Chief Chat! Monday, August 24rth. 11 Am P.D.T.

[Ronyn]

Greetings Reapers,

I know you've been waiting, craving and raving for some news. Well it's coming to you this Monday! Tune in this Monday, in the official Em-8er discord to hear some juicy info about the upcoming build from the game director himself. That's right, Grummz will be online to give out info, answer questions, and generally amuse you with witty banter. There will also be some raffles for prizes and bad jokes about whatever crosses our minds!
See you there.

For those who need it-
Here is the Discord Link https://discord.gg/D4kz2r
Here is the timezone Breakdown

 

[Wyntyr]

 

[DoktOrk]

Hi!
Help pls: Discord tells me, the invite is invalid or has expired, and so I can not join the chat.

Any help is welcome.


Cheers: DoktOrk :-D

 

[DoktOrk]

LOL, I managed to get in with an older invite, and the first thing I heard was Grummz saying goodbye... :-D

 

[Wyntyr]

LOL, I managed to get in with an older invite, and the first thing I heard was Grummz saying goodbye... :-D

 

[Faeryl]

Me before AND during a Chief Chat ...

Me after a Chief Chat ...

 

[Faeryl]

Hi @DoktOrk , I'm sorry no one saw this earlier to help you.
Here for anyone who might need it ...

https://discord.gg/em-8er
This is the permanent link to the Official Em-8ER Discord server.

There are also invite links for the Official Discord next the home button here on the forums and on the main website as well.

Cheers! ~ Faeryl

 

[Pandagnome]

I am sadly having discord issues still with my browser so, i will just live in the forums and check daily here.

 

[Faeryl]

======================================================
CHIEF CHAT NOTES FOR AUGUST 24, 2020
======================================================

Grummz: What is this Chief Chat all about? This is about chatting with the Chief; and that's me. Also raffles and updating you guys on stuff that's happening [with Em-8ER]. Some know him [The Chief] as Navel God. It's been a while since we did one of these but, this is a Chief Chat where we talk about the game, what's coming up for the game, answer questions about the game for Newcomers, and to talk about industry trends or whatever.

[Grummz mentioned a BIG current trend, pronounced by some e-celebs in anime, "The mecha genre is dead".
There's a new mech anime by Trigger called Promare.]

Grummz: I think you do have to combine mecha with other stuff now it can't be just a pure mecha show. You've got to have a good storyline, you got to have characters, and the mecha is sort of just like the icing on the cake.

CHIEF CHAT START:

► Grummz: Welcome everyone to another Chief Chat! We're starting up these up again. I'm sorry we had a little bit of a delay; there was some stuff going on IRL for me. But we're now back on track!

► Ben has lifted the throttling and emails should be going out at light speed.
[Responses indicate the announcement email was received on time.]

► NEW skin this month by CuteSexyRobutts. It's now a wallpaper for everyone to download. It is now available on the my.em8er.com site for free. You just have to sign up.

► Her name is Carmen! Carmen is a Kaiju hunter as well as the lead researcher in the Gatestrider Labs, researching kaiju technology. Because we want to reverse engineer the both the Kaiju and the tech that the Tsi-Hu implant in them to control them, in order to develop better crafting recipes, that we can unlock for our omniframes.

Grummz asks the community's opinion on the Carmen skin.
[Informal consensus is the community likes the new skin.]


► Grummz: Yes the lab coat, glasses, and goggles are all part of the skin. They're available at launch of the game for your pilots, if you're part of the Em-8ER Monthly Patron program. We had another dollar deal and we broke 1,000; and that means we unlocked the Heavy Omniframe modeling for the Kickstarter movie. Folks subbed to get the skin at $1 and after that was over, the subs dropped back down to 944 subs. So we need to get into a stable 1,000 subs territory.

► Grummz: Also we are working on PayPal as an option. We currently have that working for backer packages on our staging website. We hope to have that available for subscription packages, sometime after we enable PayPal for the backer packages.
►►► PayPal will be going up hopefully by the end of this month for Newcomer packs. And then after that, at some time we will do subscriptions via PayPal.

►►► Grummz: @cutesexyrobutts on Twitter, please comment and like on the Carmen post.

