How much can one person say in 5 minutes? Obviously the best answer is watching 30 minutes of a 30 minute video, but viewer burnout is a genuine thing that’s worth taking a look at. The fact that most of us can’t be bothered to watch every single video is a problem, and there’s nothing that would get people to watch the videos at the moment except the masterful thread idea @Runa had about talking good about all the FEE3 projects, and well, already having associated with the project. The people genuinely interested in wanting to see the new projects, even those that are OK with skimming, will be intimidated with the sheer amount of homogenous content currently presented.
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As a newbie, I guess the ultimate goal is we all want more great FE games to play. I think this is a pretty uncontroversial statement. Therefore, it seems the goal of FEE3 is to promote more FE content (in the form of hacks mostly) to solve the following two issues:
- Grow the FE hacking community. You never know when the next Kaga might get a YouTube recommendation for these videos and be inspired to lead a new project.
- Get more people to try out people’s projects in order to refine the existing hacks so they become closer to polished games.
I do not know what Youtube metrics are proxies for these metrics but they do need to be linked in some way. I’m sure anecdotally people have noticed more downloads of their hacks in and around when videos marketing their hack came out. That’s an example of improving #2 above.
Also, maybe there were some new members in discord or on feuniverse following these videos, perhaps these can be traced to FEE3 as well. This is an example of improving #1 above.
I’m just spitballing ideas here. But at a high level that’s what it looks like to me.
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I don’t think that viewer burnout is as big of an issue as some folks are making it out to be.
We’ve discussed the identity crisis of FEE3, and I think beyond identifying our audience (as Chair called out “who is this for?”), we also need to discuss how we anticipate viewers to engage with the event.
There is too much content for any one person to reasonably be expected to consume during its run. However, these aren’t live events - they’re videos that can be watched long after. They don’t need to be consumed at launch, and I predict this year’s video view count will continue to climb well after the event is over.
While perhaps older FEE3s were viewed more like a movie, where you sit through the whole thing start to finish, I think now FEE3 needs to be treated more like a conference, trade show, or convention - ie you know with your finite time you will go to X numbers of tables. You won’t visit every table (ie consuming a video), but you have options.
I don’t think we need to optimize for getting everyone to watch every video. Frankly, it’s unrealistic and misguided - especially given the diverse amount of projects that are on display. Some will naturally draw less interest and fewer views, and that is okay.
Going back to “Who is this for”, I predict that there are one of two paths that FEE3 can do down if it is to continue in a similar capacity (Which it should):
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This event goes back to its roots and clearly states as such. By hackers, for hackers. Show our progress to each other, highlight cool tech we’ve built. Learning and sharing. Success is measured by simply getting the event to run. Our primary goal is to showcase what we’ve all been working on to each other to share ideas and build partnerships. The audience is primarily FEU and fellow hackrom creators. Getting new people in the community is a secondary goal and is a byproduct of what we show off to one another. We are showcasing to each other to gain recognition among our peers and share our work in a more informal space. Operationally, we tighten up our existing processes to improve overall showcase quality and provide more guidelines and resources to help people self-serve to get their video made. (What I said above refers to how we should look at this particular option)
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The event tightens up considerably and tries to reach a broad audience. This would mean restructuring the event, limiting what gets shown, and focusing on speaking to and reaching a non-hacking audience to get their interest and build awareness for FEU and hacking more broadly. Primary success metrics include views, retention (Thank you Vesly), likes, and so forth. We put on this show for the broader FE community to highlight our self-identified best work on a bigger stage. More focus on production value and promotions in other communities. It is a marketing event. Operationally we get more personalities involved, we work to get promotions, and we have more rigorous screening and vetting process for what gets shown off and how it gets shown off. We get behind what we see as our best and share with the broader FE community to draw them in.
The former is more interesting to me, but this is a conversation we need to have so we can decide what is appropriate, since many of the solutions and ideas being proposed are better suited for one version versus another. The latter would involve pretty heavy restructures but it’s important we align on this vision since i think we’re living in a bit of a split world right now between these two ideas.
