I think that line of thought restricts hackers from creating what would be much more intricate and complex
stories and/or worlds. If we look at games and movies that are praised the most for their stories, most of them handle serious topics (and are also M rated, for that matter). Examples include Metal Gear Solid, Witcher, Fallout, Max Payne and some more.
Regarding the parents thing:
Any child who’s on the internet right now can go ahead and download, among else, Call of Duty Warzone and Phantasy Star Online 2, both being free to play M rated games. The ESRB says it’s not suitable for children, and the age rating is clearly displayed on the download page of these games. If a child goes ahead, downloads and plays these, is it the fault of the developers? Is it the ESRB’s fault? Are we just gonna tell Activision and Sega to not make any mature games because children can just download them? If a child really wants to play a game, watch a movie or visit a site, do you think they’ll stop just because the website tells them they have to be at least 13/18 to enter?
I’m all for making the community safe for everyone. But that should be done by informing the user of what the game is all about, rather than censoring the game in question.
And, I’ll state it again just in case: I am against serious topics being treated as a joke.
I don’t disagree with you. We don’t have a good mechanism or a neutral third party to spell it out for users like professionals do. In absence of that, I’m more in favor of being strict. If we did have resources to better manage this, I’d be more inclined to agree in this context.
I think we can find a solution that satisfies both sides of the spectrum. Hackers should be required to mark their project if it includes really serious and/or potentially disturbing topics, and failing to do so multiple times leads to punishment for the hacker in question. And ideally, creating a category for projects that have mature content and warning users if they click on a thread under this category (i.e. “This game contains potentially disturbing content. Do you want to continue?”) would be a nice thing, but I’m afraid that’s not really possible due to the limiations of the forum software.
Heyyooooo.
I would like to provide some input and some ideas too about the next fee3.
I’ve only read the OP.
For context, I was the host for FEE3 for 2015 and 2016. Not to toot my own horn, but I find what was REALLY successful about FEE3 2016 especially was the effort in presentation I had set out for. Obviously, 20 something submissions vs 70 (insane) makes what I did WAY more doable and less time committed to accomplish. And I applaud the organizers for doing their best this year. But maybe my experience and a “what would you do” type post could be helpful.
Presentation:
My golden rule for FEE3 2016 was the time limit on submissions - 30 minutes maximum. It should be pretty easy to understand that let’s playing fire emblem is hard to do. Whole chapters are extremely difficult to play in a timely manner, especially in chapter submission events like FEE3 or MAFC. And often, submitters want to flex their next epic trick in their wheel house, meaning it takes additional time to even understand what’s happening etc.
Its a challenge to bring someone’s hard work from 45 to even 1hr down to 30 minutes through editing. What do you omit? what do you keep? How much context is necessary for the audience to understand what you did in X turn with Y character. Its tough to do, and again, Fire Emblem makes it even harder, but its necessary to retain an audience during FEE3.
It was a challenge to do this with Melissa and myself. We had about 16ish submissions, how do you pull this off with, say, 50+? If it were up to me, I would have the deadline 3- 5 months from the actual showcase. I know it sounds like a ridiculous amount of time, but hear me out.
LPing and editing takes a LOT of time. And the longer the raw footage is, the longer it takes. The select few people who will be editing this footage down to 30 minutes are adults with their own lives, and we as project organizers have a bad habit of underestimating how long something like this will take because we often don’t factor in real life hurdles that can throw people off.
Having an “editing team” different from the Let’s Player also has its own problems - the editor doesn’t have the context or the foresight to omit certain parts of the LPers work, and it would take longer than for the LPer to edit their own footage. Its still possible, but it would require a LOT of communication and the comfort of the LPer to share their work (or stupid blunders during the episode) with the editor. That said, if you DID have a dedicated group of LPers that are experienced and can meet the quality standard that I will set below, then having a roadmap of how many projects to be finalized bi-weekly becomes more feasible.
Its great that more effort is being put into coordinating who does what as far as LPing which submission and if there will be co-commentary or not, but a month between deadline and showcase is simply NOT enough if you also want to focus on quality control for next year. Take it from the guy who organized fee3 twice and tried to solo MAFC this year, its INREDIBLY stressful to try to organize and edit and play and edit as you stare down another 5-6 projects you need to get through and you will putter out fast.
Audio/Visual:
Disclaimer: I am going to sound mean here
This was another standard that I set out when I organized. But it was very easy to standardize this because Melissa is a talented streamer with good A/V and so was a I. When you have multiple LPers, and some project makers submitting their own LP, the quality can be incredibly inconsistent. How do you remedy this?
