Hey all,
Below you'll find the transcription for the last Chief Chat Mark uploaded to the Youtube channel on May 7th, 2019. I went back today and decided to transcribe this one, and will be transcribing future Chief Chats from now on! Some people have expressed the desire to have the chief chats readable, so hopefully this helps.
Original Chief Chat Video:
All stutters, "um"s, "ah"s, and the like, are left included
There was some grooming done to make the sentences more coherent, and I omitted the giveaway portions to stay focused on the core material.
Enjoy!
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Ronyn: So, Grummz, if you’re ready, take it away, huh?
Mark: All right. So, first up, I got some news. Many of you since the beginning of the project have asked for some sort of Patreon like system and for a long time, I was like, well, I don't know about, I don't know about doing anything like that. I don't know if that's going to be, you know, um ah too relevant here, but, uh, but we figured out, we figured out a way to add value. So a subscription pack for Em8er is going live, and it won't be on Patron. We've actually coded it into our own website, the my.em8er.com website. So, uh, what does this pack include? This pack includes the ah, it's basically the work in progress of the tabletop game, the novel that's coming out. Actually, I should say series of novels, as there's gonna be three written at first, and there's also going to be access to the prior build.
So not the art build, but the one prior to that. So anybody on the subscription plan gets access to older builds or an older build, uh, while backers get the most current build and you also get a custom skin. Either a weapons skin or a frame skin. And the 1st is going to be a weapons skin that's coming out for the plasma cannon. So you're going to see that very soon. In fact, that is launching Monday and for uh, for the price of $7.95 you can sign up to the Em8er subscription pack, and it's kind of like a little loot crate, and you're going to get the tabletop rule drafts as they were built chapter by chapter, and you're gonna get the books chapter by chapter, starting with Chapter One. The other thing is, you get access to private forums. And in the private forums you can give feedback on the book, the table top and the game, and we are gonna be looking at that just like we did for the vision book. Oh, you also get access to the vision book and that vision book will be updated over time as we further develop the game.
So you get basically every IP stuff that we're making, um, minus all the custom skins and minus the game, of course and minus the Beta and Alpha access. But you get, uh, development builds of the game that are one build behind and you get the tabletop rules. You get the living design book, you get the chapters of the novel as they come out, and you get to help us refine those. So, it's gonna be $7.95 and we're launching Monday, and it's a, ah, monthly thing. So with just the skin alone it is worth more than $7.95. So I think that that's a really good deal for everybody. And we tried to include something for everybody in here.
Ronyn: And that is Monday. This Monday, 3-4 days from now.
Mark: Yeah, very soon. In fact, I was just doing... I just put the first chapter of the book into Mobi form so you can download it for Kindle as well as pdf if you don't have a Kindle..
So, um, I came from a writer's summit last week , and this was, um, several Sci Fi military Sci Fi authors, in particular, some fantasy. Um, we had, um, writers for Gears of War 3 and several of the Star Wars books there. Uh, Karen Traviss and we had ah, Kevin J. Anderson, who did obviously Dune, with ah, Frank Herbert’s son, the sequels, he didn't write the original. And, um, and it was very illuminating to be in this room also, um, it was, it was just fantastic to see this and what they're doing is they’re revolutionising publishing by going indie. They’re going direct to Amazon, and they're doing very well. And so this, um, so everybody's sort of asking me, well, ah, you know, what about Ember? Like, where's the cross over there and everything else. And so I'm looking forward to actually, um, I've gotten a lot of advice from them about how to sort of create this and, um and there is, um, basically going to be a revolution, I think in game publishing along the lines of what's happening.
So the, um, jist of it is that, we want to create games that you guys really want. You want to make sure that we're hitting the themes that you guys really want. And one theme that I'm hearing over and over again is please give us as much of the original Firefall as you can, right? So this is why a lot of people are here is because they want that spiritual successor to Firefall. So we will be, um, right now we're working on tuning jetpacks. We have jetpacks working with the Omni frame. We're getting some animations in for that. And I'm talking to Justin Hanson, the original designer of the jetpacks in Firefall so that we can tune them to be very similar to the way they were and give you that freedom of movement everybody wants. I also want to say that we have looked at the Firefall abilities and we're going to put every Firefall ability into this game, every Firefall ability that you had on a frame will be in Em8er.
Ronyn: Uh, did you say every single one?
Mark: Every single one. I mean, obviously we have to have our own names and things like this. But if it was in Firefall, you can, you can expect it to be in Em8er as part of the tech tree. Now, our tech tree is much bigger than Firefall. So you're going to see a lot more varied abilities and stuff that you can slot in. And this was my huge takeaway from this, um, indie book conference. Hey, give people what they want, um and so I know that, you know, we used to have threads on, “gee, what's your favorite ability that you’d like to see ported over?”. We're just gonna bring all of them over. Um, we're gonna bring all of them over, and you'll be able to sit there and mix and match them. So unlike Firefall where you were limited, you can actually take Crater from an assault and mix it with the engineers Turrets if you wanted to. So I think those are some pretty, pretty cool things.
Ronyn: You've checked... [inaudible] hugely important... Like hold on, what?
Mark: Well, if you look at the number of abilities there in Firefall, there weren't actually that many. So I was looking over that list and going, why can't we just bring all of this over? And so we're going to do it. We're going to bring all of it over. So your favorite builds from from Firefall, you should be able to recreate in Em8er. So that's the first thing. Give people what they want. They want Firefall. The other thing that people want, um, are are some new themes and some tropes they want, um, sort of the direction we're going with military Sci Fi and the direction we're going with frames and the direction we're going with sort of the exosuit mecha theme, and they want to, they want to hunt giant Kaiju. They wanna hunt giant monsters. And so, for, to attract a new crowd, not just the Firefall crowd. We're gonna make sure people know about that. I mean, that's always been part of Em8er. It's in vision book, but our marketing really hasn't honed in and emphasized that so we're really gonna go after sort of the military Sci Fi aspect, the invasions, the warfare and the fact that you're hunting down these giant Kaiju. And of course, you're using what, you know, well, the drops from the Kaiju in order to go into the research trees and to build up from there.
So how's that sound so far, we hitting the right marks here? Good. This is this has given me a very powerful tool to sort of emphasize correctly the themes of the game, that are in the vision book and and how to lay them out. So that was the takeaway from that. And the other takeaway is that indie is the way to go. And the other thing that we took away from that is you need more frequent drops to your users that when you sell these books, what these guys are doing is they're coming out with a book a month. They're coming out with a book of month on, um, in order to satisfy, uh, people's appetites because people are binge readers. People are used to Netflix binging series, and So, um, you're going to see more frequent drops from us. They may not be as polished as the art demo. They could have some test pieces in there or some gray levels, but we're going to get you out, builds very quickly. And the next build that's coming out is the terrain build, and you're gonna have that in two weeks. So, there you go. Things are picking up.
Ronyn: Chief Chat is crazy. Important. What happened? You just, you just throwing bombs right now.
