<Nistur>
someone should ban me from thinking while walking around with MiniNisturette
<Nistur>
my project idea has now grown into three smaller project ideas
<Regenaxer>
Good thing ;)
<Nistur>
:P
<Nistur>
I decided to split my backend into several different discrete services, an authentication/user system, one for user data (achievements, profiles, inventory etc) which will eventually be extended into some gameplay stuff, and then one for asset distribution, like a mini CDN. The reason being that, it should be easy to split the things up now and develop them separately. They could be on the same physical
<Nistur>
hardware, but if I ever want to, for example, shard the game side, I can maintain a central auth server, and I could provide assets for best latency/bandwidth... also load balance etc. Not that those things are important in _any_ way now, or for the foreseable future, but it just means I could, in theory, scale far more easily without rewriting architecture :P
<beneroth>
sounds like a plan
<beneroth>
fits picolisp way of work
<Nistur>
:)
<beneroth>
did you work on "Jumanji The video game" released 2019 ?
<beneroth>
or is there a second Jumanji game?
<Nistur>
that's the one
<Nistur>
why?
<beneroth>
ok, I just got it for the Switch, played it with gf yesterday evening
<Nistur>
aha :P
<beneroth>
I figured out it is a rouge-like arena game.. and I guess that is all, right?
<beneroth>
not bad.. but less than I expected :P
<Nistur>
not really
<Nistur>
I think the problem is that it looks like it's targetted at an older audience
<beneroth>
yeah
<Nistur>
the target audience was always 10-12 year olds
<beneroth>
ah okay
<Nistur>
and as such it was reasonably low budget
<Nistur>
we made the mistake of not putting much stuff in for older players
<beneroth>
well good to play with my gf who is not a huge gamer, she grow up in middle age-like farm in the mountains
<Nistur>
we could have gotten a lot with more hints to the the original movie or something, and some cheap things in to add a bit more percieved depth for older players
<beneroth>
but the information about the game makes it look more similiar to the old playstation "return of the mummy" games
<beneroth>
aye
<Nistur>
but as the target was always 10-12, we didn't really think to
<beneroth>
though not bad that at least it has re-play-value
<Nistur>
it's not roguelike unfortunately. We did play with making randomly generated maps, but it is VERY difficult to have procedural content as ingaging as curated content
<beneroth>
true
<Nistur>
so it has 4 maps, and that is it
<Nistur>
on hard, they are still pretty tough, so to get all achievements it will probably still take a while
<beneroth>
yeah, good enough, but less than expected :)
<beneroth>
but still nice to have a game one of my friends worked on :)
<Nistur>
we had plans for, if it did well, to add things like a horde mode in, and more levels etc etc etc
<beneroth>
ah so you say the maps are not re-arranged internally?
<Nistur>
hmmmmm
<Nistur>
they are and they aren't :P
<beneroth>
yeah one always has more ideas than budget. that is even true for boring business software
<Nistur>
the buildings for each map are always the same
<Nistur>
the collectables, the enemies etc, they can change, but there are only 2 variations (limited by the fact that we only had 2 designers, and a couple of months to set up all the levels)
<beneroth>
ok, I suspected something like that
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<beneroth>
we just played through the jungle arena on lowest difficulty
<beneroth>
we both really missed to have a minimap
<beneroth>
that's a piece which is really missing
<Nistur>
in THEORY the variation system I built could support n variations, and could do any number of things, not just the enemies, and collectables (although the actual layout would have been more difficult due to level streaming)
<beneroth>
could be a central one, like in the mario kart games
<Nistur>
but yeah, restricted budget/resource
<beneroth>
understandable
<Nistur>
hahaha, we had a minimap for a while
<beneroth>
no?
<beneroth>
fuck
<Nistur>
but we removed it as it made it FAR too easy
<beneroth>
why not a setting?
<Nistur>
the point is that you have to search and find things
<Nistur>
the lead designer was dead set against the minimap
<beneroth>
well I wouldn't had the artefacts on the map, just the layout of the rooms and the other players, so you find your friends again
<beneroth>
just mario kart style
<Nistur>
you can find your friends anyway, they have pips around the edge of the screen?
<beneroth>
we lost us several times, because the environment looked quite similiar. and the NPCs always just followed one person, so the other pretty well managed to get lost within enemies
<beneroth>
my gf really liked that you put the hippo in
<Nistur>
those animals...
<Nistur>
they were obviously a requirement from the licensee
<beneroth>
aye
<Nistur>
they wanted FAR more, but animals need bespoke animation etc, so were pretty damned expensive to get in
<beneroth>
the german off-speaker has a very annoying dutch accent though xD
<Nistur>
and the AI for them caused no end of problems :P
<beneroth>
I see
<Nistur>
oh, would you like to hear something stupid?
<beneroth>
sure. I'm used to, I read the government statements about corona xD
<Nistur>
haha
<beneroth>
just be aware this channel is public and recorded
<Nistur>
so, the game is translated into: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish (EU), Arabic, Russian, Japanese, Spanish (NA) and Portuguese (Br)... I think that's all... the publisher kept adding more every month or two... The translations were done by an outsource company in... Romania that the publisher paid for. The producer in charge of the project at the publisher side is in... California. He arranged
<Nistur>
all the voice acting (only English, German, Spanish(EU))
<Nistur>
To begin with, in English, only Nigel (Rhys Darby) as the actual voice actor was able to be got within budget. For other characters, some we were allowed to use soundalikes, some we were not because reasons. So Dwayne Johnson for example is just 'generic tough guy' voice in English
<beneroth>
aye
<Nistur>
now, after the recording session for Spanish, the producer was on a call with us and told us that when they were recording, they noticed some things which were grammatically incorrect. So they fixed them and recorded the 'correct' Spanish lines. He is a native Spanish speaker, none of us spoke Spanish so we went *shrug* your call
<beneroth>
Dwanye Johnsons voice in german is the one I found ok
<beneroth>
haha
<Nistur>
when we got the audio in, we had a bug through from the localisation testers
<Nistur>
"half of the spanish audio is in mexican"
<Nistur>
not half of the characters
<Nistur>
just a random selection of lines
<beneroth>
wtf
<Nistur>
also, I think most of the voice actors had latin american accents, rather than EU spanish accents
<beneroth>
very likely
<Nistur>
yup :)
<Nistur>
so if one character in German sounds a bit Dutch, you got off lightly ;)
<beneroth>
facepalm
<Nistur>
but yeah, I was lead programmer on that game :)
<Nistur>
I didn't do a _lot_ of code, because we didn't have an in-house producer, so I did more management, running around like a headless chicken making sure the rest of the programming team were working on the right stuff etc
<Nistur>
but you have the one version I did most on :P When I started, it ran at... in an empty area in single player... 15fps on Switch
<Nistur>
when you got enemies, it dropped below 10fps
<Nistur>
and if you had 4 player split screen it went below 6fps
<Nistur>
I spent a LOT of time tweaking things to make it work on that thing :P
<Nistur>
it is, mostly however, the same as the PS4 version now
<Nistur>
turned down a few quality settings
<Nistur>
but kept all the gameplay in. Can have the same amount of enemies etc
<beneroth>
:)
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<anddam>
howdy
<Regenaxer>
Cheers anddam!
<beneroth>
hi anddam
<DKordic>
rick42 is not here...
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