►►► Show Em-8ER female concept artist, CSR, some LOVE for Carmen!! ◄◄◄


►►►Ronyn: For those who don't want to make a Twitter, I will go ahead and put up a forum thread about this particular skin, you can make some noise there and I will make sure they see the forum thread.

▼▼▼ EDIT - Here is that forum thread: ▼▼▼
https://forums.em8er.com/threads/carmen-kaiju-field-researcher-appreciation-thread.1834


► Grummz: I will also be sending information about Carmen out and a little back story lore by email.

► You're going to see the Gatestrider novel pick up. I'm currently working on Chapter 6. Are you holding these chapters back? No I am not. I've just been trying to figure out how to get my word count up and to manage my time better so I can produce the chapters more efficiently.

► We're not holding a new build back. But we have a new build coming. Does that count as holding it back, if we're going as fast as we can?

===================================
♥ ♥ ♥ TEAM MEMBERS ANNIVERSARIES ♥ ♥ ♥
===================================

♥ ♥ ♥ Grummz: But before we get into that I want to point out that, this community is led by the BEST community team I've EVER worked with. And it's a special day today because for one of those community members, it is their 4th anniversary, yesterday, for being with us. And that would be Ronyn. And Ronyn, I want to thank you so much for leading our community team, we have something for you.

♥ ♥ ♥ Whether you like it or not, you'll be receiving this in the mail, it's a t-shirt to commemorate your unique contributions to the Em-8ER community. Are you guys ready for this? Here we go, this is Ronyn's t-shirt: ♥ ♥ ♥

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ THANK YOU RONYN!! ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

♥ ♥ ♥ HarryPearce: August 11, 2019 he joined the Em-8ER Dev Team. He is the ENTIRE reason you guys have multiplayer in the game. He's done so much for the game in one year. Harry thank you SO much for your contribution to Em-8ER.

♥ ♥ ♥ Ricardo has been with us two years now ?
Ricardo thank you for making all the animations work somehow!

♥ ♥ ♥ Ben [Fillmore] as well, longer than that.

♥ ♥ ♥ I wanted to thank everyone on the Dev Team but there are some people who aren't here.♥ ♥ ♥
I'm going to get everyone's anniversary dates and we're going to start celebrating this. At Blizzard we started giving out swords at 5 years so, I don't know what we're going to do for Crixa Labs but, we'll figure out something.

♥ ♥ ♥ Oh and I forgot Toshi, maybe because he was insulting all of us earlier, LOL. How long have you been with us Toshi? [Toshi can't remember].

=================
RAFFLES FOR SKINS
=================

► Zoom in on the bottom of Carmen's concept art. See the humans on the bottom? Those two characters are the ones you need to compare in size to the Kaiju eye in the laboratory tube.

Q: Is there any chance of any medieval inspired dark scifi knight skin in the future?
►Grummz: We kind of have one? The FREE skin you get if you just sign up is kind of 40k Sisters of Battle-ish. So not full on medieval.

Grummz did a "Skin In Review" (in order of posts in Discord).

Spoiler: Skins in Review

- April 2020 Female Bunny skin
- July 2020 Male GCSF skin
- June 2020 Female AKTA uniform skin
- March 2020 GS Cinder Omniframe skin
- 2020 Female Valkyrie skin
- February 2020 Female GCSF skin
- August 2019 Female Engineer skin
- December 2019/January 2020 Mount and Snowbunny skins
- July 2019 Female OP-AI skin
- June 2019 Female skin
- May 2019 Plasma Canon carbon fiber skin
- November 2019 Female Darla skin
- October Female (camo) skin
- September Male (camo) skin
- October 2019 Halloween Special Omniframe skin
- May 2020 Male Arch Duke skin

►Grummz: I think it's time to do another AI one. The male bunny outfit; I know people would like one.


►►► Thursday, we're dropping "The Bug Fix Demo". ◄◄◄

►Grummz: If you recall last time, we said we were doing a lot of internal rearrangement of stuff. Just organizational stuff, naming conventions, and things like this. Just trying to clean up our foundation so we have something solid to build on as we start to add the actual gameplay for the THMPR encounter. Our goal is to create a playable THMPR enoucnter for the Kickstarter and we're getting closer and closer to that.

