It won't fall, silly!
Ponies don't need to help it.
The initial goal of our A Little Bit Different team
always was to create a game about ponies
that will amaze people.
Also, I guess there will not be any more... You know, other alpha, betas or whatever.
We're a small international group of people
who can only devote short bursts of time to develop it.
Yes...
...We have a lot of stuff to do.
Looks like it's time to share our story...
right from the very beginning.
The story of an inexperienced indie game developer and crowdfunding
is like a story about a blind man with a gun.
I bet you may understand why the man is blind.
But a gun? Why?
Well, to explain when the gun comes in, we gotta remember how this project started.
I have a dream.
A dream that someday there would be a game
on which bronies could point to and say:
"This is much much more than just a videogame about ponies."
I wish that someday bronies would come to the e3, gamescom or whatever
and watch as someone comes to stage and say:
"We made a game about ponies. And it is amazing"
This was a time of an innocent young man chasing the
dream of many other bronies - a dream of creating a piece of art to define the core values of
the fandom, and the miracles that true friendship can produce.
A flood of emails kept coming in from people who wanted to help the project. A lot of talented
people and a lot of people who desired to learn and help a common goal.
And I felt I was ready to handle them.
This was the first bullet.
The first one that I fired from a gun. A bullet that I fired...
Right into my leg.
I never managed a game development team.
So my first my plan was to just center everything around me by asking people who wanted to help
to do specific assets for the game. Being an inexperienced game developer that I was,
I was completely sure that the plans of finishing a level needed for Ambient.Prologue
along with spells and combat system, even Krinita’s AI would be possible in a few months.
It’s obvious it wasn’t possible, but I was a stupid kid and I didn’t recognize the
amount of work that is needed when it comes to quality and detail.
Now the thing is, all the people I was in contact with were quite surprised by the fact that I’m
not having a place for the actual team to form and chat.
After all, everyone was in contact with me and only me.
So eventually, after a lot of requests I did form a team,
and it was visible almost immediately how incompetent I was in planning skills.
Every single deadline was missed by me, by others, because pretty much
nobody knew the real amount of time that is needed to complete something when it came to development.
After all, most of people who came on board of the team were not experienced too!
Additionally, nobody except me worked on this full time so the deadlines were shifting all around the place.
I gotta give credit to our beautiful musicians, editors, translators
and artists. They were doing great, even animators that we had were keeping up!
But... When it came to programmers, modelers and writers...
Well...I’ll talk about this later... I guess
Also turns out people actually wanna see the content,
get access to every project element, info on who’s doing what
and more and more and more!
To be fair... people were right to ask that!
That would complete a team experience of sorts.
But I was very protective of my baby game for a long time.
so I rarely gave access to anything to anyone.
After all, I literally never met any of the people that were in the team
and I only recently got to know them a little.
That’s on you to decide if I was right or wrong
to be skeptical of how much I can trust people who just joined the team.
Anyway, my beautiful friend Piramidhead joined the team soon enough as a producer
and we started to flash out our project management skills step by step.
We started moving platforms to find what suits us better,
we tried to organize the work as much as we can, learning
and using management software,
to the point that I even made a complete platform to track our tasks!
(Which was actually completely unnecessary and I just was desperate).
For 3 whole years, we slowly learned to manage a team more or less like professionals,
however when we learned enough,
after all this time the team was quite exhausted about all of this.
So managing a team was...
Noice.
No matter how hard it seemed like we were working, the progress was slow,
and we often saw another glaring issue in development.
It was.... me.
Everything about developing a game was focused around me.
I was writing, I was often modeling, I was doing game and level design,
I was programming, I was interacting with most of the team
to make sure they are going in the right art direction.
That clearly wasn’t the right way to do it, right?
That’s why every single person in the team
was constantly pointing me to the obvious solution.
To the second bullet... that I fired into my leg...
Alright! Here we go! Everything I need to do is -
I need to offload the work I do to more people!
Although there weren't many professional modelers, game and level designers who could help,
it looked like I should be able to offload the writing and programming jobs to others.
And the first big responsibility was given to the <redacted_01_MoonBoy>.
He was quite a good writer, based on his fimfiction works.
And he was very excited to help fixing up the story in the game.
But... next, there was a sequence of events that is unfortunately
all too familiar with the development of Ambient and probably many other projects like this.
