davidn | Team Hatoful presents the Undertale Demo

Raven, I respect your choice to bow out. I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we would still appreciate your presence and some commentary, but if you feel that your experience with Undertale is not worth the time invested, don't do it for our sakes.

The thread above this comment makes me think that the team needs to just sit down and have a big talk about what direction we want to go in. If we want to continue playing games together, then we have to make a solid decision about the kinds of games we want to experience together. Genres, themes, so on and so forth. If it happens that we just have to lie dormant for a while, or do things in different groups, then I think we have to decide pretty soon.

I propose we sit down in IRC some evening this week or next and really figure out what our goals are as a team now that our main project is done. I feel a little pressured now that we have a surprisingly large number of fans. I feel as if we have to do something on a fairly regular basis for the people who enjoy our work. If I am responsible for our public face, and if I have taken on some leadership roles, I have to know what our boundaries are. I need to know that I am doing okay and not, in fact, dragging people into something they don't want to do.

There are a lot of games out there, and to have 5 different people agree on what to play is just like ordering toppings on pizza. It's even worse if it's a mostly blind experience. We also need to figure out what we are doing next week, which is our next clear Saturday - How are we running the good ending's play, how long might that take, and will we do one (or both?) of the manga readings? What will we do *next* after Undertale?

>demand anchovy.

Anchovies were actually not carried at Undisclosed Pizza Restaurant, but we did have linguica, which is a favorite around here. ...The one a few cities over had chorizo, the spicier variant.

But no anchovy.

Chorizo is even better. I'll take that instead.

The last thing I'd want is for people to feel pressured about this whole thing - it's fantastic that the planned low-key Hatoful readthrough took off as much as it did and that we gained fans from it, but our focus should always be on enjoying ourselves and doing these things among friends, and I don't want this taking up more of people's weekends than it's worth for them (personally, I was very glad to get a break from video editing at the end of Holidaystar, even though what I then did with the time was to start three further video projects).

I think our mistake over the last month when we couldn't one hundred percent agree on anything was that we were actively looking for a game to voice, rather than what made the Hatoful experience stand out in the first place - voicing what we already knew was a very special game. So we may not know definitively what we want to do for a while, and I'm okay with that... the fans will wait, especially if it means that in the end we produce something more enjoyable :)

So you are more in favor of just waiting until something amazing comes along? The problem with Hatoful is that few games really match its level of writing. It's literally just like Matt Smith having to follow David Tennant's Doctor. It's hard for ANYONE to succeed after a star like him. If we wait for a game on equal par we may have to wait a *long* time, and we would also expect things out of games that shouldn't be expected.

We certainly did start off high... too high to match! I enjoyed Undertale even though it didn't have the same potential for everyone to voice and interact like Hatoful... little things that last a couple of hours like that are nice to do, without committing to it being a huge project like the Hatoful games were - when the next big thing comes along, I think we'll know it, but in the meantime we can do things that we discover and seem interesting, if everyone in the group is sufficiently interested. Though as said above, it would be nice to do a game that wasn't quite so emotionally scarring at some point.

We could always allow for ... smaller sub-group side projects, if getting all five of us to agree on a project is too impossible (a virtual certainty when the question of emotional content comes up while Raven and I are on the same team.) Raven doesn't want to do the second part of Undertale and I have no intention of making him, but we don't need to just cancel the project outright because it's no longer unanimous, do we? Conversely, everyone else seemed to think the Professor Layton series would work except for me, but why should I stand in the way of the others having their fun (if I'm wrong)? Budgie once proposed 12 to the Moon and I was all for it while the others shot it down for being too sad ... can't Budgie and I just go do it? And you and I still need to play through a co-op NES or SNES game at some point ... :)

I'm with Budgie in worrying that we are never going to find another project that all five of us really want to do at the exact same time. We keep saying to just wait for that special magical amazing thing to come along ... well, that's what Undertale was, for me. I'm sorry to anyone for whom that didn't work out, but I'm glad we got to do it (including hopefully concluding it with the good ending next time? Hopefully?) If we don't chain everyone to this idea of a unanimous all-or-nothing approach, then we can do a lot more of the projects individual members are particularly excited about. No more disappointment if your idea gets shot down, no more awkwardness if your idea gets adopted and we do it but the others don't appear to be having fun.