LPers, straight up, need to know how to record at 30-60 FPS with a bitrate of 2500 to 4000 kbps and not stretching their VBA screen to fill space (keep the aspect ratio GBA). If they don’t, they need to learn. If they aren’t capable of it (their computer isn’t good enough), they can’t LP. Similarly, they need a decent microphone. Laptop mics or headset mics on the cheap end will sound compressed and irritating, leading to an unsatisfying viewer experience. As much as people want to volunteer to LP, or a hack maker wants to LP their own submission, or even co-commentate, if they have a bad microphone, its a no from me. I won’t let a hack creator be part of their own submission if their mic is bad. And to be honest, an LPer should have full power to just refuse to co-commentate, and in fact, they should make that clear from the start. I don’t know who you are besides that its your project and i have no idea how good or bad your submission is. Imaging LPing with the creator of a project that you aren’t even having fun with? Screw that.
It sounds harsh, but FEE3 is a showcase for not just the community, but the outside viewers who are expecting a pleasant viewing and listening experience.
Its not as hard as it sounds, though. OBS is incredibly easy to use and isn’t resource heavy even on slow PCs. And thankfully, recording GBA isn’t very strenuous on a PC. You can also get someone who knows what they’re doing to help oversee this process - its too early for me to commit to helping, as i haven’t really been part of the community for a long time, but its something I’ll throw out there.
Editing and rendering a video is also tough. And usually expensive if you don’t know how to pirate, BUT, even some seemingly difficult to understand software is pretty easy to understand and use, especially when the extent of editing for LPs is just cutting out out stuff.
Teaching good good LPing, editing and rendering and uploading to the FEU channel is all part of the 3-5 month long process after the deadline is met.
Assets:
Thumbnails, logos and anything that falls in between this is a challenge in its own right. I was super lucky enough to have Mina Tangerina volunteering to produce some truly fantastic thumbnails for free. Sadly, to have that level of quality now would cost money. You would need to commission a graphic designer for that quality thumbnail and logo. I’m not sure how you would go about pulling this off next year. I can name a few people but they wouldn’t do it on the house. It wouldn’t take terribly long to do just because it would be a template that you could plug the assets in after the fact, but to the art asset end, it would cost. that’s the obstacle that organizers for next year would face.
That said, I think FEE3 as an event is at a size and scope to demand this level of quality assets. While we have a ton of sprite artists in the community, graphic designers provide an entirely bunch of skills - they aren’t the same just because they are both artists that use PS.
Lay-out:
I was told there was about 4-5 submissions per day. I don’t know how spaced out they were, but holy crap, that is a LOT to ask of a viewer. especially if the time of the submissions varies between 30 mins and 1.15 hours Obviously you can’t just upload once a day for 70 days, that would be insane. Spacing out 6 hours per submission is understandable, but also, pretty unfair to 4/5ths of the submitters that day.
Why? demographics what it do babyyy.
The large majority of people playing fire emblem are PST and CST and it gets less and less dense as you go East. If you’re the lucky submitter who gets that sweet 6-8 EST slot, you’re getting the prime 3-5 PST/CST slot. Otherwise you will be having your work showcased to straight people who are asleep. How do you resolve this?
Well, first of all while I understand the method behind uploading 4-5 videos over 18 days, that is just way too much commitment and sub-optimal times over too little days. There’s no harm in having at most, 3 videos a day at prime time - 6-11 EST. its SO much easier to commit, as a viewer, to being around for that evening window to hop between 3, 30 minute videos. No viewer will watch all 30 minutes of each video, but we’re trying to retain at least like, 6-10 minutes per vid (I know it sounds like so little, but welcome to my hell). Make it as easy as possible for the viewer to retain like 30% of 3 videos in a night and you were doing very well. Your event can last 30 days - it doesn’t matter, condition the viewer base like that and views will go up. As viewership this year was a concern.
Communication: I can’t comment on the communication made between LPers and organizers and submitters or whatever because I straight up wasn’t around for any of it. But uuuh, don’t be an buttface to the event organizers lol. They’re volunteering. All a submitter ought to know if who is LPing their stuff. They shouldn’t expect to know when their work will be showcased until everyone else does.
thanks 4 reading hope i helped~
The hero we need.