<redacted_01_MoonBoy> has taken a responsibility of writing a fairly small script,
like 30 to 40 minutes of cutscenes and in-game dialogues based on my version of the script.
He promised to finish the first version in a week or so.
A week rolls in and... huh? Where is it?
Oh nevermind, our man MoonBoy got it covered
but it should just take another week.
Alright... so?
Ah yes right! It's the holidays! Right, family time and stuff, completely understandable.
So... next week it is, right?
Alright, you gotta have something for me this time right?
Oh! d... depression? I’m so sorry to hear you’re in depression... yeah...
oh but you’ve got it almost done? Awesome!
Okay, I’ll wait another week.
So he finally got it done... let's take a look.
Oh... okay.... it’s... much bigger than expected and...
So much stuff is going on there...
And... I wouldn’t say I’m impressed, but okay. Better then my version, I guess.
After few more months of revisions, we got the script kinda done. But...
We couldn’t dream of making it soon.
Just by completing this script, we have passed the initial release deadline...
But whatever, we have the script now, so let's just finish the game.
So next... programming.
When the programmers started rolling in, the code in the game was a complete mess
and nobody could do anything about it except me.
It was like a jungle that only I had some faint idea of what to do with.
Just so you know I did work on Ambient like...
From when Unreal Engine 4 come out?
I was working on that code on and off right until 2015
when the first videos were published.
Okay, so since no programmer could do anything with the code,
if we wanted a stable build, we needed to start anew.
And another magnificent member of the team was up and ready to start the project from scratch!
It was...<redacted_02_CodeInverted>
And actually, it went pretty much the same as with MoonBoy,
but this time CodeInverted has worked like
3 weeks on a feature that was so complex we really didn’t need to bother with it,
did nothing for 2 weeks after that, and just left the team.
Just like that, yeah.
Leaving the team with like literally 5 weeks of lost progress and an empty project.
This kind of event was happening much more often then anybody wants to imagine.
Now, you may have realized by now why I was cautious about giving people responsibilities after that.
Rarely, people ended up in a situation like I did
so my caution about giving people I never met responsibility wasn’t that understood by the team.
Many people did their best with what they were doing helping the project.
And to be fair, I’m pretty sure every reason
why this guy and many others were not meeting their deadlines were valid!
But... how do we finish a project like that?
Oh yes, these two stories are far from being the only ones!
After all working with volunteers for so long gave me an opportunity to see...
...the brony fandom in all its beauty.
<redacted_03_SoundBird>
- a sound designer that left without notice pretty much after I gave him his first task.
<redacted_04_SadPon>
- an amazing concept artist, but consumed by anxiety and depression,
he didn't see how good his works are.
<redacted_05_IllustrationMonarch>
- an incredible UI designer, really,
but he spread negativity in the team out of anger on being kicked out of another project.
<redacted_06_ShinyGem>
I wish I didn’t use this word... but yeah... he’s just toxic
and the team couldn’t handle it.
Good sound designer tho, another very talented person.
<redacted_07_LeakyPony>
Yeah, just...just fuck him.
<redacted_08_SnowyWeather>
- damn, he was actually a very very good person and sound designer and musician but...
as far as I now he’s like... in jail? Because of some copyright problems?...
I hope he’s well...
And yeah, there sure are some others.
It's sad to see so many talented people doing such a poor job of taking care of themselves.
Life is difficult, not many can manage it.
However, the two first cases I told you about, with the writer and the programmer, were taking place at the beginning of 2016.
Eventually, MoonBoy has left the team for personal reasons
and I was left with a script to a game that is somewhat amusing,
but nothing that special.
And it bothered me that this was a game that is more like a trailer to another game,
than an actual complete game.
(Well, that’s why it was called prologue.)
So I made the decision in May of 2016 to stop fooling around
and enter the True Man’s World
with all the knowledge I had, and make a complete game,
(released in parts),
with a new, much better story, that will be called Ambient.White!
Yeah! Right! I’ll just do all the hardest parts myself and it will be fine!
And oh boy, every time you think you’ve got it... the truth is you probably don’t...
We all worked hard in the ALBD team, revealing a new shape of the game in Autumn of 2016,
excited to work more to actually complete it, learning about many things on the way and...
