User blog:TheModster/Recovering a 2013 Live stream recap post
UPDATE: I found some more details about the stream! I only just noticed that the second piece of trivia on the Unimplemented Characters page mentioned this stream, specifying that it was a preview for the A Little Rain Must Fall update. With that I was able to do a better search and found the announcement post on Steam. The user who posted this, SalsaShark, is actually JoeW. The stream took place on March 12, 2013 live from Klei's studio. The streamer hosting it was ShannonZKiller who sadly, but expectedly, does not have a VOD of the stream among her videos.
- TheModster (talk) 23:34, October 9, 2018 (UTC)
I've been on a research binge this weekend, trying to find the sources for various info here on the wiki. So today I was going through the history of the Unimplemented characters page, which you can see by going here. The current Unimplemented Characters page was moved in 2017, so it has a short history. The original page (now a redirect) was called Unimplemented/Speculated Characters and goes back to 2012! Super fun to see how that page changed over time.
While going through each edit I found this one containing a link to a 2013 forum post: http://forums.kleientertainment.com/showthread.php?12280-What-the-Devs-said-during-the-live-stream&highlight=livestream. Going to the URL will take you to the main Klei forum page. This happens with old forum posts I assume did not make it when the forums moved/changed at some point.
I didn't want to give up there, so I took the title of the thread in the URL "What the Devs said during the live stream" and plugged it into Google like this:
klei AND "what the devs said during the live stream"
I chose the second result which is an archive site that saved the post! However, the spoiler tags do not open for me. Fortunately, all you have to do to undo the spoiler tags is to remove the HTML for it. And that's what I've done for this blog.
Some background before we get to the post: From what I can gather there was a stream sometime in March 2013, about a month before Don't Starve launched. During the stream, Klei devs answered fan questions in the chat. I'm not sure if this was similar to today's streams where the devs read the questions and answered them on air or if the devs answered questions through the chat. Regardless, I can't confirm much due to not having access to the stream and its chat. This fan writeup is the next best thing, unfortunately. Because of this I'm not sure yet if it can be used as a source for the wiki. See the bottom of this blog for my thoughts/favorite parts!
Original Post by ShatteredSanity March, 11 2013
During the livestream, I was taking notes on a bunch of what the Dev's answers to the questions asked in the chat were. We got to talk to three of the devs, Kevin, Matt, and Jeff. Please note that the thing I have written may be incorrect, because I was sort of in a rush to get it all down. If anyone notices some mistakes or misquotes, please let me know! Thanks!
Tomorrow's update
- Rain will affect sanity
- Nightmarish triangle thing, new machine, tier three research station
- Mushrooms regrow if you DON’T dig them up.
- Drying rack preserves meat
- Picking up sound has been made quieter
- Koalaphants will no longer hop to unconnected islands (“Cannonically now, Koalaphants can not fly”) (Kevin)
- Umbrella prevents you from going crazy and you can hit people with it
- Most things are okay with being in the rain
- Marble is useful for something, you can make floorings
- Pig king has guardian pigs
- Soggyness makes it harder to keep your fire going, and affects sanity
- Mosquito ponds freeze over in winter
- Evil flowers = Evil petals= Maxwell/corrupted flowers.
- Blue gem can be found in graves
- Mermen are not pigs.
- YOU do not get hit by lightning
- What can you do with gunpowder? “Well, you can blow things up!”
- Horses will appear in sandbox mode
- You can fish in the winter with this patch, in the next update crack open the ice with the axe
- Lightning does start fires, and forest fires. Matt pushed Kevin for that. “More things to light fires? Lets do it!”
- No new character in the update
- Maxwellian rain (“He (Maxwell) cries every so often, and it makes Wilson wet.”) (Kevin may have been joking with this one)
Game Mechanics
- More things influence sanity (Kevin) and more sanity visual effects (Jeff). May have to go insane or become sane in order to get to certain areas in the game.
- New biome plan?
- Custom sandbox will not turn off major features of the game IE Rotting, permadeath
- More Custom sand box options.
- Slider to make the game harder? Difficulty is subjective. Slider in sandbox mode.
-Pig King is not killable yet, but he can kill you. May be possible to crown a new pig king?
- Kevin doesn’t know if we'll ever be able to ride a Beefalo
- No immediate plans for ocean. “We need something to separate the land out...”