►BUT, there are going to be additional small things. The next build on Thursday, we're getting a NEW hit indicator, which indicates verticality. So you're going to see that because we're a very vertical game. WE thought the current hit indicator didn't show whether the attacks were coming from above or below you. So Ben has been working on something for that.

►►► Harry has been knocking out all the bugs here in the movement code. So the stuff that you guys have been cheesing and breaking, he's there to make your life even more difficult to find the next bugs.

►►► Ricardo, has a treat for you guys . . .
►►► We have the pilot in the omniframe! ◄◄◄
So you'll finally see pilots in omniframes on Thursday! No hard driver mode yet. And it's going to be in the v2 geesuit.

We had a fall back which was to completely and separately animate the pilots. But that would have been really difficult for doing character customization and things like that. So we really needed a way to get the pilots in there procedurally.

►►► The female pilot in the v2 geesuit will be in the next build in an omniframe! ◄◄◄


► Harry: The audio issue btw? Are we sure that can be solved by Thursday?
Grummz: Yes I'm going to work on that today to see if Wise can resolve it.

♥ ♥ ♥ Grummz: The forum threads and posts you guys are creating are AMAZING!! ♥ ♥ ♥
We use that to hunt down all the bugs and to find the steps to reproduce them.
So we create a Word Doc with all your guys' feedback and we're in there fixing stuff.

========================================
RAFFLES FOR FORERUNNER & ONE DOLLAR PACK
========================================


Q: Is the Kickstarter timeframe still on for this year?
► Grummz: I don't know. I think we have hit some delays and we have to get back to getting the Tsi-Hu active again. We did a reorganization of some of the code, knocking out some of these bugs is part of that.
► Covid obviously was unanticipated this year. And while it didn't really slow things down at the beginning, it did sort of go on far longer than anyone expected. We're going to do our best to make a lot of progress.

► ► ► Grummz: Here's one thing you guys should expect -
The encounter will likely be done before the Kickstarter movie is ready because after we get the encounters running, we still have to paint a picture of what the rest of the game will be like. And we're not actually going to code that into the game, because then we have a complete game there would be no point in having the Kickstarter. But we still have to have a demo portion for that. So we'll be working on that in the background. And that's the part that's going to take a little bit of time. And I'm looking at getting more help for that, recruiting some more help potentially, so we can get the movie part done efficiently.

►We're going to be doing a new level for the demo that you won't see until the Kickstarter. The Light Omniframe is going to go in there with the Light Omniframe abilities. So we're going to be working on that. Then we're going to be working on the stuff for the movie.

► Stuff for the movie includes things like - a little bit of lore, a little bit of cut scene work with in-game models, not a lot. We're going to see bases, Kaiju, base destruction, that stuff is going to have to be programmed with Unreal because we're not going to show any pre-rendered stuff. So that's the sort of behind-the-scenes stuff. And we're saving a bunch of stuff because we don't want to tip our hand. We want a LOT of new stuff to show for the Kickstarter.

► So you can expect that once we get the Tsi-Hu encounter working for thumping, there's going to be behind the scenes work that we're also doing for the movie. And that will affect the pace of the builds that come out as well.

►►► I have a call with Michael Bross on Friday (August 28th). He is eager and very excited to get back to the music for the game.

►►► Laura Post, I contacted her and she's ready to go when we're ready to record lines for the AI. I think we need to create a model for her. Probably using the character creator and reprise her role.

Q: Are you going to move to Unreal 5?
► Grummz: Possibly? That's still a ways out. Remember, that we want framerate. Framerate is king. A lot of it is going to be performance based.


► The other thing we want to show off for the Kickstarter movie that won't be in the Kickstarter demo is the character creator.
► The other thing is mech customization, and then the Kaiju you will see in the movie and not in the Playable Mockup.

Q: Any new weapons or abilities for the Kickstarter?
► Grummz: There will be new abilities and weapons because you'll have the Light Omniframe in the Playable Mockup, which will have different weapons and abilities.