Mark: I am energized. I am. I am rejuvenated. If you haven't seen, John Galt asked, “where is this money going to?” It's going to the fact that we're late on and it's going to things like multiplayer, right? So basically, the additional runway and the additional time, um, let's us keep the lights on and and things running and we want to, basically, and if you haven't seen it yet, multiplayer is up and running, and John Galt did provide some matchmaking code for that, unseen. That was served as a template for what we used. Um, but Ben has put together the multiplayer demo, and we're working on that. And we are also, um, doing some more work on some things I can't talk about yet.
But with mostly art done. Animation is the final bottle neck. And so we're going to be using our, um, our mocap suit that you guys funded, and we are going to be adding some additional animations they want for some of the creatures. And so you're going to see a multipronged approach here. You're going to see more frequent builds from us. You're going to see the subscription system go live on Monday with additional IP, stuff that you haven't seen before. The Crixa tabletop rules, um, and there initially gonna ship with, you know, background all the way up to just ah, character stat generation. But you can give us your feedback on that in the private sessions and private sections of the forum. And you can also do ah, the book chapters. So you'll be getting those as they're written.
And one thing that we might do in the future is maybe an anthology with some of these writers that I met, so we'll sort of create, we've created the universe of Ember and maybe we'll let some of these authors play in it to sort of create an anthology of short stories or something. There's a lot of possibilities here, but what you're seeing here is the theme that we're taking the IP. And we're branching it out in multiple directions and unifying what we had before. So obviously Crixa the tabletop game goes into that and everything else.
You know, um, more subscription profits would be better. It would allow us to do more things. I would like to do more things. So, for example, for the military Sci Fi stuff, I I don't want to hold back, you know, I really want the flexibility to go kind of crazy and have fun and not take the IP all that seriously and yet not go as crazy as, say, Earth Defense Force. Right? For those of you who have played it, the Earth Defense Force is completely off the hook. E d f does crazy stuff. And I heard people here say they want e d f. So what I want to do is to raise enough money where we can actually in the demo show some additional things like we were planning for post launch i.e. I want to show that this is an actual military that's fighting against giant kaiju and ridiculous types of giant kaiju of all kinds that are demolishing base buildings and that you are fighting back not only with your exo frame suits, but with the tanks that we wanted, the aircraft that we wanted and giant Mechs.
Well, that's right. You heard me, Giant Mech.
Ronyn: You know, I I work out and am fit, but I might have a heart attack with all this stuff today. Um, good Lord.
Mark: people, people want it. People want the theme to go all the way. How can we have giant Kaiju if there aren't giant Mechs to go up against the giant Kaiju? So obviously, you know, obviously we would you know, the way these things will spawn is we have a system where not everything is spawnable, unless there is, for example, an invasion. And it's gotta be a certain category of invasion to warrant for that, for basically the, um, the Ark liege families to authorize a giant mech to be deployed. Then someone has to have been crazy enough to pour all the resource is in to build one of these things. I don't know. I don't know if that's gonna be an individual or if it's gonna be an army, but it's gonna be like a capital ship in Eve. You know how big a resource sink that is. And so you'll end up deploying that thing. And, um and this is what I want to do! So help me do it. I want to get crazy. The subscription plan is part of that because we don't have any art budget left. I want to get it in there and I want to show it off for the kickstarter.
And, um so, no, by ark liege, I mean the story version of the ark liege. Ark liege run the different [something] families that comprise the, um uh, the Gatestriders. So it's a bunch of clans, basically. And when I say, you know, um, the Ark Liege have to approve it, I mean, the story wise. That's the justification for, “hey, this invasion, we're not gonna authorize such expensive war machines, because that would be that would be ridiculous. so. I mean, this was always the dream for Firefall. To have this sort of, like, multi vehicle, uh, multi, multi front combat. And, um, in order to do this, you know, I would like to pitch this because I think it's really gonna appeal to the military side Sci Fi people to Planetside people and everything else. All right, so that's a lot of news for Em8er. I think we need to give away another five packs.
Ronyn: Oh, okay. Look at that. He knocks me out. He wants me to get up and be useful again. Hold on. Okay. Okay. Uh, all right, everybody. For those who don't know we are, we're about to give away five packs…
[Giveaway segment]
Mark: Upgrading is very kind of different. It's similar to when we had tiers in Firefall. But it's different because what there is is a giant research tech tree. And the more resources you pour in, the more branches of resources you can unlock. And then you can craft the recipes that you unlock from there. And by contributing resources to bases that have research facilities, you can increase the speed of your research. Yes, it's much more like early Firefall. The design that I presided over before all of it was changed.
Ronyn: right? Another raffle coming. Now here.
Ronyn: I think if everybody knew the kind of big news that was coming today, we would have twice as many people in this chief chat
Mark: Well, that's that's why we do this on video, right? We're gonna upload that, you know.
Mark: So if we do get enough momentum to do the uh, the tanks and the aircraft and the giant mech, then of course, we will have to do the Twitch controls the giant mech viral marketing that we've been planning. You guys remember that where Twitch gets, you know, different people get to control different limbs of the giant mech. And it's kind of like Coop. And you see what happens if they can learn to cooperate to walk together. I think it would be a great marketing thing, actually. Maybe we'll have different channels for different parts, so there’ll be the “I'm the feet channel” and “I am the Arms channel” and “I'm the head”. No, no, no. I don't mean in game. That's not really the way a giant mech will be controlled.
[Giveaway segment]
Mark: So the other thing I want to talk about is a little bit of the art style because the thumper and the Omni frame are kind of an anime art style. And I know some of you like a little more military stuff, a little more of the front mission type stuff or even some Mech warrior style stuff. And so I think, what you're going to see with our skins, that we're gonna loosen up a bit, that we're going to let you have, if you want, a more Mech warrior look to your Mech. You can. If you want a more anime Look to your mech, you can. We're gonna loosen up on the art direction here so that we can. Basically, everything that I learned from this conference was, you know, don't be so uptight and let people have fun with the genre. So we're gonna let people have fun with the genre. Yes, we can do it from different manufacturers. Thank you. We can borrow that idea from Firefall and have different corporations. And the different corporations have different looks to their Mech.
So for the male and female, we are also doing some tweaks. But this, I don't know if we can do this beforehand or afterwards. It depends how much support we get from you guys. We want to go a little bit more stylized. So a little less photorealistic going with more stylized hair because we want waifus and husbandos. We would like them to be a little more appealing stylistically too. The weeb crowd like me. Not full on anime, but you know, but more stylized. I don't know if anybody would be upset by that if we changed the look a little bit, but we definitely want we want Rule 34 of this stuff. So I would like to have the flexibility to change the look of the current, male and female to be a little more Rule 34 friendly. Well, there goes Toshi.
Uh, Evil Kitten, the change is going to be post kickstarter, but my hope is, is that the subscription plan And, um, and our re dialing of our marketing lets us actually do some of this pre kickstarter because it would be weird to show our more realistic male and female during the kickstarter, but then have these other variants later. But maybe that's not a problem. I don't know. Well, we'll see.
Uh, no. You.. so we had this talk last, um, last chief chat, and we're just going with our own hosted servers. So basically, you'll be playing on our servers, and, uh, you can't, you can't rent your own server or anything like that.