Necessary criticism is necessary. Unnecessary criticism is unnecessary. But even unnecessary criticism can be helpful, what matters is that you are constructive.
leaving constructive feedback in a thread titled “learnings and opportunities” is not the same as leaving mean spirited YouTube comments
Just want to chime in that as an Aussie, I really appreciated the round-the-clock uploads, rather than them being uploaded 4 AM my time. I realise that this might not be best for the YT algorithm but it made me feel included which is rare in online gaming communities like this.
This is good to hear - one of the main reasons I went for around the clock was because this community is global.
I do think Ghast brings up a good point about prime time EST, and potentially including more videos during this time since usually that is where there is the most viewership. I’d be all for potentially increasing the number of videos at specific timeslots so that we shorten the event a bit. If we have more stringent length guidelines, I think this is could be feasible.
However, WarPath’s data also shows that the timeslots were relatively even in terms of viewership, albeit the sample size is small, so it may not hold up to scrutiny at scale. Won’t know more until we continue growing the reach of the event.
My feedback abt FEE3:
First we need more organizers, Pandan single handedly did most of the organizing for FEE3. Recruiting more volunteers might help in this regard.
Then we need some volunteers who are willing to create thumbnails at the very least, thankfully we had a few this year, ideally you can extend this to layouts in a video or video editing but the latter two need a lot of time, communication and likely payment compared to the work you’d put out in a thumbnail.
Abt the videos:
They were long, I shouldn’t complain abt that since my videos were around a hour long…
You can either shorten them, Length is pretty complex, sometimes the hacker requests the lp’er to showcase something, in my case, I had to show all the promotion options for demon’s curse, and that took 1/3 of the video’s length for a 1.5 hr video, sometimes you get that enthusiasm in a hack while playing it for the first time. I’m recording my FE 6 PE run rn, recording the voice after recording the gameplay probably removes some exciting reactions, and yet recording a video without sound is probably the best way to edit it since you don’t have to worry abt cutting out what you want to say…
Then there’s the fact of viewer burn out, maybe making the event post lesser videos per day like two per day, or two shorter videos and one longer video is a good idea.
As for timezones, I really appreciate it that it is posted round the clock, I don’t live in America so I don’t have to check my notifications to watch a video at a later time.
Cutting out people who don’t have quality equipment is harsh imo, I have a cheap headset mic and an average laptop, some people can’t afford the equipment or not sure on whether they actually want to do it… Luckily there are tools in OBS which can cut down most of the background noises and free video editors and sound editors which could help in improving the video quality, lending these software download links along with tutorials might be helpful in that regards.
I get that bad quality videos are irritating to watch but helping these people create better quality videos could lead to creating better videos.
mix up content like trailers, tutorials for FEbuilder, SRPG studio, LT, showcase what these are capable of, for instance, in SRPG studio and LT you can create combat arts while FE builder is working on it and it isn’t currently available for FEbuilder, this way you highlight what all the engines could do, encourage more people to use it and in the long run get some good stuff… again this is a showcase to a hacking community ,there’s a lot more to hacking than putting let’s plays.
You can put in debates, scripted content, for instance Pandan has a good series of how to design a hack and Markyjoe dabbles into game design. These are understandably hard to do since making scripts, arranging co commentators can be hard.
Mixing up content may also increases viewer interest instead of showcasing only or mostly lps. Nuramon did an animation showcase while pandan did an interview…
As for reskins, probably pick the good ones, project ember for instance is a pretty good reskin hack, it’s far from complete and the developers are still working on variations, but make them show what’s unique in a hack… animation, gameplay, story, ptraits animations.
The FEU community has it’s own youtube channel, MK404 was probably a youtuber who posted regularly and hence he has a higher amount of views. I’d recommend putting in something regularly, for instance long videos you couldn’t put in a main event because of time restrictions if you put a hard limit or Vesly’s idea of posting something biweekly or ideally weekly… because that’s likely the bare minimum for youtube algorithm to recognize a regular viewer.
Project of the week, tutorials, Project of the month, design philosophies the content could be anything, that’s an another discussion.
We need promotion, we have a couple of bigshot youtubers in the hacking community like Ghast or Markyjoe, if they are willing perhaps we could ask them, otherwise we could ask Mekkah, Bismix or FED to promote the event or channel if it is needed.
The FEE3 channel needs to be able to stand on it’s own feet, because relying upon another content creator single handedly to host the event has it’s risks, MK404 couldn’t host it this year because of reasons… so promoting the newly created channel is a good idea in the long run.
That’s it for my feedback.