Curious to get thoughts.
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That’s interesting pandan, I hadn’t considered #1 in your suggestions. This relationship reminds me of academia vs. industry. Academics are typically at the bleeding edge of what’s possible and hold conferences by experts for experts (i’m generalizing but mostly this is true). I would never understand the importance of research at a quantum physics conferences but an expert could. This makes watching videos by experienced hackers such as yourself so enjoyable cause you appreciate the details of what is going on in a project.
The second item you are describing reminds of Tesla showcases, everyone is interested when Elon Musk presents some new wild car even if they don’t like cars. There’s obviously some inventive engineering going on but that’s not the focus, it’s the consumer level that is important and how average joe will enjoy this new vehicle.
I think ideally the community would separate out both of these into two “conferences” but there probably just isn’t enough resources at this point to feasibly do that. (unless you pare it down significantly). Something by hackers for hackers would get less visibility but that’s okay because the goal is to sharpen the existing hackers and share knowledge of newer methods. Something for a broad audience would be measured by amount of clicks/views/subs etc. it generates like a typical marketing campaign.
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This is a fantastic comparison and you are correct. Chair shared it well above too, what I care about as a viewer is probably different than what I care about as a creator. It is academics at a conference versus a marketing presentation.
Given the resources and time commitment involved, I think we could feasibly only focus on one of these two events unless we got more outside help to produce the showcases, which seems unlikely.
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This is essentially what I’ve been saying. If you think I was saying something else, you were probably thinking I was implying the opposite. I wasn’t.
Of course we can’t expect everyone to watch everything. Unfortunately, as it currently, is, it’s not structed in any way that would suggest too much otherwise, it’s simply presentation after presentation with no signs to guide viewers.
I significantly prefer the second option, as it will help expand the hacking community. The roots were what they were because there were, what, like, sixty people ten years ago, or something? It’s unsustainable to show off everything the community has been making because its too large unless we divide everything up. On the other hand, if we try to expand outwards, we can expand the community and attract more interested parties. There’s, of course, no real benefit to this, aside from being super cool.
This year’s FEE3’s problem was that it was… well, frankly boring, aside from things like Nuramon’s showcases because they’re always focused on the meat. Although there’s nothing inherently wrong with LPs, trailers or the like are significantly better. A map of sorts should absolutely be implemented, perhaps even with multiple shows. Those that want certain things can go to a different section of FEE3 presentations, and we can have a central hub for people to discuss what they’ve seen and any highlights. I know it’s currently unrealistic to have well-edited trailers for everything, but it’s not unrealistic to want to have the showings feel like they really mean something. Novice hacks that don’t have a lot going for them absolutely have a place in the community, but few people will get invested in them because many of the newcomers don’t know how to present properly. Which isn’t a huge problem, mind you. They’re newcomers and deserve help. Expand the organization team, work with developers. If they can’t be worked with, they don’t have to be here.
The fact that there is a decline with later projects as opposed to earlier projects is not fair for projects that happen to appear later. There are multiple ways to approach this, all of which is up to the organizers. Does this project go in the same stream as this one? Is it promising and deserves to be put among the rest? Is it fair to have “professional big hack” and “small hack” be segregated? Should we do a summer showcase for new hacks exclusively and winter for veteran projects?
There is no easy solution, and anyone who pretends like there is a “this is the way to do it” at this stage is not being creative enough. What I am sure of is that the current structure of FEE3 is unsustainable, but FEE3 itself is still beneficial for us as a community because it makes many of us feel obligated to check out what’s new. Which should be a good thing, but for whatever reason it just doesn’t feel like it a lot of the times as of late.
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I guess its time to articulate my thoughts a bit. I won’t go too much into the obvious as many have already done it and i think focusing on a suggestion/offer would be more helpful on my own part.