[Inaudible] has been a long time. So that's the other thing I learned from these guys is don't get hung up on perfection like I was really waiting for the art to be where I wanted it to be. And I think what's more important is that we get builds into your guy's hands rapidly, so you can expect that it may not be as beautiful looking we, but like, for example, you might get a movement demo that is a great test level block rather than full on terrain. And you could get terrain that has placeholders stuff in it. But we want to just basically get more builds into your hands more frequently because that's where the real excitement is. When you guys get new builds, that's when you feel like there's real progress. You could see it. You can. You can touch it. And so let's do it. Let's make that happen.
Terrain Demo in two weeks. Subscriptions go live Monday, and if you subscribe, you get the older build. So what happens is if you subscribe and we come out with the terrain demo, um, for backers, then you would get as if you were just a subscriber and not a backer. You would get the previous art demo so you'd be one build behind. and you don't have access to the alpha or beta or the game or anything like that, like backers do. But you do get access to development.
[Giveaway segment]
Yeah. Subscriptions are completely apart from milestone funding. So, uh, you know, even if you're a max at the $1500 level, that doesn't cover subs. Subs really are. You know, a lot of it. It is access to different stuff. It's access to the tabletop rules as they are written, so you can participate in their development. It's access to the book chapter by chapter, month by month as it's written. So you have access to that. Um, and it also is ah, sort of custom skin sort of thing. So every every month, you get a drop on a different custom skin. You can subscribe at the my.em8er.com site on Monday. So if you go to my.em8er.com, the packs will be there. And I'll do a little, um, launch announcement so everybody will know.
[Giveaway segment]
Mark: Okay, so I talked about a couple of different looks, so I said that for the mecha you could, you could expect to styles. You can expect sort of the anime style we have now and then I also want to create skins that are, uh, more military style. So more more like front mission. Basically. and those are the two styles for the characters. That would be a complete switch over because we should be changing shadeer's and the way we do hair into something that's just more stylized overall, and we're not We're not talking anime characters here, but we're talking about more stylized characters with more stylized hair and less photo realism on the characters and more emphasis on just for fun looking characters that you'd like to play and, um, not, um, you know, not fully stylized, but, but definitely not the photo realistic stuff we were doing.
Yeah, I know some people really dig a different mecha look, and so I want to make sure we hit that. And this is probably gonna be.. unless we're able to, you know, raise enough funds, is probably gonna be post kickstarter, which means we won't be able to show this stuff for kickstarter. Um, but it really depends on how well the sub's do and how well, uh, packs do. In order to do this, I would like Here's what I'd like to do. I'd like to show the stylized characters, I'd like to show the anime versus military versions of the frames. I'd like to show the tanks and the air vehicle. I'd like to show the giant mecha and I'd like to show a base being destroyed by a Kaiju and a big F ing battle with between the mecha and the giant mech. So that's what I would like to do. But, you know, we will do this at least post kickstarter. Uh, but I really want to do it beforehand. And that all depends on you guys.
The nice thing is that we have the art for the original scope ready to go. And so we're working on terrain. We're working on jet packs. Ah, we are working with the original Firefall designer on those jetpacks.
So I don't have any ETA on Kickstarter. Let's see how we do on subs. Let's see how we do on packs that come out here. Then I don't have to make a decision on if we're gonna do KS without the additional goodies that we want. But you know, part of the reason.. I just I just haven't sensed a lot of excitement about our character designed so far. So I wanted to, I wanted to push it to more stylized realm. Cause everyone keeps asking me for naval and waifu, so I was going to save that for another game. But I'm thinking, Why? Why not? Why not do it now? Schmuckee would like the option to keep the character. I don't think we're gonna go full on cartoon like Firefall, but I don't know yet. I mean, we kind of have to explore the visual style. I think that maybe you'd see it more like, um, say how it looks in overwatch.
The character art's been out for a while, but you're right about the story. And so one thing that's gonna happen in the design book is there's a little bit of story about how the Tsi-hu were discovered. That actually changes a little bit in the novel. So there's gonna be a little bit of retcon there so that we can build more characters into the lore. There's gonna be a lot more characters, a lot more story because of books that are coming out and that's going to make its way into the game.
Well, okay, so let me let me clarify. The military look of a frame is not a, a stylization, so I, I don't want to confuse people. The look of the frames isn't changing. We're not going to go cartoon shader for the world or anything like this. We're not going to start looking like Borderlands. We're not gonna be a Firefall clone. The omni frame, the terrain, all that stays the same. When I say the style of the mech I'm really talking about, does it look more like, you know, like it's got tank armor plating on it, or doesn't have more swoopy curves like anime. And so what I'm saying is that you know, you can have a chunky Titanfall looking or front mission looking next skin for your omni frame if you want. We're gonna provide those options, but that doesn't automatically make it cartoony. People are confusing two different things. So the look of the game isn't changing, but our characters, there's still gonna be in a photo realistic, really rendered environment. But we're going to push the style of mainly their faces a little more so that they look a little more stylized and their hair, so that, you know, and, and give them outfits that are more varied so that you can get this sort of, like, you know, um, variety going in there.
Yeah, I think people are gonna have to see the art to understand. But please don't come out of this chief chat thinking, “Oh, my God, they're gonna, they're gonna go toon shader on everything.” No, that's, that's not what I'm saying. The look is not changing. The, the stylistic differences I'm talking about in the mechs is really a difference of say, you know, Titanfall and Mech warrior versus what we have now, which is much more anime.
Well, yeah, your hit boxes can change. If you're in a bigger mech, you're gonna have bigger hit boxes. So, you know, But one thing I found is after obsessing years over trying to make hit boxes equal, we're not a competitive game. This is the PvE game. And even in competitive games, no one seems to care anymore about the size of hit boxes. They compensate with the ability system and everything else to sort of make up for it.
So Ah, yeah. Actually, Toshi, can you put up the the more stylized stuff that we've been talking about? Does Toshi have image posting permissions? Yes, there will be first person in the mech. You can switch between first and third in Em8er just like Firefall Okay, let me grab it out. Shared media and actually, drop it in here are actually Ronyn, or PleaseBanMe. Can you help me out and grab it from shared media and drop it?
Remember, we're not a PvP game. So if you have a small character, you we can compensate the AI is just gonna pick on you more. Maybe. Haha.
OK, so for those of you who missed it, we are giving you guys what you want and what I want to. We're going to have more waifu and husbando style characters. Because people love to collect that stuff so you can collect different uh, different little people, basically to be your pilot and switch between them.
[image shown]
And she is wearing the new founder G suit, which is part of the newcomer pack. So if you get the newcomer pack, you get that new founder suit. Um And you know, the other things we're doing is you guys want Firefall. So we're gonna make sure the jet packs are pretty close to the way they were in Firefall, because I think that worked pretty well. And I think that, um, everyone's distracted by the waifu. No one's listening to me haha.
So yeah. more Firefall. We're gonna take every ability from Firefall, and we're going to put it into the game. Um, and we're gonna take every weapon from Firefall and put it into the game. So you could build something very close to what you had in Firefall, because that's why you're here. That's why you guys back this project. So we're gonna do it.
Ronyn: Are you toying with me right now? Are you talking about like, mobility, Firecat style?