I’ve made a few of these myself and would be happy to continue making them for the FEU youtube channel
I’d like to echo something that I think Klok and Pandan already mentioned. Its awesome that people are thinking of alternative ways to present FEE3 passed 30 minute LPs. I agree that there are MUCH more digestible types of videos that can be made, but like they mentioned, it takes significantly more time to push out a single video this way, and editing a scripted video is understandably different than just LPing something for 45 minutes and cutting it down. If you wanted to have a more digestible format, I think massively increasing the cooperation between developer and presenter could be a good idea?
Idea: requiring the project submitters themselves to write their own scripts and submitting their own B-roll footage of their hack at the appropriate bitrate and FPS for the video editor themselves to voice over and edit, saving a BUNCH of time on their end just needed to compile what the project developer sent them.
- Developer records footage of their hack and everything they want to showcase. Footage can be around 5-10 minutes.
- Write a script advertising/ talking about their project and the features it has with time stamps to the B-roll footage they themselves provided
- instructing the narrators/ video editors how to use the footage, making the process of making the video a coordinated effort between both as clear as possible.
- Hopefully the end result is a quick, painless 5-10 minute video about the project.
It would probably save a shitload of time for the video makers and editors. Instead of LPing 1-1.5 hrs of game footage, they have all they need to edit anyway. Recording a 5-10 minute script is WAY less timeconsuming than playing 1.5 hours of a hack.
For developers who want to showcase a full chapter, they can do that, too. But given that viewer retention is already very low on 20-30 minute videos, you might be better off opting for this option if you want the viewer to watch more of your stuff.
I’ve gone back and forth about throwing my opinions into this, but I’ve decided to quickly write out some of my thoughts on what I’ve seen in this thread, hopefully without excessively echoing things people have said.
Gatekeeping
I want us to be very careful with gatekeeping submissions to FEE3, particularly when based off of activity within FEU. While FEU has generally taken charge of the event, the origins of the event are not within FEU and it’s unfair of us to intentionally exclude external things, namely SRPG Studio submissions. The schism between FEU and the SRPG community is bigger than many people here truly realize and excluding them would not be the play. There were numerous indie projects in FEE3 this year as well that I personally found some of the coolest things submitted that wouldn’t have been able to be included if we made it an “FEU” exclusive event. While I would argue we’re the center of ROMHacking specifically here, SRPG Studio and other engines, as well as indie projects, often don’t feel at home in FEU. I don’t think this should be grounds to exclude them from the event.
In terms of reskins and rebalances, I think it depends on the level of quality. Something complete that I would say really redefines how a game is played, such as Project Ember for FE6, would be fair to include. Senseless rebalances and reskins that really don’t offer anything new, on the other hand, would be fair to exclude (or even have a few “pre-show” videos showcasing these as a light taste of what’s to come)
Organization
More people need to be willing to step up to help out with this in a realistic way. While too many helpers can be a problem, it shouldn’t all fall to Pandan to organize the entire event. More LPers (which I would argue should be filtered to ensure high quality recording quality, even if commentary is subpar), more people dedicated to communicating, etc. There’s been a lot of ideas and volunteering stepping up this thread and I trust the organizers to find a way to synthesis this for next year, as well as I trust those of you who have said they’re volunteer will hold your word on that. Hopefully you get treated better than you treated this year’s organizers.
While I think that there was heavy disrespect towards the organizers from the community, I also think more transparency from the organizers would have gone a long way in lessening that. There was no need for numerous people to ask about the fundraiser after one person had asked; likewise, there was no need for the staff to snap back so vehemently once they got around to answering. The community tab offers a few more opinions about this specific issue.
Mature Content
If its for “memes” or just being “dark humor,” it has absolutely 0 place in FEE3. Having it on the site in general is a different issue that’s not my area to discuss, but for something like FEE3 that (in my vision, at least) is a sort of outreach showcase of what the fan game communities have created, it shouldn’t be included.
Hacks like Inheritance, which present mature content, are a bit of a different issue. I’ve not played Inheritance, so I can’t speak to the long term effects the mature themes actually play. If they truly enhance the story and are painted in a truly negative light, it’s one thing. However, I think that for hacks like these, the “clean” version should be showcased instead, or nothing at all. I’m not here to condemn Inheritance; that’s a can of worms that’s been opened repeatedly the past week that isn’t my job to deal with.
Community
This is, far and away, the biggest issue this FEE3. Our community has become incredibly self-destructive. The personal assaults against Arch for adding FE7x at the end were unwarranted, especially since Blademaster himself had no issue with it. Don’t get mad on other people’s behalf if they aren’t angry. It’s immature, stupid, and divisive. The constant bitching about formatting, the fact this is called a “post-mortem” thread, and everything else is also totally unwarranted. We all want a good event. That’s why we discuss these things afterward. Freaking out about pointless things that nobody cares about makes it that much harder for people to want to organize it. I can barely blame the staff and organizers for becoming so vehemently defensive throughout this. We as a community members treated them like shit, beginning to end, and we should honestly be ashamed of ourselves.