Oh! Hey, didn't I tell you about another thing I wasn’t experienced in?
Right! Game design.
If only you knew how many times the interface, features, combat, magic, Krinita, enemies,
world, the real world, my life-goals, desires, tastes, PERSONALITY, have been changing all this time!
We released at least 3 demos with pretty much completely different mechanics,
because I didn't know what I was doing and I really didn't know what I wanted,
because as life went by - my interests just kept on changing!
So that's it... another bullet.
My lack of game design knowledge and experience.
We worked for a year after Autumn 2016 and finally, in Autumn 2017, we got it!
Kinda...
After all this time, we completed a sort of prototype of a whole Chapter 1 of the story.
About 3 hours of gameplay footage with cutscenes. Only... the gameplay was
kinda off everywhere... and... the levels were pretty much empty because I didn't have time to flash them out...
Yeah... It was a mess.
And even story...
...The story that I was too scared to show to the team because of the potentiality of a leak...
After all this time, people didn't enjoy it much.
Well... we still got something, right? Might as well finish it.
But finishing it needs time, too.
Alright, 2018, here we go.
We continued flashing out what we had as much as possible,
although the morale of the team already was quite low
and I had less and less time for the project because of college...
It was obvious the project was lacking in more people
experienced in various fields of game development,
and not many people were coming to the team at that point. I wonder why...
And then I heard them...
THE BRONY FANDOM RUMORS!
Guess what they were about? That's right!
The management in the team behind Ambient sucks.
Moreover, the lead developer of Ambient.White is actually...
...an evil tyrant!
Imagine waking up one day to know that you are hated and thought of as an evil person.
After all the emotions and hard work you put into helping people
to develop an element of the game that both you
and the creator of the element would be proud of,
after all of the time you’re trying to be understanding of people’s fuck ups,
after all of the stress you feel trying to learn as you go, being in charge of a thing
that is important to so many people...
...turns out people in and outside the team talk behind your back, describing you as an evil tyrant.
Did I make mistakes? Yes, of course.
Was this title deserved?
I guess if you’re looking for a reason to describe why you left the team or was kicked out of the team,
or to describe why the progress in the development is slow,
it's quite useful to just describe that the person in charge of the project is an evil tyrant.
Whatever, back to the development story.
In Spring of 2018, a writer joined the team.
He was very excited about helping with the core story of the game.
His name was <redacted_01_SharpIrony>
We already had some writers, but they worked on side stories.
I was too cautious to give main story to anybody else.
But this guy really really wanted to make a difference.
He wanted this project to be special, like I did.
He did have some experience too, and eventually, I agreed for him to polish the dialogues a little,
since he was a native English speaker. Unlike me.
But as time went by, he told his honest feelings about the fact
that he thinks the story needs a complete change,
since, as it is, it was a mess.
Naturally, I opposed that. After all, we had a lot of stuff done already!
Changing the story would mean we have to change a huge amount of stuff in the game.
But the whole team at a time agreed that the story needed to become better.
It was obvious we had to give some responsibilities to a professional.
Fair points were made and everybody thought it was a good idea.
So eventually, I agreed.
I don't like where this is going.
After an intense brainstorm with SharpIrony,
we came up with an idea so beautiful - it literally made me cry.
The idea was simply perfect and SharpIrony was excited to start writing!
At this time, roughly May 2018, I gave the gun into the hands of another person for a change.
But it looked like SharpIrony knew how it usually is done when it comes to working with me.
So he pointed the gun right at my leg, and...
After a month of work, he completed the outline of the story,
describing how every chapter will go in a nutshell.
Again, of course, this work was 4 times longer than expected,
than planned,
than he himself had planned.
And then, after my list of needed fixes, polish and additions,
SharpIrony spent another month
working on an outline to the story, that is...
completely different from the original idea.
Yeah, like... something got wrong there...
This literally wasn't what we agreed on, right?
and the new idea is not that...
Yeah, it's not that exciting.
For example, most of the story happens out of the actual game time!
Yeah there were some problems with the second version of the script,
and I wasn't happy about it.
It was obvious that there was a reason why he
was going so well before,
but this time actually...
didn't deliver on his promises.
Eventually, like it is usually done in the A Little Bit Different team,
he confessed that he was going through a rough time with his family
and he would not be able to work anymore.