I should preface by saying that while the event was being worked on, I was occupied with my own project and getting that submission done and so I trusted that the event was in good hands. And at least on my own end things did go wrong in a few areas, such as a bug that made it so I could not complete the submission chapter in the way I wanted it to go, and on top of that Attila was absent at the time I wanted to get the planned video idea with him done in time. However of course this is not the fault of anybody here but that might having something to do with it being the 13th entry.
So I go for the plan B and make my usual flash cut type trailer which probably did turn out better than any playthrough submission probably could. And compared to the usual trailers I have made in the past which requires wrangling together some people and going into a muiltiplayer game without private servers and having very specific windows to get the shots I need for it. Doing a fire emblem one was an absolute breeze. It even took like 6 minutes to render the video which was probably due to the lack of complexity in the image, but is nonetheless insane.
But obviously I need to mention the event as a whole and I think the first red flag was probably the way the form was structured, as I do know what its like to document and handle community members getting involved in something and you have to keep things clear and restricted, especially on the initial signup. This was to the point were I had to ask a couple questions on the discord which was also separated from the main one.
This along with a lack of communication after making a submission unless your directly involved in the video I would assume. Definitely leads to a lot of questioning which is to be expected. It also didn’t help that there wasn’t an updated board but that’s not something to critique on but rather what to do.
Although I can’t be the only one that when they saw the scheduled lineup as 4 a day, assumed it would be packed onto one video that would be reasonably short. Granted it was stated that videos would drop every six hours so perhaps I’m oblivious to be assuming that. But perhaps cramming all entries for a day might not be a terrible idea. As by the time Day 6 rolled around I got really sick of entries getting into my subbox on a constant basis, a great example of this would be did anybody remember that point in time were tech youtubers uploaded dyson vacuum reviews over the course of a whole day or two? It kind of felt like that a bit.
One thing that has also been commonly addressed is the video length, which i was told was much much longer than it was here in that entries would be hours long rather than anywhere from 40 minutes to an hour and a half in the case of this year. The reason for the video length i think is a bit more nuanced than people might initially assume.
Due to the event being 72 entries it involved a lot of people who don’t have any experience with making videos, which can easily prompt a lot of submissions to go something along the lines of asking two chapters or so to be played while two people commentate or at least ideally and it ends up being an hour or longer raw recording. And the majority of the submissions turned into something like that.
The obvious problem with this is that too many submissions are going to be an unreasonable length for the viewers. But I think part of why that is, has to do a habit of inexperience. Now I didn’t watch every video so I don’t know how much cutdowns were done video to video. But generally whenever I see a video of someone straight up playing fire emblem. There is no significant editing or cutdowns to be seen.
Its generally common with people with little editing experience were they don’t feel a need to cut things down as much as they should, as they want to keep many unnecessary things in which keeps the video padded. Which is more or less a pitfall interms of keeping videos engaging. I personally learned this because I had to cram in good parts of many clips into 15 minutes due to a youtube limit however it has become more than that overtime. There is a reason why when you watch an experienced content creator play a game, there not going to show every little thing that goes on.
Obviously the other factor here is the actual quality of the content itself and while things like microphones aren’t something you can do much about, you can control the quality of the recording on the contributors end. It also helps for people without experience in recording to pair themselves with somebody they know. I think the best example of this was Clendo’s hack when him and his bud have not done it before yet it turned out basically perfect sans editing.
With all my points covered I would like to formally lay out my offer to help with recording, editing and organizing future video related events in the future. I hope what I have said it more informative than harsh. And thank you all for doing this year by year despite the more glaring flaws in production overtime.
I think even with the former, it would require some kind of additional quality control for videos since a noticeable amount of entries had videos where you only really managed to get a surface level of insight behind the hack and its development which sometimes is insufficient for learning a substantial amount of information that could be used to build ideas off of. If we’re going back to our roots by being for hackers, by hackers, then we still need to make sure that the event can be a good opportunity for us to have some kind of creative discourse.
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This right here. This is it. Superheart, Zmr.
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100% - I think committees for quality control and providing more resources to help people make their own showcases, will help this. We won’t know until we make a go at it, but I agree this is the direction we need to take if we go with option #1.
