Hey! Saw a telephone thing posted by someone, but then saw it was removed. I thought that a telephone would be a super neat thing to do, especially since I personally think they’re super neat.
Obviously, I need others to do a telephone, so uh… recruiting! Yay!
Alright, crazy man, what *is* a telephone anyways?
A telephone hack is a FE hack, in which multiple people work off of one ROM, each person doing one chapter at a time, without communication in between. This is cool, since it means that each person doesn’t really know where the story is meaning to be developed, until after the hack is nearly finished.
Now then, with the explanations out of the way, let’s get in to the cool stuff. How this is gonna work!
How will this work anyways?
Obviously, this will be going off of a FE8 US ROM, because that’s just what people have experience in, and a credits text file will be floating around with it, for obvious reasons. Outside of that, after the actual telephone is done, there’ll be a few days where the hack will be polished story-wise, just for cohesions sake, though gameplay should remain entirely untouched, for obvious reasons. In terms of SkillSys, that’s up to everyone, since some like it, and some don’t.
That about wraps it up. Apply if you’d like, and have a good one!
It’s been done a few times to make some pretty cool games.
I’d love to help, but unfortunately I’ve only got skills when it comes to Lex Talionis.
Wish you nothing but luck all the same <3
Recommend reading the “The Rules / How we Built this” section in the Call of the Armor thread. Projects like this can go off the rails without strong leadership and guidance to keep things moving.
You’ll also want to edit stuff – you can make things better while keeping original author intent in check in most cases. Although the ownership of each chapter is with a different member of the team, the telephone projects I led and worked on were better when we were communicative throughout the process to make a cohesive hack.
I second this in that I would recommend relaxing the “no communication” rule; storytelling is difficult to keep consistent, and gameplay almost certainly will need at least a bit of rebalancing to keep the final product engaging. All depends on how much you want to stick to the process vs. polishing.
yeah really for me the part that makes telephone projects work is giving people ownership over individual chapters, but there absolutely needs to be communication and edits if you want the project to be playable.
That’s for the end, the idea is that there’s little/no communication during the actual chapter making, with a polishing period after that, with story being the focus.
Well that’s what I meant, speaking from experience, it’s easier to have it be an ongoing process than to try and fix it at the end, especially when gameplay and story both necessarily build on top of each other.
yeah it is easy to run into issues if the chapter dev is working in a silo and misses a key piece of info that causes an issue.
For example, a plot point is established, the dev makes the chapter by themselves and gets it wrong, then you need to fix it – would be better if the process was more open so they could catch that earlier.
Alright, with that, I will be tentatively closing the form. At the moment, we’ve got 11 people total, which is fantastic, all things considered. A huge thank you to everyone who signed up!