Think Team Hatoful under the Freebird Rule (appropriately enough.)

Edit: The current barrier to this idea, of course, is that, well, you're the only one who knows how to and is set up to record things ... but we can figure something out if we have to, that's not insurmountable.

Edited 2013-06-28 00:40 (UTC)

Well, we certainly are fabulous.

I was almost about to say outright that Professor Layton would never work, and then remembered that it... really did have a quite strong visual-novel side to it. But the important characters in each game all have voices anyway! There are so... many, many ingredients that have to come together to make the perfect game to voice, you're right, and Hatoful might just have been unique...

Loosening it is definitely going to be the way to go, because I don't want anyone thinking about it as an obligation - nothing to stop us releasing sub-group stuff under the same name, now that you mention it :) Recording has actually got a lot more simple since I got FRAPS to replace my previous mad setup - I can happily pass that knowledge on to anyone who feels like they've got enough space on their hard drive (though you'd also need a video editor).

Definitely think about NES/SNES games :) I noticed just now that Battletoads has a 2-player mode and I've always meant to play it - I have no idea what it is except it's reputed to be very frustrating. I'm not sure how well Internet play would work for something that fast-paced, though!

How would the posting etiquette go if you are not involved? We send you an edited video, you post under your account? Or should we really just get a team Youtube account and, possibly, give everyone access so we can just collectively deal with our own stuff?

How much raw video, and maybe even audio, does one Hatoful session generally net you?

That's a very good question! (Which is business-speak for "I have no idea") - posting all under one account rather than multiple personal ones would definitely keep the watchers from having to subscribe to a heap of channels. I hadn't really thought ahead to what my lack of involvement would imply :)

The Hatoful sessions I recorded with Camstudio 2 were, for hour-long videos, about 3GB each when you add up the size of the video (about 1.5GB) and the two audio recordings (750MB each). However, it depends on the codec you use - FRAPS doesn't use a compressor at all and so a five-minute video can be about 1GB, depending on the screen size, but this comes at the advantage of only minimally affecting the game speed (you can compress the video later). I would say you definitely need a dedicated partition of about 500GB to do it - I took an external hard drive apart and just installed that :)

You'll have to find a modified version of Battletoads. I'm almost completely positive that I've seen one before. The issue is that, apparently the game is so difficult that no 2-player team beta tested beyond the first half of the game. In one of the levels in the second half, the 2-P controls simple do not function. The level features a "chase," so the second player is immediately killed, and. . perhaps the screen doesn't scroll with the second player still so 1-P dies, too? Anyway, certainly 2-P will game over in this area. Which, you probably won't get to anyway; you're confidence is pretty impressive, from someone who knows the game. There is a modified version that enables full 2 player mode throughout the game; somewhere. .

Wow, that's... quite a thing to have missed! Did they just think "Nobody's going to get this far - ship it anyway..."

I think that's quite possible for it's age.

Okay, I knew I should have expanded the comments, because this is basically the same point I just tried to make. ;)

And about the capturing setup -- don't forget that David is going to this extra level of effort, splicing his audio out separately, AND the game audio out separately, which (while nice) a stream could probably do without, and I'd bet that most do.... Really all you need is Google Plus itself, it streams directly to youtube if you aren't interested in editing.... and even if you are, I'm pretty confident you could do it with FRAPS and MAYBE a second laptop for your microphone.... though I admit I'm kind of beat at the moment and less able to tease the theory all out than I thought I would be at the start of this paragraph. ;p

My recording setup got significantly simpler when I started using FRAPS (though bear in mind it can't hook into games that don't use DirectX/OpenGL, maybe one of the two, I can't really remember.) I had to record three different channels when I was using the manual screen-recording method, but now it's down to two - and FRAPS by some black magic has the ability to record from both microphone and speaker output at the same time if you choose to do it, and that would bring it to just one (with no need for a microphone laptop). The only reason I didn't was that I like having the game audio separate from my voice - it allows for editing that's just a little more professional, especially if I can eliminate any involuntary breathing/coughing noises on my part.