Q: Will you have "good graphics" while also aiming to not dissuade lower end computer players from playing?
► Grummz: You're going to see a graphics fidelity update for Kickstarter. What we call it in the industry is a beauty pass in the visuals before the Kickstarter.


► Michael Bross is composing the music for Em-8ER.
► Christian is working on sound effects.

 

[PartTimeJedi]

======================================================
CHIEF CHAT NOTES FOR AUGUST 24, 2020
======================================================

Grummz: What is this Chief Chat all about? This is about chatting with the Chief; and that's me. Also raffles and updating you guys on stuff that's happening [with Em-8ER]. Some know him [The Chief] as Navel God. It's been a while since we did one of these but, this is a Chief Chat where we talk about the game, what's coming up for the game, answer questions about the game for Newcomers, and to talk about industry trends or whatever.

[Grummz mentioned a BIG current trend, pronounced by some e-celebs in anime, "The mecha genre is dead".
There's a new mech anime by Trigger called Promare.]

Grummz: I think you do have to combine mecha with other stuff now it can't be just a pure mecha show. You've got to have a good storyline, you got to have characters, and the mecha is sort of just like the icing on the cake.

CHIEF CHAT START:

► Grummz: Welcome everyone to another Chief Chat! We're starting up these up again. I'm sorry we had a little bit of a delay; there was some stuff going on IRL for me. But we're now back on track!

► Ben has lifted the throttling and emails should be going out at light speed.
[Responses indicate the announcement email was received on time.]

► NEW skin this month by CuteSexyRobutts. It's now a wallpaper for everyone to download. It is now available on the my.em8er.com site for free. You just have to sign up.

► Her name is Carmen! Carmen is a Kaiju hunter as well as the lead researcher in the Gatestrider Labs, researching kaiju technology. Because we want to reverse engineer the both the Kaiju and the tech that the Tsi-Hu implant in them to control them, in order to develop better crafting recipes, that we can unlock for our omniframes.

Grummz asks the community's opinion on the Carmen skin.
[Informal consensus is the community likes the new skin.]


► Grummz: Yes the lab coat, glasses, and goggles are all part of the skin. They're available at launch of the game for your pilots, if you're part of the Em-8ER Monthly Patron program. We had another dollar deal and we broke 1,000; and that means we unlocked the Heavy Omniframe modeling for the Kickstarter movie. Folks sub to get the skin at $1 and after that is over, the subs dropped back down to 944 subs. So we need to get into a stable 1,000 subs territory.

► Grummz: Also we are working on PayPal as an option. We currently have that working for backer packages on our staging website. We hope to have that available for subscription packages, sometime after we enable PayPal for the backer packages.
►►► PayPal will be going up hopefully by the end of this month for Newcomer packs. And then after that, at some time we will do subscriptions via PayPal.

►►► Grummz: @cutesexyrobutts on Twitter, please comment and like on the Carmen post.

►►► Show Em-8ER female concept artist, CSR, some LOVE for Carmen!! ◄◄◄


►►►Ronyn: For those who don't want to make a Twitter, I will go ahead and put up a forum thread about this particular skin, you can make some noise there and I will make sure they see the forum thread.


► Grummz: I will also be sending information about Carmen out and a little back story lore by email.

► You're going to see the Gatestrider novel pick up. I'm currently working on Chapter 6. Are you holding these chapters back? No I am not. I've just been trying to figure out how to get my word count up and to manage my time better so I can produce the chapters more efficiently.

► We're not holding a new build back. But we have a new build coming. Does that count as holding it back, if we're going as fast as we can?

===================================
♥ ♥ ♥ TEAM MEMBERS ANNIVERSARIES ♥ ♥ ♥
===================================

♥ ♥ ♥ Grummz: But before we get into that I want to point out that, this community is led by the BEST community team I've EVER worked with. And it's a special day today because for one of those community members, it is their 4th anniversary, yesterday, for being with us. And that would be Ronyn. And Ronyn, I want to thank you so much for leading our community team, we have something for you.

