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05-04-22 05:49:59 PM
Jul - The Cutting Room Floor - Interviews and developer accounts New poll - New thread - New reply
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Sanqui
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Posted on 05-07-16 09:49:09 PM Link | Quote


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I've been thinking about TCRF and what it's missing.

Developer accounts are an important and often overlooked part of a video game history. If we want to document a game's development process, we should be paying attention when the creators themselves are speaking! Interviews in particular can provide a lot of insight and answers to questions raised by unused content.

Sonic and Sega Retro are doing a wonderful job cataloguing Sonic and Sega interviews. But what about other series and games? Many independent interviews are scattered among old fanpages, just waiting to linkrot away. We should either archive them and link them, or straight up copy them for preservation's sake (up for discussion).
There's more, though. Many developers or localization teams speak on their own. One example I have is the Ace Attorney blog kept by the translator, Janet Hsu, which contains not only inside info about the localization process, but sometimes even short snippets with the original developers talking about original ideas and constraints. Sometimes developers speak of their own games that were never released and share materials, screenshots, or even entire soundtracks!

Even beyond long form accounts, nowadays, creators sometimes post tidbits of information on Twitter. They might answer inquiries by fans about their current games, or they might reminisce about their old ones. Those tidbits often get lost and go undocumented, in many cases even untranslated. I think there's a place on TCRF for them.

However, let me approach this from a different angle now. In general, TCRF right now is pretty passive in the things it covers: content dug up from games, and more recently prerelease material like magazines. However, I think we have the potential to become active and bring in some interaction and new content beyond discoveries, for example by producing our own interviews. It's not that difficult: many people are willing to speak up - but nobody asks. For example, we (the Telefang community) did an interview with a designer of Telefang, Saiko Takaki, and she was happy to share.

This is probably a lot of ideas at once, but I truly felt like there's a lot of valuable content we're missing. I hope I can spark some discussion about whether we should embark on this path and set down some kind of roadmap.

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Posted on 05-07-16 10:05:56 PM Link | Quote
I think this is a great idea. I'm in the process of trying to set up a developer interview right now, and there are plenty of existing interviews online that I know would fit well in the context of TCRF.
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Posted on 05-07-16 10:10:07 PM Link | Quote


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At the moment, I'm thinking about a new namespace. In general, a game's page on it would:

  • Host TCRF interviews in the form of subpages
  • Link to outside resources (interviews, blog posts...), together with an archive.org link
  • Embed short quips and tweets, with source

All with the possibility of editor comments ("This quote is probably related to the unused sprite...")

Interview: sounds like the obvious choice, but it doesn't cover all use cases. Accounts: is passable, but it might also get confused with the technical term. Ideas?

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Cuber456

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Posted on 05-07-16 10:58:55 PM Link | Quote
Documenting interviews should be apart of TCRF for sure.

Not sure what is the best way to document older interviews. It's easy enough to just copy and paste an interview (with source) to preserve it although I disagree with that method. By the time you read it, who knows how it could have been manipulated. That feels like a game of telephone. I think a better way would be to use something like archive.org. However the case, I don't think there is just one solution to the problem. We should have a few different solutions at the ready to help preserve interviews.

As for new interviews, I think it would be great if people in TCRF community would reach out to devs or what have you and ask questions. I actually would like to interview a developer myself just because of some of the odd things I have found. However, what holds me back is that I don't know how much said developer would reveal to me and, more importantly, how they would react to having their game dug around in. I just don't want to end up with a negative stigma from the developers of games I enjoy. Perhaps this is just a self-contrived fear.

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Posted on 05-07-16 11:50:07 PM (last edited by divingkataetheweirdo at 05-08-16 12:06:22 AM) Link | Quote
Hoo boy. I might be up for this, since a lot of games are unknown and the people behind them don't really go into depth with what happened during a game's development. For example, there's an obscure, yet awesome, YT channel called Matt Chat and Matt interviews a bunch of PC/Western developers for their inputs. As of yet, I don't think anyone on the wiki has bothered to watch the videos and jot down any instances of unused/cut stuff.

Interviews do help build upon a game's background and clarifies a lot of rumors, which is nice for a wiki that digs through content and doesn't always know what that content was used for.

However, I also fear mission creep with this. Considering we are still missing an insane number of games just on the hidden/unused content front alone, I would think that still needs to be worked on further. I can acknowledge that it is hard to even find one who has knowledge of the game and can dig through. After all, the CTE page keeps growing every day and I know a lot of people don't have time to search through them.

Might as well include a rough list of blanket questions here, even if they are robotic:

*How would you describe yourself in terms of the games industry?
*What/who influenced you to join the games industry?
*What was your first game?
*What's your most recent game?
*What have you used to develop video games? (This includes developer tools, SDKs or even code snippets for something like the game's compression)
*Where there any books/research papers used during the development of a game?
*Do you recall there being a debug menu in the game? (Awkward, but something like this could be said)
*Do you have a development diary/timeline/journal for the game?
*How many prototypes/developer back-ups do you have?
*What are you currently doing?

I'd say the namespace would be DeveloperCommentary, DevTalk or something among those lines. I'm not sure if I can contribute much to these pages besides the typical clean-up routines and all. I also think that there could be a general interview wiki, which would include all types of interviews made and sort them by type. I'm not sure about the legal repercussions, though.

tl;dr Maybe, just maybe it's worth it.

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Posted on 05-08-16 05:21:05 AM Link | Quote
Someone mentioned to me that letting unqualified people do interviews is a terrible idea, citing Sonic Retro as evidence, and boy howdy do I agree.

