Buzz and Release Planning

[Agent 12]

Yea, we'll insert zeality final scene whines before beta testing to minimze beta testers' bullet wound .

Though they'll still have some i'm sure since chrono'99 is still polishing.  But it's worth it to release it sooner I think.

Couldn't agree more with nightmares idea.

--JP

[ZeaLitY]

Yeah, and I've got several humorous ideas for 10 Youtube vids with my voice narrating like the Rated R movie guy who recently passed away. I've got several, but to give you an idea:

Video opens with one silent second showing Lavos in his pocket dimension
That "IVE GOT THE POWA" song form the early 90s starts
Lavos's two little growths pop up for battle and animate
After the song goes for couple seconds, I come on
LAVOS HAS THE POWER
CHRONO TRIGGER: CRIMSON ECHOES OUT NOW
WWW.WHATEVER.COM
GET THE POWER

Just, a lot of surreal, ridiculous viral ideas like this. The "IVE GOT THE POWA" thing is a meme from GameFAQs about Lavos's theme.

Edit: Ugh, watching the PG and Magus Unmasked videos (and Unmasked now has 35,000 hits, what the holy fuck), I'm almost starting to cry here. I am starting to cry. This...this feeling is addictive! We're...about to release something so...amazing, and it's going to make so many people happy...god, we've got to give it our very best...this is what the springtime of youth feels like!

[FaustWolf]

Your voice is probably the only piece of audio not copyrighted by Warner Music Group, so that should be great. Looks like "Ladies and Gentlemen" may fall under a WMG copyright, but there's some Saliva music videos allowed on Youtube with an advertisement overlay (doesn't get in the way too much). I'll do some experiments and see if I can sneak it through undetected.

Yeah, the Time's Scar lead-in will be great. I'll get the basic audio track worked out in Audacity and upload it here for everyone's perusal even before I start the video.

We should definitely have a ton of preview vids for this. Videogame fandom will be completely overwhelmed in new Chrono goodness.

[Agent 12]

FW, if you want me to make any scenes for you I can whip them up real quick.  For example the beginning of the song might look good with norstein bekkler on a black background or something :shrug:

Also....how far away should the compendium stay from these.  it'd be awfully horrible if we got hit right before release cause of this?  Maybe FW should make a new youtube account?  I would suggest not putting chronocompendium anywhere on it.  And maybe we should remove some of the CE references once we start throwing these out there?

--JP

[FaustWolf]

The Bekkler idea's great. I can easily whip up an animation of Bekkler on a black background in my (albeit aged) animation software to save you the trouble on that one.

json, do you mean staying away from copyrighted audio or just separating the videos from Compendium affiliation entirely, i.e., to avoid a potential C&D from Square Enix?

For audio, it may seem kind of trite, but we can rely on fan music like Chrono Symphonic or some favorite Chrono remixes if worse comes to worst.

[Agent 12]

oh no I dont care about the audio at all haha.  I was just wondering if we want to associated the compendium with this viral advertising thing or just make it look like it's coming out of nowhere.  Once it's released I odnt really care cause by then it's too late.  But right now it's possible to stop it......kind of...shrug.  I'll leave it up to zeality.

--JP

[FaustWolf]

As far as the audio, we're now in business and can use anything we like -- turns out a simple 3% change in pitch is enough to throw off Audible Magic's audio fingerprinting software. Probably not something I should go around repeating, but I'm so happy right now.

So we'll have three versions at least:

1. ZeaLitY preview
2. "Time's Scar" transitioning into "Ladies and Gentlemen"
3. One with a Dead Can Dance song (because I just have to).
4. Maybe one showing off impressive in-game audio.

If we use an alternate account to upload the preview videos, we won't be able to take advantage of ready-existing subscribers to our Youtube channels, but maybe it's for the best.

[FaustWolf]

json, you said elsewhere that neither the Fall of Guardia nor the Reptite World should be shown in the preview. Would you mind showing just a peek of the Reptite World, with an ambiguous scene in which Crono & co. confront some Reptite time travelers? Naturally it wouldn't be given away that the reptite time travelers are from a Reptite Dimension, or even time travelers, I just like the idea of ambiguously showing that there are Reptites in the game, without giving away why they're there or anything.