♥ ♥ ♥ Whether you like it or not, you'll be receiving this in the mail, it's a t-shirt to commemorate your unique contributions to the Em-8ER community. Are you guys ready for this? Here we go, this is Ronyn's t-shirt: ♥ ♥ ♥

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ THANK YOU RONYN!! ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

♥ ♥ ♥ HarryPearce: August 11, 2019 he joined the Em-8ER Dev Team. He is the ENTIRE reason you guys have multiplayer in the game. He's done so much for the game in one year. Harry thank you SO much for your contribution to Em-8ER.

♥ ♥ ♥ Ricardo has been with us two years now ?
Ricardo thank you for making all the animations work somehow!

♥ ♥ ♥ Ben [Fillmore] as well, longer than that.

♥ ♥ ♥ I wanted to thank everyone on the Dev Team but there are some people who aren't here.♥ ♥ ♥
I'm going to get everyone's anniversary dates and we're going to start celebrating this. At Blizzard we started giving out swords at 5 years so, I don't know what we're going to do for Crixa Labs but, we'll figure out something.

♥ ♥ ♥ Oh and I forgot Toshi, maybe because he was insulting all of us earlier, LOL. How long have you been with us Toshi? [Toshi can't remember].

=================
RAFFLES FOR SKINS
=================

► Zoom in on the bottom of Carmen's concept art. See the humans on the bottom? Those two characters are the ones you need to compare in size to the Kaiju eye in the laboratory tube.

Q: Is there any chance of any medieval inspired dark scifi knight skin in the future?
►Grummz: We kind of have one? The FREE skin you get if you just sign up is kind of 40k Sisters of Battle-ish. So not full on medieval.

Grummz did a "Skin In Review" (in order of posts in Discord).

Spoiler: Skins in Review

- April 2020 Female Bunny skin
- July 2020 Male GCSF skin
- June 2020 Female AKTA uniform skin
- March 2020 GS Cinder Omniframe skin
- 2020 Female Valkyrie skin
- February 2020 Female GCSF skin
- August 2019 Female Engineer skin
- December 2019/January 2020 Mount and Snowbunny skins
- July 2019 Female OP-AI skin
- June 2019 Female skin
- May 2019 Plasma Canon carbon fiber skin
- November 2019 Female Darla skin
- October Female (camo) skin
- September Male (camo) skin
- October 2019 Halloween Special Omniframe skin
- May 2020 Male Arch Duke skin

►Grummz: I think it's time to do another AI one. The male bunny outfit; I know people would like one.


►►► Thursday, we're dropping "The Bug Fix Demo". ◄◄◄

►Grummz: If you recall last time, we said we were doing a lot of internal rearrangement of stuff. Just organizational stuff, naming conventions, and things like this. Just trying to clean up our foundation so we have something solid to build on as we start to add the actual gameplay for the THMPR encounter. Our goal is to create a playable THMPR enoucnter for the Kickstarter and we're getting closer and closer to that.

►BUT, there are going to be additional small things. The next build on Thursday, we're getting a NEW hit indicator, which indicates verticality. So you're going to see that because we're a very vertical game. WE thought the current hit indicator didn't show whether the attacks were coming from above or below you. So Ben has been working on something for that.

►►► Harry has been knocking out all the bugs here in the movement code. So the stuff that you guys have been cheesing and breaking, he's there to make your life even more difficult to find the next bugs.

►►► Ricardo, has a treat for you guys . . .
►►► We have the pilot in the omniframe! ◄◄◄
So you'll finally see pilots in omniframes on Thursday! No hard driver mode yet. And it's going to be in the v2 geesuit.

We had a fall back which was to completely and separately animate the pilots. But that would have been really difficult for doing character customization and things like that. So we really needed a way to get the pilots in there procedurally.

►►► The female pilot in the v2 geesuit will be in the next build in an omniframe! ◄◄◄


► Harry: The audio issue btw? Are we sure that can be solved by Thursday?
Grummz: Yes I'm going to work on that today to see if Wise can resolve it.

♥ ♥ ♥ Grummz: The forum threads and posts you guys are creating are AMAZING!! ♥ ♥ ♥
We use that to hunt down all the bugs and to find the steps to reproduce them.
So we create a Word Doc with all your guys' feedback and we're in there fixing stuff.