Mark: You can do it. (Ronyn: My goodness) We’re bringing it all over. Um, we're gonna do the thing I learned. And that is you've got to satisfy the tropes of your genre and the genre here is Firefall. So we're gonna bring them.
Ronyn: I think I'm crying right now.
Mark: Oh, the promotional idea. So, uh, let me go down the list, because okay, so we're gonna bring the weapons of Firefall. We're gonna bring the abilities of Firefall, plus, we're adding a ton more and you can mix and match them on your frame. So, unlike Firefall, you're not stuck with the set of abilities that the assault had you could actually go ahead and mix your crater with a healing beam, for example. That's one crazy possibility, because we do not do PvP. We can do stuff like this. We can have you have really kind of wacky fun builds because we don't have to sit there and be like, well, if we did that then we would really screw our PvP balance. But if people want one fun wacky dueling in their spec’d out frames, that's a possibility too.
All right, So, uh, we don't plan on supporting VR right now. Just because it's a huge pain in the ass for frame rate and everything else. Ah, so we have no plans for VR right now, but, um, I don't know. We'll look in the future because the unreal engine has built in support for VR off the bat, and it's really, really good and kind of seamless. But ah, you know, there's a whole host of issues that comes with developing VR. So we'll see what happens.
No, pvp, we've been saying that since the beginning. We don't really… our concentrations are on PvE. If PvP comes on later, we have to deal with the issues that we just basically lets you create these really wacky builds that you're having fun with. So if we did pvp in the future, it would probably look different. We probably have to lock out certain sets of abilities and other things. So, uh, this is really Coop PvE. There's a little bit of a competitive nature because guilds do compete for standing on how much resources they donate, but yes, we want we want to get crazy. We want we want to you to be able to get vehicles, and we always want you to have vehicles. Um, and now we want you have giant Mechs too, and we want that to be like a capital ship in eve or something that like, you have to pour a lot of resources in.
And I would like to show this off before the Kickstarter. Uh, but that's really going to depend on, you know. Can we, can we spike the funds in order to do this? If not, we'll still do it. We'll just do it after the KS or put it into a stretch goal.
The mecha is piloted directly. The giant mech, Robert? Yea, I mean, it's just like, uh, planet side. You're gonna be hopping into whatever vehicle you feel.
We will know when we have the beta and alpha versions after the kickstarter, depends on how much we raise, that can, that determines the timing.
[Giveaway segment]
Ronyn: Can we get like, a thickness slider for the for the female? I'm just kidding..
Mark: well, since you know, the idea is that it's like a Fortnite. You buy skins if you want different looks, and so, yeah, there could be thicker, thicker ones Ronyn, to accommodate your bigger office.
Ronyn: Well, if it's all about the impact..
Mark: Winter, Ah, we could have Firefall battle frame style G suits, except for the clunkier ones. Because the clunkier ones wouldn't fit inside like the big feet wouldn't really fit it. Uh, I guess we could hide it when you go when you go inside the frame, but, uh, I don't know. You got me thinking Winter.
Yes, Monk. I think so. But I've often liked the idea of stylized characters in a more photorealistic world. Um, to me that that kind of stands out in a really pleasing way to me. Maybe we'll try that. Have you seen the Tsi-hu Grappling hooks, Fiona, where they can grab you out of the sky while your jet packing and slam you to the ground. We had that in an early prototype. The Tsi-hu have that. I don't see why players, if they can research it sufficiently, couldn't unlock something similar because it looks so much fun.
Thanks, John. Yeah, we could do something like hide bone by name to get rid of the clunky feet if you get into a frame. Um, but, you know, that would be a good way to do it.
I know. You know I love Attack on Titan. Is season three good? Haven’t watched it. John, when you, when you hide the bone and this is not an adult reference, but when you hide the bone in Unreal. Oh, um, how does it... What part of the mesh does it hide? How does it know? Is it by weighting?
Are the waifu’s gonna be 3D printable? You know, I think maybe that's something that will just, we'll put the files up and we'll sell them online. It would be like buying T shirts. If you'd like to 3D print your waifu, you can go download the file and send it off to Shapeways. So she will personally make all 1,000,000 prints that will be ordered off his one printer.
Ah, interesting. John. I have to check that out. I think you'd want it to be posed. So for the different skins we could we could pose them, and then, yeah, we could make them like a downloadable purchase.
[Giveaway segment]
All right, guys. So we dropped a lot of information today too on the 10k milestone for forum unlocks. We need more people to sign up to Em8er prior to kickstarter, we would also like to hit visually some of these goals before the kickstarter. Uh, the only way we can do that is if our subscription plan goes well, if people upgrade their packs, or if new people come in. So please help get the word out. We would like to do this for the KS. We're making a big push here. We're gonna have every weapon from Firefall, every ability from Firefall. We're gonna have giant mechs were going to have tanks that we wanted to have. Ah, the planet side stuff that we wanted to have. We want to have a giant Kaiju destroying a base. Um, and we would like to show this stuff for the Kickstarter.
So, um, the, and the other thing we learned is more frequent builds. You guys are going to get test builds more frequently. They may not be as polished or pretty, but we want you guys to feel part of the process and the last bit of news. Subscriptions go up Monday. They will. Every month you'll get a new chapter, a draft of the novel that you can help us., um, you know, uh, edit and continuity check. Just like we did the design book. You will get the design book. You will get the design book updates. After this month, we'll have our first update after that. You're going to get the tabletop rules for the Crixa, ah, the space adventure, space opera RPG that we're building. Um, you will get that chapter by chapter as well, and you will be able to give feedback and we’ll probably also start when we have a critical mass of rule, some play test sessions as well.
So, um, the other thing you get with subscription is a skin of the month. So skin of the month gives you things. The first thing that's coming up is a skin for the plasma cannon weapon. So these air, these will be unique. You are not going to find them again, and so you can collect them by being a subscriber and the subscription is only $7.95. $7.95 gets you all of that, [!1:05] gets you access to all of our IPs in development, gets you access to private forms to discuss it. And that is going live Monday.
All right, thank you all for joining us. This was uh, a great Chief Chat. I hope you like all the new info that came out here. And there's gonna be a ton of lore going into the game because of these books. That's gonna be, that's gonna be something. I'll tell you. We got some stuff planned for this story. I'm excited.
You might see some recycled themes from Firefall stories that were abandoned in beta. Some of those themes might come back. Ah, who knows where we'll take it, but we're gonna, but since it's it's ah, serial episodic thing you guys are going to be able to sort of give me your ideas, for what, you’d like to see stuff to go in the subscriber only forum section. All right, guys, thank you very much for Chief Chat. This has been wonderful. I am re energized. You guys have really picked me up here. I was tired from the week, but now I am just amped. Especially since we've got a terrain demo to ship in two weeks.
All right, guys, catch you later. And thank you once again.
[Grummz exits]
Ronyn: Hey, I don't know about the rest of you, but holy crap, that's so much new huge information that just got dropped today. I mean, what are we even gonna do with ourselves? So it looks like Em8ers coming up to a whole nother level. Um, I'm excited. You're excited. This video will be posted as soon as we can, give us a few days. And guys just thank you for being here. I'm at a loss for words. And if you know me, that's a rare occasion. All right, guys.
So until next time DEEP STRIKE.