Also, the antagonist should probably be left ambiguous, but is an ambiguous scene with King Zeal's sprite allowed to grace the preview video(s)?

I think I'll definitely want to show off new techs.

I guess I'll keep an eye out here for more discussion from the CE team on what should or shouldn't be shown off.

[Agent 12]

Hm......I suppose there's no harm in showing scenes with reptites since singing mountain was in the first demo and that had reptites. 

It's cool to show the zeal sprite, again i think that was in the first demo.

and of course, new techs are a must. 

I'd like to hear other peoples opinions too.


--JP

[nightmare975]

Should we flash a screeny of 1 AD?

Or just the redone 12,000 BC map?

[ZeaLitY]

Hm, what about Lucca and Robo in the robot base? As long as it didn't show any dialogue. And maybe them on the OW?

[ZeaLitY]

SNES9x emulates well on the Wii:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6ODKG0bvq8&feature=channel_page

Who knows if it'll work for the entire game, though. I've asked this guy if he has special instructions for emulating to put in the readme.

Edit: Same issues as SNES9x.

[ZeaLitY]

Feature writing has begun:

http://www.chronocompendium.com/Term/CE/Feature.html

Go ahead and interview yourselves. I've made a bare outline that'll be fleshed out in the coming days. When we decide how this'll be presented, we'll go ahead and get it ready to activate one week after the CE release.

The "Director Commentary" is going to be a collection of chapter-by-chapter comments from the developers. For instance, in Chapter 21 or whatever, I'd say "I tried to make it seem as if Belthasar and Melchior were reluctantly following King Zeal. Maybe they were afraid of being killed if they resisted, or maybe they wanted to keep a close eye on what he was doing. And perhaps they even wanted to see if Zeal would be resurrected. I also loved "x" scene, etc. etc."

The anatomy sections are just going to be little one-page things about those four technical aspects (or more if someone suggests). Like, "anatomy of an event", where we take some screenshots of a Crimson Echoes location in Temporal Flux's event editor, talk about coding it, and how it turned out in-game, etc. and then do it for a map, enemy AI, etc...just fun little behind-the-scenes things.

[Agent 12]

Before and after!



Wow.....I dont remember if I planned on this being the final product but that's just gross.  I think when I was making it I was going to have a HUGE battle going on so i needed tons of empty space...then i realized you can really only have so many sprites on the screen before things fall apart.....of course chrono'99 proved me wrong with his 1 AD battlefield ( a few years later )



What can i say....i hate....hate......hate......hate the cave tileset....whoever cleaned this up must have ridiculous patience




Someone must have cleaned this up already by the time i took this screen shot cause my first beast forest did not look this good..at all


Again...this isn't the first, first chronopolis...the first chronopolis i made was not nearly this good looking.  However check out all the missing stuff.  No mother brain, no melchior room, no inn.....you also can't see from this pic but no savepoint, and no entrance room either.  Oh i should have taken a pic of before/after elevators...99 (i assume it was him) did some smart stuff with the conveyerbelts



What can I say....probably 99's best maps.  Amazing....the chrono cross reference, somehow making a habitable looking place out of that tileset (look at the "table" and "chairs" in his) ....just amazing.




*laughs*



I like how from this picture you can see that we really listened to the fans by making the path to singing mountain more obvious.....i'm sure people still won't be able to find it but hey we tried.  Also...no lava is definitely better.  Oh yea...the reptite lair just sorta dissapeared huh?



Yup...1005 reptite used to have an OW, and this is it....i think we made the right decision with the locaiton based overworld



Again....amazing work with the tilesets by chrono 99 here. Why in the world did I think it'd be a good idea to use those trees....it would cause me a ton of grief when I eventually got sane and switched to prehistory trees



Oh hey guys i have a genious idea, let's put chronopolis OW AND the future reptite OW on one map.  *sigh* That's why it's the future reptite OW is so squished on the left



While chrono99 didn't change MUCh with this, the details really make a difference (as you can see).  Plus..man just changing the palette makes it a million times better right there.

note to self, gotta grab before/after DBT and 1005 reptite cave locations.

--JP

[ZeaLitY]

Digg army is now at 240. With a couple more pushes, maybe we can get 400. If even 100-150 of these people upvote, it should be enough for frontpage.