- Status Ailments: Probably “That’s an interesting way to go”
- End game boss? WILL MEET MAXWELL IN THE END AND HAVE TO MAKE A DECISION
Ideas that will probably or definitely not be added in later
- Weight? “Probably not. A bit simulationey” (Kevin)
- Dehydration, “a bit too micromanagey” (Kevin)
- No literal chess against Maxwell. His posse are all chess related
- Fishing in the ocean? “Because the ocean is everywhere, and that would just be free food... Besides that water is brown and gross, you wouldn’t want anything that comes out of that anyways.”
- Multiplayer: DS is a single player game. (Kevin)
Plans for the future
- Hopefully more music in the game.
- Harness lightning with a rod? “Not yet”
- Introducing more technological Maxwell type elements
- Modders will be able to change the game to a greater degree.
- Mac and Linux release is planned and in progress
- Physical release? “Not that I know of” (Kevin)
- Cutscenes: Quite expensive to produce, possibly, not before launch, Kevin would like to see more of those, however team is focusing on the main game before launch
Game Design (Sound, Art Direction, Steam, Etc.)
- Engine was written in C++- Game logic is written in LUA
- Klei has not looked into Steam Workshop yet, will hopefully look into it post launch
- Controller support? “Maybe in the future”
- Insane Dusk Theme was changed
- Parts of the thunder sounds are real thunder
- Eating sounds changed for technical reasons. Eating sound will be changed again soon, Matt isn’t happy with it
- Depends on the sound for how long it takes to make.
- Damage sounds come from vegetables
- Doesn’t know if soundtrack will be released on steam (Matt)
- Tried to give all the characters a 2-d vibe (Jeff)
- Inspired by Tim Burton stuff, Paranorman, Franken Weenie, Nightmare Before Christmas
- Tried to make everything look like pencil or charcoal. Everything is done digitally now.
- Ocean was inspired by stop motion
- “White souless eyes” on the creatures are a style choice.
- Creatures start out as an idea. One of the artists do a design. Matt comes up with the sound, if there’s something he wants to do more, the design is changed a bit.
Creatures (Planned, Creature Trivia)
- Pengulls will show up post launch. Will be aggressive.
- There will be a snowman (Probably post launch)
- Plans for more varied trees. (Probably post launch)
- No immediate plans for more creatures that you can train
- Tallbirds you raise will attack you, this will not change
-Matt is the voice of the Gobbler and the spider
- Night Monster’s voice was Matt making a bunch of scary sounds and then manipulating it.
- Tallbirds were actually bird sounds, also rabbits were real sounds
- Beefalo babies sounds are made from some kind of real animal
- Treeguard was Matt with a lot of processing
- Krampus was also Matt
- Ghost sounds: Male ghost is Matt, Female ghost is Kelly, one of the artists.
-Matt is the Swamp Tentacle noises
- Chess piece knight is bagpipes
- Deerclops concept was created in the very beginning
-Shadow Wilson is up to Kevin if it will make it into the game
- The Koalaphant is a “sibling” of the beefalo, they kind of used the same animation, working off the same basis
- More chess pieces coming (?) (“Well there’s more chess pieces in chess, soooooo... no comment”) (Kevin)
- Jeff doesn’t know about the Pelontrix
- Hound boss is a possibility.
- “Bee queen seems like a cool idea for a character” (Jeff)
- Body to the tentacle monster: “That would be a great idea!” “That thing would be huge if we were to put it into the actual game.” “Is Kevin listening to this right now?” (Jeff)
- The eyes in the Darkness are the Grue’s eyes? “Possibly” (Jeff)
Information about Characters
- Character differences, strange powers, cooldown powers, statistical bonuses (Kevin wants to add these)
- No new characters for a while. Kevin wants to make those characters more unique.
-Jeff wants to explain how the other characters got there, and he thinks he will have opportunities to explain it.
- Wilson is around 30s, Willow is maybe late teens, Wolfgang is about 40s.
- Wilson’s voice is a combination of two different types of trumpets
- Wilson’s full canonical name is Wilson Percival Higgsbury
- Willow’s teddy bear was to make her feel “cute and innocent”.
- All of the girls are different types of flutes, except for The Librarian who is an obo
- Robot’s voice is a synth
- All of the unimplemented character sounds are made.
- Wes has an invisible bicycle
- Abigail died under mysterious circumstances
- Maxwell’s moral alignment (“If you were to ask him, he wouldn’t call himself evil...”)