Below you'll find the transcription for the last Chief Chat Mark uploaded to the Youtube channel on May 7th, 2019. I went back today and decided to transcribe this one, and will be transcribing future Chief Chats from now on! Some people have expressed the desire to have the chief chats readable, so hopefully this helps.
Original Chief Chat Video:
All stutters, "um"s, "ah"s, and the like, are left included
There was some grooming done to make the sentences more coherent, and I omitted the giveaway portions to stay focused on the core material.
Enjoy!
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Ronyn: So, Grummz, if you’re ready, take it away, huh?
Mark: All right. So, first up, I got some news. Many of you since the beginning of the project have asked for some sort of Patreon like system and for a long time, I was like, well, I don't know about, I don't know about doing anything like that. I don't know if that's going to be, you know, um ah too relevant here, but, uh, but we figured out, we figured out a way to add value. So a subscription pack for Em8er is going live, and it won't be on Patron. We've actually coded it into our own website, the my.em8er.com website. So, uh, what does this pack include? This pack includes the ah, it's basically the work in progress of the tabletop game, the novel that's coming out. Actually, I should say series of novels, as there's gonna be three written at first, and there's also going to be access to the prior build.
So not the art build, but the one prior to that. So anybody on the subscription plan gets access to older builds or an older build, uh, while backers get the most current build and you also get a custom skin. Either a weapons skin or a frame skin. And the 1st is going to be a weapons skin that's coming out for the plasma cannon. So you're going to see that very soon. In fact, that is launching Monday and for uh, for the price of $7.95 you can sign up to the Em8er subscription pack, and it's kind of like a little loot crate, and you're going to get the tabletop rule drafts as they were built chapter by chapter, and you're gonna get the books chapter by chapter, starting with Chapter One. The other thing is, you get access to private forums. And in the private forums you can give feedback on the book, the table top and the game, and we are gonna be looking at that just like we did for the vision book. Oh, you also get access to the vision book and that vision book will be updated over time as we further develop the game.
So you get basically every IP stuff that we're making, um, minus all the custom skins and minus the game, of course and minus the Beta and Alpha access. But you get, uh, development builds of the game that are one build behind and you get the tabletop rules. You get the living design book, you get the chapters of the novel as they come out, and you get to help us refine those. So, it's gonna be $7.95 and we're launching Monday, and it's a, ah, monthly thing. So with just the skin alone it is worth more than $7.95. So I think that that's a really good deal for everybody. And we tried to include something for everybody in here.
Ronyn: And that is Monday. This Monday, 3-4 days from now.
Mark: Yeah, very soon. In fact, I was just doing... I just put the first chapter of the book into Mobi form so you can download it for Kindle as well as pdf if you don't have a Kindle..
So, um, I came from a writer's summit last week , and this was, um, several Sci Fi military Sci Fi authors, in particular, some fantasy. Um, we had, um, writers for Gears of War 3 and several of the Star Wars books there. Uh, Karen Traviss and we had ah, Kevin J. Anderson, who did obviously Dune, with ah, Frank Herbert’s son, the sequels, he didn't write the original. And, um, and it was very illuminating to be in this room also, um, it was, it was just fantastic to see this and what they're doing is they’re revolutionising publishing by going indie. They’re going direct to Amazon, and they're doing very well. And so this, um, so everybody's sort of asking me, well, ah, you know, what about Ember? Like, where's the cross over there and everything else. And so I'm looking forward to actually, um, I've gotten a lot of advice from them about how to sort of create this and, um and there is, um, basically going to be a revolution, I think in game publishing along the lines of what's happening.
So the, um, jist of it is that, we want to create games that you guys really want. You want to make sure that we're hitting the themes that you guys really want. And one theme that I'm hearing over and over again is please give us as much of the original Firefall as you can, right? So this is why a lot of people are here is because they want that spiritual successor to Firefall. So we will be, um, right now we're working on tuning jetpacks. We have jetpacks working with the Omni frame. We're getting some animations in for that. And I'm talking to Justin Hanson, the original designer of the jetpacks in Firefall so that we can tune them to be very similar to the way they were and give you that freedom of movement everybody wants. I also want to say that we have looked at the Firefall abilities and we're going to put every Firefall ability into this game, every Firefall ability that you had on a frame will be in Em8er.
Ronyn: Uh, did you say every single one?
Mark: Every single one. I mean, obviously we have to have our own names and things like this. But if it was in Firefall, you can, you can expect it to be in Em8er as part of the tech tree. Now, our tech tree is much bigger than Firefall. So you're going to see a lot more varied abilities and stuff that you can slot in. And this was my huge takeaway from this, um, indie book conference. Hey, give people what they want, um and so I know that, you know, we used to have threads on, “gee, what's your favorite ability that you’d like to see ported over?”. We're just gonna bring all of them over. Um, we're gonna bring all of them over, and you'll be able to sit there and mix and match them. So unlike Firefall where you were limited, you can actually take Crater from an assault and mix it with the engineers Turrets if you wanted to. So I think those are some pretty, pretty cool things.
Ronyn: You've checked... [inaudible] hugely important... Like hold on, what?
Mark: Well, if you look at the number of abilities there in Firefall, there weren't actually that many. So I was looking over that list and going, why can't we just bring all of this over? And so we're going to do it. We're going to bring all of it over. So your favorite builds from from Firefall, you should be able to recreate in Em8er. So that's the first thing. Give people what they want. They want Firefall. The other thing that people want, um, are are some new themes and some tropes they want, um, sort of the direction we're going with military Sci Fi and the direction we're going with frames and the direction we're going with sort of the exosuit mecha theme, and they want to, they want to hunt giant Kaiju. They wanna hunt giant monsters. And so, for, to attract a new crowd, not just the Firefall crowd. We're gonna make sure people know about that. I mean, that's always been part of Em8er. It's in vision book, but our marketing really hasn't honed in and emphasized that so we're really gonna go after sort of the military Sci Fi aspect, the invasions, the warfare and the fact that you're hunting down these giant Kaiju. And of course, you're using what, you know, well, the drops from the Kaiju in order to go into the research trees and to build up from there.
So how's that sound so far, we hitting the right marks here? Good. This is this has given me a very powerful tool to sort of emphasize correctly the themes of the game, that are in the vision book and and how to lay them out. So that was the takeaway from that. And the other takeaway is that indie is the way to go. And the other thing that we took away from that is you need more frequent drops to your users that when you sell these books, what these guys are doing is they're coming out with a book a month. They're coming out with a book of month on, um, in order to satisfy, uh, people's appetites because people are binge readers. People are used to Netflix binging series, and So, um, you're going to see more frequent drops from us. They may not be as polished as the art demo. They could have some test pieces in there or some gray levels, but we're going to get you out, builds very quickly. And the next build that's coming out is the terrain build, and you're gonna have that in two weeks. So, there you go. Things are picking up.
Ronyn: Chief Chat is crazy. Important. What happened? You just, you just throwing bombs right now.