========================================
RAFFLES FOR FORERUNNER & ONE DOLLAR PACK
========================================


Q: Is the Kickstarter timeframe still on for this year?
► Grummz: I don't know. I think we have hit some delays and we have to get back to getting the Tsi-Hu active again. We did a reorganization of some of the code, knocking out some of these bugs is part of that.
► Covid obviously was unanticipated this year. And while it didn't really slow things down at the beginning, it did sort of go on far longer than anyone expected. We're going to do our best to make a lot of progress.

► ► ► Grummz: Here's one thing you guys should expect -
The encounter will likely be done before the Kickstarter movie is ready because after we get the encounters running, we still have to paint a picture of what the rest of the game will be like. And we're not actually going to code that into the game, because then we have a complete game there would be no point in having the Kickstarter. But we still have to have a demo portion for that. So we'll be working on that in the background. And that's the part that's going to take a little bit of time. And I'm looking at getting more help for that, recruiting some more help potentially, so we can get the movie part done efficiently.

►We're going to be doing a new level for the demo that you won't see until the Kickstarter. The Light Omniframe is going to go in there with the Light Omniframe abilities. So we're going to be working on that. Then we're going to be working on the stuff for the movie.

► Stuff for the movie includes things like - a little bit of lore, a little bit of cut scene work with in-game models, not a lot. We're going to see bases, Kaiju, base destruction, that stuff is going to have to be programmed with Unreal because we're not going to show any pre-rendered stuff. So that's the sort of behind-the-scenes stuff. And we're saving a bunch of stuff because we don't want to tip our hand. We want a LOT of new stuff to show for the Kickstarter.

► So you can expect that once we get the Tsi-Hu encounter working for thumping, there's going to be behind the scenes work that we're also doing for the movie. And that will affect the pace of the builds that come out as well.

►►► I have a call with Michael Bross on Friday (August 28th). He is eager and very excited to get back to the music for the game.

►►► Laura Post, I contacted her and she's ready to go when we're ready to record lines for the AI. I think we need to create a model for her. Probably using the character creator and reprise her role.

Q: Are you going to move to Unreal 5?
► Grummz: Possibly? That's still a ways out. Remember, that we want framerate. Framerate is king. A lot of it is going to be performance based.


► The other thing we want to show off for the Kickstarter movie that won't be in the Kickstarter demo is the character creator.
► The other thing is mech customization, and then the Kaiju you will see in the movie and not in the Playable Mockup.

Q: Any new weapons or abilities for the Kickstarter?
► Grummz: There will be new abilities and weapons because you'll have the Light Omniframe in the Playable Mockup, which will have different weapons and abilities.


Q: Will you have "good graphics" while also aiming to not dissuade lower end computer players from playing?
► Grummz: You're going to see a graphics fidelity update for Kickstarter. What we call it in the industry is a beauty pass in the visuals before the Kickstarter.


► Michael Bross is composing the music for Em-8ER.
► Christian is working on sound effects.

Thanks Fae for all your behind the scenes hard work! @Faeryl#8011.
Great Chief Chat! So much to look forward to in the near future!

 

[Pandagnome]

Em8er em8er the planet Em8er your time is arriving what will you give us in Em8er time?
I see action,i see suspense, i see expanding areas that are from out of space.

You will enrich us with terrains of beauty and some of danger, the beasts lurk with big teeth in anger!
Go Meks deploy its time to vanquish them once and for all, little we know the others await we look in horror and anticipate.

Em8er is vast like no other do you join us in this epic journey in the boundless endless discoveries.
We have much to see, much to do, only together we stand can we see it through.

You are the reapers of Em8er, we wait each and everyone of you.
Time ticks the arrival is nearer... brace for impact our display huds become clearer

A motorbike zooms past with trails of fire its sleek dark metallic look in the blinding light, and just on the right a figure approaches to offer their insight.

Greetings Reaper a landing well noted, you should get out we have much exploring.
A huge shadow from above covers us, you worry but it is just our drop-ship that hovers past!

 

[Wyntyr]

Awesome write up! Thank you!