudios.com\/news\/blog\/buffalo-in-a-china-shop-band-aids-and-anniversaries\/"},"modified":"2021-04-20T13:28:04","modified_gmt":"2021-04-20T13:28:04","slug":"buffalo-in-a-china-shop-band-aids-and-anniversaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooneyestudios.com\/news\/games\/lostember\/buffalo-in-a-china-shop-band-aids-and-anniversaries\/","title":{"rendered":"Lost Ember Dev Blog #3 &#8211; Buffalo in a China Shop, Band-Aids and Anniversaries"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"h:hey-beautiful-people\">Hey beautiful people,<\/p>\n<p>Here comes your update on Lost Ember\u2019s development. Please be prepared, it\u2019s not all shiny. Let\u2019s start by&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<h3 id=\"h:ripping-off-the-band\">Ripping off the band-aid<\/h3>\n<p>The past milestone, we\u2019ve been doing a whole lot of planning and even though we\u2019d been making good progress until now, the predictions did not leave us very happy. Even though we\u2019re doing our very best and are working hard to bring you Lost Ember as soon as humanly possible, we\u2019re not going to be ready to launch in March, as we had initially hoped. Or at least, the version that we\u2019ll have in March, is not what we\u2019d like to give you. You deserve better and that\u2019s why we are currently planning to have Lost Ember in your hands more towards Fall of 2018. We cannot wait for you guys to get your hands on it, so realising this was painful and telling you is not easy. But it looks like our initial planning was tinted by wishful thinking a bit too heavily. We are now confident our plan is solid and doable. We sincerely hope you understand and continue to trust us to make Lost Ember the best game it can be.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/jh_6QBdljgk\" width=\"800\" height=\"350\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<h3 id=\"h:help\">Help!<\/h3>\n<p>To ensure we don\u2019t suffer any further delays, we went and looked for more helping hands and we found an amazing animator, Steven Bodnar, who we\u2019re very happy to be working with for the coming 3 months. He has been working\u00a0as a character animator and animation director on projects like Bioshock: Infinite, Prey, Battleborn and Borderlands. He is also a really nice guy that is super stoked to work on Lost Ember\u2019s animals. We\u2019re excited to see his first animations in game. He\u2019s already done some test animations that looked awesome. And as we didn\u2019t have too much experience with animations prior to Lost Ember, Steven is most likely going to do a much better job at it \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;\" src=\"https:\/\/ksr-ugc.imgix.net\/assets\/018\/706\/016\/35875c40203aaa03917503793e542884_original.jpg?w=639&amp;fit=max&amp;v=1507733900&amp;auto=format&amp;q=92&amp;s=14c817d91bb3213acc2521ebb83779e5\" alt=\"\" width=\"348\" height=\"348\" \/><\/p>\n<p>On top of that we also got a marketing expert to work with us for a couple of days who helped us make a proper marketing plan. He\u2019s also going to be assisting us again whenever we have questions or need his advice, which feels very good. He\u2019s been in the industry for a long time and previously worked as a marketing director and head of marketing for small indies like EA \ud83d\ude00 so it\u2019s great to have him in our corner. His name is Stephen Hey. Another awesome Stephen! Although the Steven\/Stephen situation is a little confusing to be honest \u201cDid you say Steven\u2019s at a convention right now?! I thought he promised to work on the digging animation.\u201d \u201cWrong Stephen\u201d \u201cOh\u201d It\u2019s embarrassing \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;\" src=\"https:\/\/ksr-ugc.imgix.net\/assets\/018\/706\/023\/8520ae07c497dfda348f37a08ba63812_original.jpg?w=639&amp;fit=max&amp;v=1507733929&amp;auto=format&amp;q=92&amp;s=50e2d82df2230980e03f3611cf173106\" alt=\"\" width=\"639\" height=\"494\" \/><\/p>\n<h3 id=\"h:have-you-done-anythi\">Have you done anything apart from planning?!<\/h3>\n<p>We sure did. Matthias is continually making the world prettier and prettier and making level design adjustments following our feedback from the last playthroughs. He\u2019s also continuously building more assets to fill our world with life. Pascal has put a lot of work into movement controls and cameras, as well as putting all the dummy VO by Florens into the game. Max has been doing some awesome animatics, on top of concepts, to give a feel of what some of the most important cutscenes could look and feel like. One of those animatics nearly made Florens cry, but don\u2019t tell anyone I told you \ud83d\ude09 Tobi has been working on everything afaik, that\u2019s what he does. We\u2019ve also added some placeholder music in that reflects the mood we\u2019re going for. I think we achieved the goal of making our \u201cemotional prototype\u201d, as we called it, it\u2019s slowly starting to feel like a proper journey \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;\" src=\"https:\/\/ksr-ugc.imgix.net\/assets\/018\/706\/085\/b1697da7ffaac4f0c0ff9452a493908b_original.jpg?w=639&amp;fit=max&amp;v=1507734111&amp;auto=format&amp;q=92&amp;s=044b39a8afc3b1cc913ac9a7feef2875\" alt=\"\" width=\"639\" height=\"359\" \/><\/p>\n<h3 id=\"h:and-what-now\">And what now?