I forgot about Google Plus (which we may have to permanently, if they don't fix this horrendous feature and any other games are particularly keyboard-heavy!) - for an unedited play session, yes, that really is all you need.

I've also been thinking about the keyboard problem and wondering if I could get around it by running the stream from a computer other than the one I'm playing on, but having to expend energy on this is honestly vexing when the system worked perfectly before!

Surely if it's audio-based detection, you'd have to use acoustic isolation anyway? You'd have to find some way to route only your voice and not ambient clicking into the microphone…

Blaaagh! I forgot it might be audio-based (I haven't tested it completely because the "feature" only turns on when you have four or more people in a hangout). If it really is done like that, then I've no idea.

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premchaia_pre4 - 2013-06-28 18:03 (UTC) - Expand

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davidn - 2013-06-28 18:20 (UTC) - Expand

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premchaia_pre4 - 2013-06-28 18:33 (UTC) - Expand

If we're doing Undertale mixed in with our next Hatoful (manga) recording, I'm certainly not going to up and leave when we get to that point -- I just don't think I'd be interested in bothering to attend a session put together for nothing but Undertale. (Which obviously isn't an issue at the moment since we're basically finished the demo, but I mean in the future when the full game comes out.)

I share your feeling about the pressure from the fans, but actually I have the opposite response -- rather than putting out regular content, I feel like we have a responsibility to put out quality content.... if I subscribed to someone, I would rather get a great video every few months than mediocre ones all the time....

I think the solution here is not to worry about the strict integrity of "team hatoful" per se..... not in the sense of "breaking up the band" but in terms of band members having side projects. I think David's got the right idea, he's doing videos alone, or with other people, as the project suits.... we've already established that five people doing Undertale was a bit of overkill anyway, so I think the way to have frequent content AND good content is to not be afraid to have smaller groups doing other things instead of feeling forced to find something that exactly all five of us always want to do. (Frankly I think applying the name 'team hatoful' to non-hatoful videos was a bit of a mistake in the first place, and just led to the current awkward situation.... I can certainly understand the desire to keep providing videos to an audience that's going to be starved for content until the next game once we're done the manga, but maybe it would make more sense to put videos like that on the tumblr as "here's some other things the Team Hatoful members are doing!" rather than "hello we're most of team hatoful even though this game isn't a hatoful game!")

I didn't mean to imply that we have to keep banging out videos. Quality work is definitely the priority, I think that we just don't know our voice yet. We're pretty much two games in - that's not a lot to go on.

I think the biggest issue is that we're all very new to this and are learning what works and what does not as it occurs. Now we know that forcing roles for each member doesn't work, and we're going to have to learn what does work naturally as we eventually cover more material.

Yes, we do need to think about our name - but, do we have a better name to call ourselves?

I more meant, that we can "call ourselves" whatever based on the particular video and people involved (and we can mention it to the Team Hatoful fanbase too, but that there doesn't necessarily have to be a consistent name put on anything that any of us does. There certainly could be one if you prefer.... but it seems like that's the start of all this awkwardness.... like what if three Team Hatoful members wanted to do a game, with a fourth person.... is that fourth person then "in" the team? Or should we just only call it Team Hatoful when we're doing Hatoful, and everything else is just side projects that aren't related :P)

Well, we started out with an fan-made name. It only came about because people wanted to talk about us. I'm okay with not really having a name outside of Hatoful things. If we want to stick together as a group, we can create a new name that's a lot more generic. But then we have the same problem we have now - getting 5 people to agree on a game to play and scheduling it.

The sensible thing to do is, ideally, to only do Hatoful stuff with our current name and branch off onto unrelated channels the rest of the time for side projects. We keep our own projects and schedules this way, but should we have something like "this is what team hatoful has been up to individually" on the tumblr page?

That's what I was trying to say, yes. :)

“It's a tern.” “Does it use ternary logic” “<.<”

Team Hatoful presents the Undertale Demo - Part 4

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