Mark: I am energized. I am. I am rejuvenated. If you haven't seen, John Galt asked, “where is this money going to?” It's going to the fact that we're late on and it's going to things like multiplayer, right? So basically, the additional runway and the additional time, um, let's us keep the lights on and and things running and we want to, basically, and if you haven't seen it yet, multiplayer is up and running, and John Galt did provide some matchmaking code for that, unseen. That was served as a template for what we used. Um, but Ben has put together the multiplayer demo, and we're working on that. And we are also, um, doing some more work on some things I can't talk about yet.
But with mostly art done. Animation is the final bottle neck. And so we're going to be using our, um, our mocap suit that you guys funded, and we are going to be adding some additional animations they want for some of the creatures. And so you're going to see a multipronged approach here. You're going to see more frequent builds from us. You're going to see the subscription system go live on Monday with additional IP, stuff that you haven't seen before. The Crixa tabletop rules, um, and there initially gonna ship with, you know, background all the way up to just ah, character stat generation. But you can give us your feedback on that in the private sessions and private sections of the forum. And you can also do ah, the book chapters. So you'll be getting those as they're written.
And one thing that we might do in the future is maybe an anthology with some of these writers that I met, so we'll sort of create, we've created the universe of Ember and maybe we'll let some of these authors play in it to sort of create an anthology of short stories or something. There's a lot of possibilities here, but what you're seeing here is the theme that we're taking the IP. And we're branching it out in multiple directions and unifying what we had before. So obviously Crixa the tabletop game goes into that and everything else.
You know, um, more subscription profits would be better. It would allow us to do more things. I would like to do more things. So, for example, for the military Sci Fi stuff, I I don't want to hold back, you know, I really want the flexibility to go kind of crazy and have fun and not take the IP all that seriously and yet not go as crazy as, say, Earth Defense Force. Right? For those of you who have played it, the Earth Defense Force is completely off the hook. E d f does crazy stuff. And I heard people here say they want e d f. So what I want to do is to raise enough money where we can actually in the demo show some additional things like we were planning for post launch i.e. I want to show that this is an actual military that's fighting against giant kaiju and ridiculous types of giant kaiju of all kinds that are demolishing base buildings and that you are fighting back not only with your exo frame suits, but with the tanks that we wanted, the aircraft that we wanted and giant Mechs.
Well, that's right. You heard me, Giant Mech.
Ronyn: You know, I I work out and am fit, but I might have a heart attack with all this stuff today. Um, good Lord.
Mark: people, people want it. People want the theme to go all the way. How can we have giant Kaiju if there aren't giant Mechs to go up against the giant Kaiju? So obviously, you know, obviously we would you know, the way these things will spawn is we have a system where not everything is spawnable, unless there is, for example, an invasion. And it's gotta be a certain category of invasion to warrant for that, for basically the, um, the Ark liege families to authorize a giant mech to be deployed. Then someone has to have been crazy enough to pour all the resource is in to build one of these things. I don't know. I don't know if that's gonna be an individual or if it's gonna be an army, but it's gonna be like a capital ship in Eve. You know how big a resource sink that is. And so you'll end up deploying that thing. And, um and this is what I want to do! So help me do it. I want to get crazy. The subscription plan is part of that because we don't have any art budget left. I want to get it in there and I want to show it off for the kickstarter.
And, um so, no, by ark liege, I mean the story version of the ark liege. Ark liege run the different [something] families that comprise the, um uh, the Gatestriders. So it's a bunch of clans, basically. And when I say, you know, um, the Ark Liege have to approve it, I mean, the story wise. That's the justification for, “hey, this invasion, we're not gonna authorize such expensive war machines, because that would be that would be ridiculous. so. I mean, this was always the dream for Firefall. To have this sort of, like, multi vehicle, uh, multi, multi front combat. And, um, in order to do this, you know, I would like to pitch this because I think it's really gonna appeal to the military side Sci Fi people to Planetside people and everything else. All right, so that's a lot of news for Em8er. I think we need to give away another five packs.
Ronyn: Oh, okay. Look at that. He knocks me out. He wants me to get up and be useful again. Hold on. Okay. Okay. Uh, all right, everybody. For those who don't know we are, we're about to give away five packs…
[Giveaway segment]
Mark: Upgrading is very kind of different. It's similar to when we had tiers in Firefall. But it's different because what there is is a giant research tech tree. And the more resources you pour in, the more branches of resources you can unlock. And then you can craft the recipes that you unlock from there. And by contributing resources to bases that have research facilities, you can increase the speed of your research. Yes, it's much more like early Firefall. The design that I presided over before all of it was changed.
Ronyn: right? Another raffle coming. Now here.
Ronyn: I think if everybody knew the kind of big news that was coming today, we would have twice as many people in this chief chat
Mark: Well, that's that's why we do this on video, right? We're gonna upload that, you know.
Mark: So if we do get enough momentum to do the uh, the tanks and the aircraft and the giant mech, then of course, we will have to do the Twitch controls the giant mech viral marketing that we've been planning. You guys remember that where Twitch gets, you know, different people get to control different limbs of the giant mech. And it's kind of like Coop. And you see what happens if they can learn to cooperate to walk together. I think it would be a great marketing thing, actually. Maybe we'll have different channels for different parts, so there’ll be the “I'm the feet channel” and “I am the Arms channel” and “I'm the head”. No, no, no. I don't mean in game. That's not really the way a giant mech will be controlled.
[Giveaway segment]
Mark: So the other thing I want to talk about is a little bit of the art style because the thumper and the Omni frame are kind of an anime art style. And I know some of you like a little more military stuff, a little more of the front mission type stuff or even some Mech warrior style stuff. And so I think, what you're going to see with our skins, that we're gonna loosen up a bit, that we're going to let you have, if you want, a more Mech warrior look to your Mech. You can. If you want a more anime Look to your mech, you can. We're gonna loosen up on the art direction here so that we can. Basically, everything that I learned from this conference was, you know, don't be so uptight and let people have fun with the genre. So we're gonna let people have fun with the genre. Yes, we can do it from different manufacturers. Thank you. We can borrow that idea from Firefall and have different corporations. And the different corporations have different looks to their Mech.
So for the male and female, we are also doing some tweaks. But this, I don't know if we can do this beforehand or afterwards. It depends how much support we get from you guys. We want to go a little bit more stylized. So a little less photorealistic going with more stylized hair because we want waifus and husbandos. We would like them to be a little more appealing stylistically too. The weeb crowd like me. Not full on anime, but you know, but more stylized. I don't know if anybody would be upset by that if we changed the look a little bit, but we definitely want we want Rule 34 of this stuff. So I would like to have the flexibility to change the look of the current, male and female to be a little more Rule 34 friendly. Well, there goes Toshi.
Uh, Evil Kitten, the change is going to be post kickstarter, but my hope is, is that the subscription plan And, um, and our re dialing of our marketing lets us actually do some of this pre kickstarter because it would be weird to show our more realistic male and female during the kickstarter, but then have these other variants later. But maybe that's not a problem. I don't know. Well, we'll see.
Uh, no. You.. so we had this talk last, um, last chief chat, and we're just going with our own hosted servers. So basically, you'll be playing on our servers, and, uh, you can't, you can't rent your own server or anything like that.