<\/h3>\n<p>In the current milestone, we are planning to do less planning \ud83d\ude09 We think we\u2019ll be making a big step forward on multiple animals soon, now that we have animation help. Hooray! We\u2019re also planning to finalize the story. Well, as far as that is possible at this point, it\u2019s probably not going to be final final. Our sound wizards in Scotland will be starting work on sound design, as we were able to send them some more footage from the game. It\u2019s going to be so cool to have more sound in the game, can\u2019t wait! Even adding the dummy VO and placeholder music last milestone did so much for the feel of the game. And as always, we\u2019ll pretty up the world bit by bit, there\u2019s still a whole lot of prettying to do \ud83d\ude42 We\u2019ll be putting a lot of work into the companion as well this milestone. Having him at your side throughout the journey makes it feel that much more complete. And we\u2019ll also be putting some more work into key story moments in the game and make them feel more complete. On the non-game-dev side, we\u2019ll be on the look-out for a publisher in Japan and China. As we still haven\u2019t reached the financial goal to be able to stay independent, we thought it might be a good idea to self-publish in Europe und US and find a partner to help with Asia, hoping that this would also come with some financial help. So fingers crossed and should you by any chance have useful connections, please let us know ^^<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;\" src=\"https:\/\/ksr-ugc.imgix.net\/assets\/018\/706\/066\/7194d6e532320609f82acae49fbe2e98_original.jpg?w=639&amp;fit=max&amp;v=1507734075&amp;auto=format&amp;q=92&amp;s=985ec23d7f0e7072cc8c2ec7db37b2ec\" alt=\"\" width=\"639\" height=\"340\" \/><\/p>\n<h3 id=\"h:so-if-youre-working\">So, if you\u2019re working so hard why is there so little to show?<\/h3>\n<p>Honestly, we would love to show you everything! But we also want you to be able to enjoy Lost Ember at release and be surprised here and there. So we\u2019re trying to not spoil everything from the start. We certainly cannot show the animatics. New areas or even assets would give away way too much about the experience. It\u2019s like we\u2019re working on an awesome surprise for you and it\u2019s not gonna be awesome if it\u2019s not a surprise, so we have to bite our tongue constantly to not spoil it. In fact, I\u2019m biting my tongue right now.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;\" src=\"https:\/\/ksr-ugc.imgix.net\/assets\/018\/706\/113\/833a0d01bd8a0ab7af5bcee28605c889_original.jpg?w=639&amp;fit=max&amp;v=1507734160&amp;auto=format&amp;q=92&amp;s=3162e51dc48af62e0f91dcb968ae9a5e\" alt=\"\" width=\"639\" height=\"359\" \/><\/p>\n<h1 id=\"h:here-comes-your-upda\"><\/h1>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hey beautiful people, Here comes your update on Lost Ember\u2019s development. Please be prepared, it\u2019s not all shiny. Let\u2019s start &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mooneyestudios.com\/news\/games\/lostember\/buffalo-in-a-china-shop-band-aids-and-anniversaries\/\" class=\"btn btn-readmore\">Read More <span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Lost Ember Dev Blog #3 &#8211; Buffalo in a China Shop, Band-Aids and Anniversaries&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":293,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lostember"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooneyestudios.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooneyestudios.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooneyestudios.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooneyestudios.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooneyestudios.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooneyestudios.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":294,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooneyestudios.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions\/294"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooneyestudios.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooneyestudios.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooneyestudios.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooneyestudios.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}