i thought this was an extremely good update. one of the few NTS games going right now that isn't afraid of having things ACTUALLY HAPPEN in his game. an NTS game with NTS in it... what a fucking revelation!!!
nice work dev/devs, really good stuff.
here's a gentle criticism, intended to be constructive: i've heard multiple devs talk about how much effort group scenes are. and this chapter had a lot of group scenes in it. and i must say... they weren't the best part at all! group scenes take a ton of effort and rarely pay off the way devs are hoping. i'm thinking of the volleyball game as an example here. my suggestion is to consider during the writing outline phase, "how much effort am i going to have to sink into this? is the scene really truly worth it?" and try to nudge the story into a direction that doesn't require so many ultra-high-effort scenes.
i understand group scenes are important for establishing a group dynamic and to have the characters meet, so some of this is necessary, and i think abyss has earned the benefit of the doubt. this is not a slam, just a gentle "hey, maybe consider this" tip from someone who deals with scope creep/risk-reward calculations in a development context professionally
good stuff fellas
We have no intention to sacrifice cool ideas for expediency, if Abyss has a cool idea we don't want to go "Ah, can we actually do that?" we want to go "OK, how do we get that done?". If the best creators in the AI space weren't doing these things - and as I'm friends with BCG, DTZ and on the proofreading team for MNGF I know all the top creators in the space - then ultimately our games would become the generic AI trash so many people accuse of anyway. But we use every tool at our disposal, photoshop (lots of it), various controlnets, inpaint, inpaint sketch, whatever tool we can to create a coherent, exciting visual narrative. We don't want to see AI as a limitation in what we make, that would suck, and so we ignore the "limitations" and work past them.
Some people would be happier if we simplified the visuals and put out the same amount of images in half the time, gave up on cool ideas like the volleyball, like the
like some of the other complex images we work with (and it's sometimes hard for people outside this work to determine what is and isn't complex). But all these devs are creatives, despite working with AI, they don't want to be chained by what they "can" and "can't" do, and that's what makes them as good as they are, at least for myself and many others.
We will post a timelapse tomorrow of Pepega's (one of two of us who help Abyss with visuals) work on one of the images for the final scene. I think people might be curious to see just one of (many) different types of work that is sometimes done for certain things. Although the type of work varies so much depending on what we're doing and who's doing it.