Tl;dr: Gatekeeping based on FEU activity and engine is a terrible idea, more people should help with organization, mature content should (at the very very least) be excluded from the showcase itself.
Overall, to echo what Chair has said, we need to fix ourselves as a community first and foremost if we truly want the future of FEE3 to be successful.
This
And we need some low effort content besides lps…
Like streams if you can set it up, mainly because they don’t need to be edited, bring in viewer and content creator interaction , FED for instance posts something discussing abt Fire Emblem almost everyday,short and simple videos describing some mechanic in three houses. Interviews that Rengor did on various bigshot FEtubers while he was recording his 0% growth ltc on three houses which weren’t frankly edited yet the hype of doing something new, high gameplay skill , combined with a famous personality essentially increased the no. of views of a particular video along with his subscriber count. Tutorials probably can be low effort especially if you are just showing what to do while talking on a screen.
Streaming on a weekend might be a good idea…
I’d basically recommend the community watching an youtuber who puts Fire Emblem content daily to atleast thrice or twice a week and does something which isn’t an lp to get a few ideas on what sort of content variety, we could bring to the table.
TLDR
We need to fix the content length, get a decent variety of easy to create content and ideally get some viewer content creator interaction.
Love the idea, but it will only work at scale if 1) project creators are empowered to do this themselves and 2) we have more volunteers with the editorial and communication skills to facilitate this. It sounds like the work of the volunteer here is just to provide voice over and record the final video, which does sound way more viable than having them make/edit the footage as well. I think this is a good compromise if someone asking for this format needed volunteer support.
I’ll be drafting up a few guides for next year to help organizers and project creators, and including a “best in class” example for different formats (LPs, trailers, your suggested format, etc.) will help folks out.
Re: voice over of 10 mins of footage - one issue I forsee is that users may want their footage to line up with the voiceover, which makes it a lot more difficult to coordinate. Or if the footage is unrelated to the script, the cuts can seem pretty random. Having fade out/in transitions for cuts in footage would nice, too.
I like the idea, though. I don’t think it’s a huge barrier of entry to record simple footage without any commentary, but a few people probably can’t or aren’t willing to try it. I don’t really want us excluding people from the event, so I’m not really sure how to handle those cases.
Not everyone needs to follow a single format so long as they can fit within the guidelines around video length and inappropriate content.
Also, if someone is submitting for a volunteer, there has to be expectation that the volunteer won’t be able to 100% align to your vision - it’s the nature of outsourcing. Specific detail and instruction will help get closer, but I think folks will need to accept it if the work isn’t exactly what they want, so long as it meets quality benchmarks.
Yeah, different editors will have different strengths and ideas for what the presentation will look like. And yeah, this idea will rely on a group of dedicated and experienced video makers all on the same page. there’s a lot of good ideas in this thread but hopefully there’s a dedicated group of individuals wanted to execute all these things.
i like making videos as a hobby so i could try my hand at editing
too bad my software is bad xd
What about for FEBuilder video tutorials we have them reviewed by @7743? Of course, we don’t want to overload the amazing 7743 (or have too much content that is only tutorials all at once). But as the creator of febuilder, he might be a good judge of that content. He gave me some harsh criticism on the video I made for the Difference Debug Tool, for example 
I would like to make more febuilder tutorials, and it’s nice to encourage new users to give hacking a go by making it more easily accessible. Users could upload the videos to googledrive which would allow 7743 to review it. If he’s unsatisfied with it, then he’d provide feedback and the video maker could implement that feedback and resubmit it. Once approved, it gets sent over to the staff to upload it.
Of course, this all depends on if 7743 would like to review any FEBuilder tutorials that we make.
I would also suggest that we keep these videos as focused on a topic and to keep them short and sweet. I think that makes it a lot easier for quality control and organization of the videos. Personally, I wanted to try and keep them under 5 mins when possible.
Apologies for the self-plug here, but I started this thread last month as a draft of how I’d do this:
Of course, I’ll be making more tutorial vids when I have time either way. I was just thinking that this might be a nice way to do things. If anyone has any thoughts or feedback on this, I’d appreciate your input. I also look forward to hearing about any decisions regarding usage of the channel.