[Inaudible] has been a long time. So that's the other thing I learned from these guys is don't get hung up on perfection like I was really waiting for the art to be where I wanted it to be. And I think what's more important is that we get builds into your guy's hands rapidly, so you can expect that it may not be as beautiful looking we, but like, for example, you might get a movement demo that is a great test level block rather than full on terrain. And you could get terrain that has placeholders stuff in it. But we want to just basically get more builds into your hands more frequently because that's where the real excitement is. When you guys get new builds, that's when you feel like there's real progress. You could see it. You can. You can touch it. And so let's do it. Let's make that happen.
Terrain Demo in two weeks. Subscriptions go live Monday, and if you subscribe, you get the older build. So what happens is if you subscribe and we come out with the terrain demo, um, for backers, then you would get as if you were just a subscriber and not a backer. You would get the previous art demo so you'd be one build behind. and you don't have access to the alpha or beta or the game or anything like that, like backers do. But you do get access to development.
[Giveaway segment]
Yeah. Subscriptions are completely apart from milestone funding. So, uh, you know, even if you're a max at the $1500 level, that doesn't cover subs. Subs really are. You know, a lot of it. It is access to different stuff. It's access to the tabletop rules as they are written, so you can participate in their development. It's access to the book chapter by chapter, month by month as it's written. So you have access to that. Um, and it also is ah, sort of custom skin sort of thing. So every every month, you get a drop on a different custom skin. You can subscribe at the my.em8er.com site on Monday. So if you go to my.em8er.com, the packs will be there. And I'll do a little, um, launch announcement so everybody will know.
[Giveaway segment]
Mark: Okay, so I talked about a couple of different looks, so I said that for the mecha you could, you could expect to styles. You can expect sort of the anime style we have now and then I also want to create skins that are, uh, more military style. So more more like front mission. Basically. and those are the two styles for the characters. That would be a complete switch over because we should be changing shadeer's and the way we do hair into something that's just more stylized overall, and we're not We're not talking anime characters here, but we're talking about more stylized characters with more stylized hair and less photo realism on the characters and more emphasis on just for fun looking characters that you'd like to play and, um, not, um, you know, not fully stylized, but, but definitely not the photo realistic stuff we were doing.
Yeah, I know some people really dig a different mecha look, and so I want to make sure we hit that. And this is probably gonna be.. unless we're able to, you know, raise enough funds, is probably gonna be post kickstarter, which means we won't be able to show this stuff for kickstarter. Um, but it really depends on how well the sub's do and how well, uh, packs do. In order to do this, I would like Here's what I'd like to do. I'd like to show the stylized characters, I'd like to show the anime versus military versions of the frames. I'd like to show the tanks and the air vehicle. I'd like to show the giant mecha and I'd like to show a base being destroyed by a Kaiju and a big F ing battle with between the mecha and the giant mech. So that's what I would like to do. But, you know, we will do this at least post kickstarter. Uh, but I really want to do it beforehand. And that all depends on you guys.
The nice thing is that we have the art for the original scope ready to go. And so we're working on terrain. We're working on jet packs. Ah, we are working with the original Firefall designer on those jetpacks.
So I don't have any ETA on Kickstarter. Let's see how we do on subs. Let's see how we do on packs that come out here. Then I don't have to make a decision on if we're gonna do KS without the additional goodies that we want. But you know, part of the reason.. I just I just haven't sensed a lot of excitement about our character designed so far. So I wanted to, I wanted to push it to more stylized realm. Cause everyone keeps asking me for naval and waifu, so I was going to save that for another game. But I'm thinking, Why? Why not? Why not do it now? Schmuckee would like the option to keep the character. I don't think we're gonna go full on cartoon like Firefall, but I don't know yet. I mean, we kind of have to explore the visual style. I think that maybe you'd see it more like, um, say how it looks in overwatch.
The character art's been out for a while, but you're right about the story. And so one thing that's gonna happen in the design book is there's a little bit of story about how the Tsi-hu were discovered. That actually changes a little bit in the novel. So there's gonna be a little bit of retcon there so that we can build more characters into the lore. There's gonna be a lot more characters, a lot more story because of books that are coming out and that's going to make its way into the game.
Well, okay, so let me let me clarify. The military look of a frame is not a, a stylization, so I, I don't want to confuse people. The look of the frames isn't changing. We're not going to go cartoon shader for the world or anything like this. We're not going to start looking like Borderlands. We're not gonna be a Firefall clone. The omni frame, the terrain, all that stays the same. When I say the style of the mech I'm really talking about, does it look more like, you know, like it's got tank armor plating on it, or doesn't have more swoopy curves like anime. And so what I'm saying is that you know, you can have a chunky Titanfall looking or front mission looking next skin for your omni frame if you want. We're gonna provide those options, but that doesn't automatically make it cartoony. People are confusing two different things. So the look of the game isn't changing, but our characters, there's still gonna be in a photo realistic, really rendered environment. But we're going to push the style of mainly their faces a little more so that they look a little more stylized and their hair, so that, you know, and, and give them outfits that are more varied so that you can get this sort of, like, you know, um, variety going in there.
Yeah, I think people are gonna have to see the art to understand. But please don't come out of this chief chat thinking, “Oh, my God, they're gonna, they're gonna go toon shader on everything.” No, that's, that's not what I'm saying. The look is not changing. The, the stylistic differences I'm talking about in the mechs is really a difference of say, you know, Titanfall and Mech warrior versus what we have now, which is much more anime.
Well, yeah, your hit boxes can change. If you're in a bigger mech, you're gonna have bigger hit boxes. So, you know, But one thing I found is after obsessing years over trying to make hit boxes equal, we're not a competitive game. This is the PvE game. And even in competitive games, no one seems to care anymore about the size of hit boxes. They compensate with the ability system and everything else to sort of make up for it.
So Ah, yeah. Actually, Toshi, can you put up the the more stylized stuff that we've been talking about? Does Toshi have image posting permissions? Yes, there will be first person in the mech. You can switch between first and third in Em8er just like Firefall Okay, let me grab it out. Shared media and actually, drop it in here are actually Ronyn, or PleaseBanMe. Can you help me out and grab it from shared media and drop it?
Remember, we're not a PvP game. So if you have a small character, you we can compensate the AI is just gonna pick on you more. Maybe. Haha.
OK, so for those of you who missed it, we are giving you guys what you want and what I want to. We're going to have more waifu and husbando style characters. Because people love to collect that stuff so you can collect different uh, different little people, basically to be your pilot and switch between them.
[image shown]
And she is wearing the new founder G suit, which is part of the newcomer pack. So if you get the newcomer pack, you get that new founder suit. Um And you know, the other things we're doing is you guys want Firefall. So we're gonna make sure the jet packs are pretty close to the way they were in Firefall, because I think that worked pretty well. And I think that, um, everyone's distracted by the waifu. No one's listening to me haha.
So yeah. more Firefall. We're gonna take every ability from Firefall, and we're going to put it into the game. Um, and we're gonna take every weapon from Firefall and put it into the game. So you could build something very close to what you had in Firefall, because that's why you're here. That's why you guys back this project. So we're gonna do it.
Ronyn: Are you toying with me right now? Are you talking about like, mobility, Firecat style?