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I think the community and event are big enough to warrant a fundamental reshuffling. I think there needs to be a keynote event that opens day 1, and I think FEE3 should include more than just LPs and trailers.
The opening event (as I roughly imagine it) would be a 2-3 hour event of trailers, announcements, and retrospective/misc. sessions. This event should include trailers for all projects that are participating in FEE3, and then the LPs can resume as normal for the days following the keynote. I would also suggest a reduction in project quantity: 30 to 45 projects is probably ideal. And definitely no rebalances or simple gimmicks. Additionally, a moderate bar of quality should be established.
Regarding content other than LPs
How about having well-known (or just regular) community members debate or dissect popular FE topics? MarkyJoe is pretty into design, perhaps he and Pandan can debate and/or dissect popular (or unpopular) GBA maps, or the utility of giving Knights 5 mov, or whether Berserk is a fair mechanic, etc. How about presentations on the hacking tools? Vesly and Snakey1 doing 15 minute overviews of FEBuilder and buildiles, respectively? Heck, I’d personally like to rebut some of Mekkah’s FE7 narrative complaints. Maybe some audience participation can be included too, though that’s an added complication and a bit too micro for this current brainstorming.
How about a revisiting of past FEE3s? Maybe have a 30 minute segment comparing projects that debuted one or more years ago with their current iterations? How about audio or video interviews with project leads (even if it’s just 2-3 minutes)? (I believe there were a few interviews for this year’s event, though I didn’t see/hear them and I don’t think they were centralized)
How about recognizing people that have made landmark contributions to the hacking scene? Creators of tools and popular patches, leaders of longstanding communities, folks who have provided lots of F2U assets, etc. (this session could be either a ‘year-in-review’ type thing or for the entirety of FE hacking’s history)
Regarding my suggested requirement of having a trailer. It may seem restrictive, but really, if you’re competent enough to use buildfiles or even FEBuilder, you can figure out how to make a trailer. With no prior video editing knowledge, I made a 3 minute trailer for my hack in about 4 hours. Now, my trailer isn’t exactly ‘high quality,’ and I was sort of troll-y on purpose. But I think it’s pretty feasible to put together a simple trailer that showcases aspects of your project. You already spent tens to hundreds of hours developing, right? Put in another 5 - 10 hours on a trailer. Also, a text description of one’s project should absolutely be required. I understand there was an attempt to have descriptions this year that fell through, but I think it could and should work as long as the organizers have the time/capacity to deal with it.
Overall, I’m suggesting for FEE3 to become more dynamic, concentrated, and multifaceted, rather than a long continuum of LPs. This suggested format sort of hits both philosophical paths #1 and #2 outlined above: keynote event for a broad audience, followed by in-depth LPs of the featured projects.
Personally, I found this year’s event difficult to digest. I skimmed through a few videos, but largely, I didn’t watch or participate. I know some folks are eager for FE content and will just watch everything. But for people who aren’t necessarily in that frame of mind… 70 projects over 18 days is a bit unruly, especially with no centralizing aspect. And after day 1, the luster and intrigue of the event sort of wanes.
With these suggestions, some folks may be thinking, “That all sounds great, but realistically, who’s going to put it together?”
To echo what several people have said: I think expanding the organizing team and starting earlier would be paramount to making an event like this work. I have helped run both physical and digital events for prior jobs. I have the time to help FEE3, and I think a lot of other people do too - we just didn’t realize the behind-the-scenes situation was in need of assistance.
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It takes more time to read all the replies here than to watch FEE3 as a whole.
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Regarding Awareness: This is something with the FE community in general, and not just FeU, but it’s kinda hard to raise awareness for such an event when the 3 ‘‘big’’ FE communities (r/FE, Serenes and over here) are so disconnected from each other. There was just a pinned thread on the sub + my weak tries at weekly threads and i don’t know if there was even any thread over at Serenes.