So as the whole team, including me, was already prepared to start all over again
with a new, competent writer, we were left again with a good idea, a mess of a code and assets, and
no defined path ahead of us.
In the second half of 2018, I have started going through my last year of college.
The hardest of them all.
I gave my friend and project manager, Piramidhead, the lead,
since I couldn’t spend time on the project at this time myself.
We had a solid plan of finding and working with a new writer and programmer.
After all, we had some finances from our supporters on Patreon.
But right to the Summer of 2019, there was almost no progress in the project.
Writers and game designers that were working in my place tried to come up with something,
but after a long time of work, the only thing they came up with
was a game design document that was too far from anything that was promised to the fans,
and it just didn't work with the previously defined ideas and assets.
And so eventually I returned. With the team morale being completely destroyed,
and me not being able to even give work to anybody in the team,
because the music is done, the art is done,
the particle effects and such are done! After all, let me remind you,
most of the time, our production team consisted from musicians, artists and barely working writers.
Everything that this team was capable of without me - it did.
But even though these elements were done...
There was just no game, no story even to work with.
Only a mess of ideas, mechanics and writings.
So... What now?
What is the future of Ambient? And why did I do this long rant?
The original show is finished, the fandom is... well...
...not what it used to be.
Why even care doing anything past that?
Well, the thing is... I always said that no matter what happens,
I still will do my best to complete this project.
No matter what, I will reach my dream!
And this is a dream of so many others!
This project already changed something in many people.
And even though so much time passed, the dream still lives on.
There are still people who care.
There are still people who want to see this game released and play it!
Telling friends about how awesome a game about ponies is!
A game our fandom can be proud of!
A game that doesn't just let you play as a pony or whatever,
but actually be touched by the story and characters,
immersed into the beauty and the atmosphere of this world,
seeing this experience as a form of beautiful art.
In this video I was trying to answer the question of what happened after all this time.
It all was my opinion, my view of things, including my own mistakes.
This video is a way of being transparent with you on
why I see the project ended up the way it did after all this time.
And, well, you already heard what is the shape of the project now.
On this long journey, I have often been shooting straight into my legs,
but like a fool, I still stood up.
I still am walking, walking towards the dream that still lives on in many of our hearts.
Ambient.White is still in development.
At this moment we actually have a new writer, that is competent, professional
and that I am good friends with.
And compared to everybody before him, I actually can meet him in person,
because we live in the same city!
He even finished literally half of the script of the whole game!
With a well-defined path on how to finish it! How to finish the story.
How cool is that?
Now we have me, a guy that went through all of this hell, that is now professionally educated to be game designer,
we have a team of amazing people that help with PR, with music and art,
and we also have a much more defined idea of what Ambient has to become.
Now here is a thing: as I said, we’re still working on Ambient.White.
The work is still slow, because I have a job and personal life to deal with.
But this project is very important to me so we either finish it in coming years as an independent game,
(if we’ll have enough time of course),
or I will make sure to acquire the budget in the much distant future to make the game professionally
in a studio as a passion project.
Who knows where the life will lead us, right?
But the truth is, no matter what kind of rumors you see around,
the project is not dead or frozen
until I - DreamyWings - says so!
Alright? Awesome!
Oh yeah, now, after you listened to my long rant, let me share with you some fun news:
For the next few months we will be sharing our old Patreon builds with you guys. Publicly.
You’ll see how the ideas behind Ambient grew, and after we share all of that,
we’ll do our best to create and share a game build,
which is being done with new and fleshed out ideas,
that we started making a few months ago!
And also, we wll soon describe full idea behind what Ambient.White will be on release.
And we will show that in the next update video - Ambient Update #8.
So thank you for watching this video up to the end!
And hope to see you in the next update!
See ya!
Oh, also, what about Patreon? Can you donate? Should you donate? I don’t know! You decide!
What I know is that donations do help the project going.
Little by little, it is spent by me, trying to also spend more time on the project
and hire people to do things that I’m bad at - like animation or modeling!
So...I’m leaving the patreon up to keep contact with the supporters and
to keep myself organized enough to do content from the game that I’m excited to show.
Little by little, we do our best and eventually... we’ll get there.
Sis?
Yeah?
Before you started fighting the golems,
you... said you were tired of running.
I did...
What is it you're running from?
I don't know...
The real world, I guess...