Mark: You can do it. (Ronyn: My goodness) We’re bringing it all over. Um, we're gonna do the thing I learned. And that is you've got to satisfy the tropes of your genre and the genre here is Firefall. So we're gonna bring them.
Ronyn: I think I'm crying right now.
Mark: Oh, the promotional idea. So, uh, let me go down the list, because okay, so we're gonna bring the weapons of Firefall. We're gonna bring the abilities of Firefall, plus, we're adding a ton more and you can mix and match them on your frame. So, unlike Firefall, you're not stuck with the set of abilities that the assault had you could actually go ahead and mix your crater with a healing beam, for example. That's one crazy possibility, because we do not do PvP. We can do stuff like this. We can have you have really kind of wacky fun builds because we don't have to sit there and be like, well, if we did that then we would really screw our PvP balance. But if people want one fun wacky dueling in their spec’d out frames, that's a possibility too.
All right, So, uh, we don't plan on supporting VR right now. Just because it's a huge pain in the ass for frame rate and everything else. Ah, so we have no plans for VR right now, but, um, I don't know. We'll look in the future because the unreal engine has built in support for VR off the bat, and it's really, really good and kind of seamless. But ah, you know, there's a whole host of issues that comes with developing VR. So we'll see what happens.
No, pvp, we've been saying that since the beginning. We don't really… our concentrations are on PvE. If PvP comes on later, we have to deal with the issues that we just basically lets you create these really wacky builds that you're having fun with. So if we did pvp in the future, it would probably look different. We probably have to lock out certain sets of abilities and other things. So, uh, this is really Coop PvE. There's a little bit of a competitive nature because guilds do compete for standing on how much resources they donate, but yes, we want we want to get crazy. We want we want to you to be able to get vehicles, and we always want you to have vehicles. Um, and now we want you have giant Mechs too, and we want that to be like a capital ship in eve or something that like, you have to pour a lot of resources in.
And I would like to show this off before the Kickstarter. Uh, but that's really going to depend on, you know. Can we, can we spike the funds in order to do this? If not, we'll still do it. We'll just do it after the KS or put it into a stretch goal.
The mecha is piloted directly. The giant mech, Robert? Yea, I mean, it's just like, uh, planet side. You're gonna be hopping into whatever vehicle you feel.
We will know when we have the beta and alpha versions after the kickstarter, depends on how much we raise, that can, that determines the timing.
[Giveaway segment]
Ronyn: Can we get like, a thickness slider for the for the female? I'm just kidding..
Mark: well, since you know, the idea is that it's like a Fortnite. You buy skins if you want different looks, and so, yeah, there could be thicker, thicker ones Ronyn, to accommodate your bigger office.
Ronyn: Well, if it's all about the impact..
Mark: Winter, Ah, we could have Firefall battle frame style G suits, except for the clunkier ones. Because the clunkier ones wouldn't fit inside like the big feet wouldn't really fit it. Uh, I guess we could hide it when you go when you go inside the frame, but, uh, I don't know. You got me thinking Winter.
Yes, Monk. I think so. But I've often liked the idea of stylized characters in a more photorealistic world. Um, to me that that kind of stands out in a really pleasing way to me. Maybe we'll try that. Have you seen the Tsi-hu Grappling hooks, Fiona, where they can grab you out of the sky while your jet packing and slam you to the ground. We had that in an early prototype. The Tsi-hu have that. I don't see why players, if they can research it sufficiently, couldn't unlock something similar because it looks so much fun.
Thanks, John. Yeah, we could do something like hide bone by name to get rid of the clunky feet if you get into a frame. Um, but, you know, that would be a good way to do it.
I know. You know I love Attack on Titan. Is season three good? Haven’t watched it. John, when you, when you hide the bone and this is not an adult reference, but when you hide the bone in Unreal. Oh, um, how does it... What part of the mesh does it hide? How does it know? Is it by weighting?
Are the waifu’s gonna be 3D printable? You know, I think maybe that's something that will just, we'll put the files up and we'll sell them online. It would be like buying T shirts. If you'd like to 3D print your waifu, you can go download the file and send it off to Shapeways. So she will personally make all 1,000,000 prints that will be ordered off his one printer.
Ah, interesting. John. I have to check that out. I think you'd want it to be posed. So for the different skins we could we could pose them, and then, yeah, we could make them like a downloadable purchase.
[Giveaway segment]
All right, guys. So we dropped a lot of information today too on the 10k milestone for forum unlocks. We need more people to sign up to Em8er prior to kickstarter, we would also like to hit visually some of these goals before the kickstarter. Uh, the only way we can do that is if our subscription plan goes well, if people upgrade their packs, or if new people come in. So please help get the word out. We would like to do this for the KS. We're making a big push here. We're gonna have every weapon from Firefall, every ability from Firefall. We're gonna have giant mechs were going to have tanks that we wanted to have. Ah, the planet side stuff that we wanted to have. We want to have a giant Kaiju destroying a base. Um, and we would like to show this stuff for the Kickstarter.
So, um, the, and the other thing we learned is more frequent builds. You guys are going to get test builds more frequently. They may not be as polished or pretty, but we want you guys to feel part of the process and the last bit of news. Subscriptions go up Monday. They will. Every month you'll get a new chapter, a draft of the novel that you can help us., um, you know, uh, edit and continuity check. Just like we did the design book. You will get the design book. You will get the design book updates. After this month, we'll have our first update after that. You're going to get the tabletop rules for the Crixa, ah, the space adventure, space opera RPG that we're building. Um, you will get that chapter by chapter as well, and you will be able to give feedback and we’ll probably also start when we have a critical mass of rule, some play test sessions as well.
So, um, the other thing you get with subscription is a skin of the month. So skin of the month gives you things. The first thing that's coming up is a skin for the plasma cannon weapon. So these air, these will be unique. You are not going to find them again, and so you can collect them by being a subscriber and the subscription is only $7.95. $7.95 gets you all of that, [!1:05] gets you access to all of our IPs in development, gets you access to private forms to discuss it. And that is going live Monday.
All right, thank you all for joining us. This was uh, a great Chief Chat. I hope you like all the new info that came out here. And there's gonna be a ton of lore going into the game because of these books. That's gonna be, that's gonna be something. I'll tell you. We got some stuff planned for this story. I'm excited.
You might see some recycled themes from Firefall stories that were abandoned in beta. Some of those themes might come back. Ah, who knows where we'll take it, but we're gonna, but since it's it's ah, serial episodic thing you guys are going to be able to sort of give me your ideas, for what, you’d like to see stuff to go in the subscriber only forum section. All right, guys, thank you very much for Chief Chat. This has been wonderful. I am re energized. You guys have really picked me up here. I was tired from the week, but now I am just amped. Especially since we've got a terrain demo to ship in two weeks.
All right, guys, catch you later. And thank you once again.
[Grummz exits]
Ronyn: Hey, I don't know about the rest of you, but holy crap, that's so much new huge information that just got dropped today. I mean, what are we even gonna do with ourselves? So it looks like Em8ers coming up to a whole nother level. Um, I'm excited. You're excited. This video will be posted as soon as we can, give us a few days. And guys just thank you for being here. I'm at a loss for words. And if you know me, that's a rare occasion. All right, guys.
So until next time DEEP STRIKE.
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