Anyway that's my $0.02

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Posted on 05-08-16 05:29:33 AM Link | Quote
I'd say there's still something to be gained from documenting interviews (or relevant parts of interviews). I can empathize with not wanting to perpetrate some unprofessional interviewing going on, but I think there's a lot we can do still for postmortem documentation outside of in-house interviews.
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Posted on 05-08-16 07:01:02 AM Link | Quote
Originally posted by Xkeeper
Anyway that's my $0.02

That isn't a bad 2 cents. Nothing should be halfhazardly done. Anybody going to do an interview should be well versed in what questions they are going to ask and not just "wing it". This is especially so if the interview was actually going to be live. It would be pretty awkward for the interviewer to be straining and fumbling around which would lead to poor results.

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Sanqui
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Posted on 05-08-16 07:45:43 AM Link | Quote


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Originally posted by Xkeeper
Someone mentioned to me that letting unqualified people do interviews is a terrible idea, citing Sonic Retro as evidence, and boy howdy do I agree.

Anyway that's my $0.02

This is a valid point. Maybe we could make a process for greenlighting interviews that would be branded as by TCRF and conducted "officially". That way, anybody wishing to do an interview on behalf of TCRF would check with us first and we could make sure they're competent and qualified. Of course, there's nothing you can do if people don't consult with us.

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Posted on 05-08-16 07:52:05 AM Link | Quote
Yes, that is a problem with letting unpracticed people conducting interviews. The same goes for trolling and that is something you want to deal with carefully, yet quickly.

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Posted on 05-08-16 08:19:20 AM (last edited by SamEarl13 at 05-08-16 10:36:52 AM) Link | Quote
This is quite a good idea, not only is there a lot of things that would be interesting for the wiki but a lot of dev's are totally fine with answering questions. In fact there's still the old japanese site for Sonic Adventure which seems to have a lot of stuff http://sonic.sega.jp/sonicadv/ (Might be worth mentioning links are in a backwards order so start at the bottom)

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Posted on 05-08-16 10:40:12 AM (last edited by Sanky at 05-08-16 10:45:04 AM) Link | Quote


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We spoke with drx, who has a great deal of expertise on these things, and I'm now convinced we should steer clear of the TCRF interviews idea for starters. There's too much of a risk of random people badgering devs and we want to avoid that. I'm not saying we can't host fresh interviews, but we shouldn't be starting a public initiative or anything like that.

In addition, Hidden Palace intends to host interviews soon, both old and new. Their focus is on raw content and metadata, and I think a synergy can be reached with TCRF.

I'll be repeating myself a little, but I now have a clear picture of what I'd like:

Each game would get an extra page on a new namespace, acting as a hub of links to interviews, blog posts, and snippets like forum posts or tweets. This way, we can refer to relevant articles on sites like Hidden Palace, Sega Retro, Unseen64, SNES Central, or developer team blogs. We will not be lifting their content, it will be merely linked (but also dumped into archive.org). The short snippets could be hosted with translations if relevant.

The primary goal is to enhance accessibility, discoverability, and preservation of interviews, developer accounts, historical news, and research conducted by other sites about the development process of video games, without actually being invasive and copying everything to TCRF. That's my vision!

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Posted on 05-08-16 10:50:16 AM Link | Quote
It would be good if we could use other sites to the Wiki's advantage as you say. After all that might convince some people to help out the Wiki with its content. The site i linked to is well known but Google Translate does a terrible job translating it (plus the text seems corrupted unless you view it with archive.org). I have been wondering what kind of info the Wiki should have, there's a lot of interesting stuff out there but since TCRF is mainly for unused things I don't know.

An example of something i personally found interesting was the diary on the site i linked, turns out Tikal is named after a real place.

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Posted on 05-10-16 07:56:25 PM Link | Quote
So wait, are we actually going to start dedicating space on TCRF for interviews found on the web now?

Please don't let this idea die in this thread. I don't want it to turn into a thought that was "throw around" and then forgotten about.

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Sanqui
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Posted on 05-11-16 08:07:47 AM (last edited by Sanky at 05-11-16 08:13:19 AM) Link | Quote


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I made a test page with how it could roughly look. I'd like to include more metadata for each link, maybe? Ideas? Feel free to edit that page and the associated template.

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Posted on 05-11-16 08:10:04 AM Link | Quote
Originally posted by Sanky
I made a test page with how it could roughly look. I'd like to include more metadata for each link, maybe? Ideas? Feel free to edit that page and the associated template.

Fixed link. (smilies disabled)


https://tcrf.net/User:Sanky/Outlinks_test

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Posted on 05-11-16 09:39:51 PM Link | Quote
Originally posted by Sanky
I made a test page with how it could roughly look. I'd like to include more metadata for each link, maybe? Ideas? Feel free to edit that page and the associated template.
I like the "Sanky/Outlink" template.

Suggestions:
I think it would be nice if the name of the interview/article was the blue hyperlink.
I think citing the original source of the article should be explicit. Perhaps it can be on the left side mirroring the original publish date.

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Posted on 05-20-16 05:45:37 PM (last edited by Hiccup at 05-20-16 05:46:55 PM) Link | Quote
A suggestion for a site that could be linked (or cooperated with): ttp://www.pidgi.net/wiki/Main_Page
It is an archive for video game media, which would include useful things for prerelease pages (e.g. early logos, screenshots and videos of early builds).
Disclaimer: I have, and will continue to upload media to this wiki.

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