If you want to raise awareness for the event, coordination with the moderators and big shots of other FE communities is needed. -
Regarding SRPG Studio: I think something needs to be done about the bias against it, ngl. Of the 5 projects shown, there is one i am keeping my eyes on, and one i personally played and can vouch for it being a top quality fan project. Not to mention i played other SRPG studio games as well (english and non-english projects alike) and the engine is pretty powerful and alot of people implement really cool ideas.
Yet people seem to be writing them off just because they are ‘‘SRPG studio’’ games. Kinda unfair, if you ask me. Makes me also understand why Markyjoe went with his own ‘‘Don’t make a Fire Emblem’’ contest to show off what the engine is capable of. -
Regarding famous community members and LP’ers: A lot of them might not be actually interested in hacks, but they will be interested in gameplay discussions in general. I am gonna echo what someone else said here and maybe have streams with audience involved were people discuss gameplay ideas in general, including those of official FEs. Could also help newer hackers avoid what people dislike, or give birth to new ideas. Also LTC competitions and stuff, to give awareness to the event.
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Regarding Audience: When i read the comparison to academics, the first thought that came to my mind was ‘‘Then should FEE3 show hacking/design techniques instead of gameplay/features?’’ and i don’t know if that is the right approach.
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Regarding Guidelines: I think such an event needs more detailed guidelines rather than playing it loose, so to say.
Just my 5 cents^^
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tbf I would check out the reddit threads and always upvote them but I didn’t have a lot to say most of the time, because either what I would’ve said I would’ve already said here or I didn’t really learn enough from the presentations to really comment on anything.
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I’m sick of this defeatist attitude regarding SRPG Studio. Literally the only potentially negative thing said in this thread about the SRPG Studio showcases was that they happened to get fewer views, which is literally what the statistics say. It is in no way whatsoever a value judgement to say that, am I in the Twilight Zone?
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The data is not biased - it’s simply one way to slice the data. SPRG studio projects on average received fewer views than non-SRPG studio projects. It isn’t fair to conflate this with bias against the engine. I don’t think anyone who isn’t using SRPG studio has an issue with it.
No - that’s not what I am saying. There’s a difference in how you’d present content depending on your audience. Some content may have hack/design techniques versus a focus on gameplay/features, but it varies project to project. My point is that if you’re engaging with an informed audience (ie fellow hackers) you can afford to be more casual and technical than if you’re engaging an unfamiliar audience (ie people who are brand new). How we approach content development starts with who we think our main audience is, and aligning to the types of content structures that are most interesting to this target group. I def don’t want to police what type of showcases people do in this regard, though, and I apologize if that’s how you took it.
100%
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Ironically, I watched all of the SRPG Studio vids, while I still haven’t seen half of the other showcases. I find SRPG Studio to be quite fascinating.
I prefer FEXNA/LT, but SRPG is pretty gud too.
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Yeah i think i was a bit harsh in my wording there, sorry^^.
Maybe it’s also how i interpreted the data, ie people overlooking SRPG studio projects more.
no need! What you raised is definetly a valid question, and these are just my thoughts about it.
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It’s because the SRPG default art assets are generally mediocre and nowhere near as stylish as the GBA games. They’re literally less visually appealing.
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i would think that projects that are not fire emblem at a fire emblem expo would receive less attention
not saying they don’t belong here! it’s just that people who come for the fire emblem are less likely to watch content that isn’t fire emblem, even if it’s close to it.
if i had to give my own thoughts on fee3, i definitely could’ve done a lot better with my own project showcase ^^;
despite being the “every fee3 entry is good” bxxxh i find it really hard to actively watch a lot of the projects, and usually just skim through them. i’d skim through my own entry if i was someone else!
i think that understanding the issue of entry length and engagement is great, and if we can give more guidelines regarding what makes a better entry, we should get a lot more high quality entries!
to be perfectly honest i wasn’t that involved in the fee3 stuff, so i’m not as engaged in this subject, but yeah. hopefully next year will be even better! (also i might be willing to offer up my editing skills if there is an fee3 2021? :OOO)
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