The Directors Special Podcast

[Kristy Green]

Hello everyone

We finally got our four directors together and put your questions to good use and made our first podcast.

You can listen to it here. We are looking to get it out there more (like iTunes and such) but we wanted you to be the first to hear it.

Please enjoy and feel free to give us your feedback

I do realise we only got through about half the questions that were asked, so there will hopefully be a The Directors Special Podcast Part Two in the future.

Here are the show notes:

Embers of Caerus Podcast - Show One

Introduction Music


Introduction

Rob (Creative Director)
Lee (Art Director)
Dave (Technical Director)
Arthur (Audio Director)


Part One – Background

Where did Forsaken Studios and Embers of Caerus come from?


Part Two – Questions

Questions from the community:

Development:
Slash/Stone Dog/Loki - How well do you think making EOC is going eg How much progress are you making, has there been any unexpected problems?
Thradok/Stone Dog - Just a question about the team. You say the team is 55+ right now, but many of those people are working part time. Once you get boat loads of money from investors, a giant office tower, etc., how many people will be working there as their full time job? I know some people are planning to move there, but will everyone be expected to or can you get by with only a small office space and still having most people be remote workers? And I guess where will the office be, and why?
Stone Dog - I believe I read somewhere that a very tentative release date was set for 2015. Is that still the target year for release?
Slash - When do you estimate that you will start working inside the game world, developing/testing animations and other in-game systems?
Slash - are you going to be updating the engine in regular basis? What happens when it gets outdated, that goes for the other little software that go with it, like speedtree etc ?
Stone Dog - Did you use a "top-down" approach in creating the EoC environment (by that I mean did you first create your vision of the EoC world and then created the various regions that make up the world and then filled each region in with population [both NPC and wildlife] as you saw fit) or did you come up with NPC lore and wildlife ideas first and then place those in various areas to create the world you have now? – Rob to answer
Stone Dog - What do you find to be the most daunting challenge in being the Technical Director for a project such as EoC and what background work have you done that made you the best choice for this position? - Dave to answer
Stone Dog - I've seen artists renditions for models from other games that looked spectacular but when the game itself released the in-game models just didn't seem to hold the same vibrancy as the screenshots. Can you tell us what goes into creating the concept artwork and how that ends up coming to life and from there, how much (if any) of the detail in the original artwork is perhaps lost or toned down to make the models easier to work with and/or easier on the servers in terms of polygon counts? - Rob/Lee to answer
kupfer - I read a Red`s post (Rob or Dave maybe? no clue) about making it an adult-only game, anything new about that?
Stone Dog - When it comes to immersion game sounds are as important as the visual cues that the players see. I'm not just talking about hearing footsteps or listening for animals moving in the underbrush, I'm also referring to ambience sounds such as water running in a babbling brook and even the ambience music that many games have included. What plans do you have to include as many "natural" sounds as possible (again, referring to the sound of wind, water, perhaps even having the sound of trees falling if a lumberjack is out felling them) and will you be looking at having ambience music to set the mood for a given region? - Arthur to answer

PvP
Stone Dog - When a game first goes live everyone who plays is generally on a level playing field. But after a few weeks/months, new players can find themselves so far behind that they have a hellish life ahead of them while they try to either catch up or become viable (at least in PvP.)
Stone Dog - If the devs can talk about it now, what plans do you have in "protecting Noobs" to avoid what I call the Darkfall Syndrome (that being the endless griefing of brand new players by seasoned, high-end vets who have nothing better to do but drive new players from the game.)?
Boots - Will there be siege equipment or ropes or ladders to climb castle or town walls?

Dungeons
stubs - Will there be traps and puzzles in dungeons? Maybe some traps which can be detected and disarmed by those with the necessary skill? Also, would be players be able to re-arm traps after passing to cover their ass?
Stubs - Will dungeons also have a "public instance" or will they be part of a seamless world?

Weather/Seasons
Stone Dog - Will the weather system be server side? - Rob/Dave to answer
kupfer - Anything decided about the day and night cycle or changing seasons?

Account Management
Stone Dog - Recently there have been numerous instances of brute force attempts to hack gaming accounts (Darkfall immediately comes to mind) and yet I still run into games that only allow alpha-numeric passwords. Will EoC allow symbols for our account passwords to help prevent brute force hacking attempts?
Stone Dog - Are there any plans to have EoC available on a Mac platform or is it just easier to have Mac users utilize one of the Windows utilities that are available these days?

Beyond EoC
Mark Hope - If Embers of Caerus is a raging, runaway hit (as we all know it will be!), what other games would you like to develop? Another MMO? A single-player game? What about console games?


Summary/Closing Off

Any final words
Reminder that this is a special podcast
How to find us
Goodbyes!


Closing Music

[Yeti]

Woah! Nice this will give me something to listening too when taking the new years bath!

-
Well it was a nice long podcast that i enjoyed , happy new year!

[ghost]

happy new year folks , and pretty cool podCast

[Thradok]

Had a good listen, a few laughs, and learned a few new things. Perfect!

[drakedude]

My speakers, my mike, and the new mike i bought aren't working on my computer. FFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU! Looks like I'll have to wait untill some brave and merciful soul types it up or puts it on youtube so i can listen on my xbox, hmmmm?

[Stone Dog]

Awesome podcast folks. Thanks so much for taking the time to put this out to us. One promise that I'll try to keep...I'll see if I can't find a way to keep my questions to less than 1,000 words next time. :P

My speakers, my mike, and the new mike i bought aren't working on my computer. FFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU! Looks like I'll have to wait untill some brave and merciful soul types it up or puts it on youtube so i can listen on my xbox, hmmmm?

I still have nine days left on the trial of the program I used for Dave's podcast so I do plan on converting this cast to text ASAP. Keep in mind that it is the holidays and I do have in-laws coming here in a day or two so I wouldn't expect to see it up tonight. Add to that this cast is about 30 minutes longer than the last one I transcribed and I'm guessing it will probably take a full day to finish.

I'm also going to transcribe Rob's first Sandbox podcast for anyone who's interested.

[Bella_Fein]

<---- Did not find the divorce bit so amusing. Everyone's gonna hate me

[Thradok]

<---- Did not find the divorce bit so amusing. Everyone's gonna hate me

Haha, just focus on the internet backbone reasoning :P

[kupfer]

My fault...wasn´t my intention to suggest kinky features

The only thing beyond 18+ over here is the Index.

At least you will have enough applicants for the GM-job.

[Saint]

finally, thanks.

Edit: DAVE ! You better give me one of those business cards or the whole serie because the sounded quite sexy !
Awesome podcast