- Why does Abigail hate Chester: (“Abigail is very jealous”)
- Skeleton character is rattling bones, bamboo
- Wes’s dying scream is a bug.
Information/ Trivia on Devs
- Kevin is not a robot.
- Matt was pushing for the musical instruments as voices
- Matt’s first project with Klei was Shank 2. He is one of the VAs in Mark of The Ninja.
- All of the sound effects come from Matt
- Matt doesn’t do the music. Vince and Jason do the music
- Jeff did concept designs
- Jeff’s favorite thing to draw so far was Wilson’s hair.
- Jeff and Eric animated the Forbidden Knowledge videos
- Wilson is Jeff’s favorite character.
- Jeff loves the Smallbirds
- Alex did all the mime animations
- Alex does the idle animations
- Jeff’s favorite thing to work on in the game was the water.
- Alan did the sketch for the rabbits in the game
- Maxwell was come up with by Kevin, Julian (Possibly one other person, couldn’t quite catch it) Alex did the design
[MENTION=1667]MilleniumCount[/MENTION], I figured that someone else would be taking notes on the upcoming update, so I just focused on what the devs said. Thanks, though!
MilleniumCount said
Recipes:
- for gunpowder we need a rotten egg (some creature which was supposed to lay eggs does it now, charcoal and niter)
- purple gems are crafted using red and blue gem
- umbrella needs pig skin
- there was a carpet as flooring (probably crafted with beefalo wool)
- one man band drains sanity but helps befriending all near pigs (also needs a pigskin)
- honey healing stuff needs two honey and two papyrus
New Drops
- treeguard drops living logs now (used for the shadow manipulator)
- nightmare fuel out of graves
- chess knights drop gears
- mermen (merms) drop living fish (they are out of fish^^ and froglegs?)
- marble pillars drop marble (used for the marble flooring)
Stuff
- pighouses are shown on map
- the pillars are guarded by something different than the chess knights
- healing with food was nerfed
My Thoughts
This was a harrowing ride! Trying to dig up old DS info is like pulling teeth when it comes to old forum posts. So many have been lost in only the past few years. I'm very happy to have found this!
I checked for ShatteredSanity's profile on the forums and they haven't been on since 2013. Only the title of this thread is in their activity under Topics. Clicking on it goes to an error screen.
My choice bits:
"Multiplayer: DS is a single player game. (Kevin)"
Lol, how things have changed.
"Inspired by Tim Burton stuff, Paranorman, Franken Weenie, Nightmare Before Christmas"
I was pleased to see this, if its true it's nice to see it confirmed because I love all these aesthetics (even though I have... strong feelings about Tim Burton/Frankenweenie...)
"Ocean was inspired by stop motion"
Cool!
"There will be a snowman (Probably post launch)"
? Where is it.
"Ghost sounds: Male ghost is Matt, Female ghost is Kelly, one of the artists"
I haven't actually seen ghosts in my game yet, are there really male and female ghosts?
"Shadow Wilson is up to Kevin if it will make it into the game"
So Shadow Wilson was a thing? I only know of it from the blind box figs.
"More chess pieces coming (?) (“Well there’s more chess pieces in chess, soooooo... no comment”) (Kevin)"
Maybe they were thinking about adding the pawns? (Is this concept art on the wiki yet?)
"Jeff wants to explain how the other characters got there, and he thinks he will have opportunities to explain it."
Plz Klei I wanna know it's been years. I only got into this game like 6 months ago. I'm dying already and I can't imagine what it's been like for longtime fans.
"Wilson is around 30s, Willow is maybe late teens, Wolfgang is about 40s."
Interesting! I always thought that Willow was originally designed to be around that age. There's a facebook comment from Klei some time in 2014 that says she is "roughly" early 20s, which I guess is the current age range now. Nice to have that theory maybe semi-confirmed.
"Willow’s teddy bear was to make her feel “cute and innocent”."
One of the reasons why I thought she was initially designed to be younger.
"Wes has an invisible bicycle"
I feel like this is a joke, but it's funny to imagine. Like Wonder Woman.
"Abigail died under mysterious circumstances"
"Why does Abigail hate Chester: (“Abigail is very jealous”)"
So that's where these statements came from!
"Skeleton character is rattling bones, bamboo"
And here we go! This is what I was originally looking for. I'm really into fact checking the unimplemented chars at the moment. This is about Wilton's voice audio. Next up is the Wallace being Scottish thing that Kevin apparently said somewhere.
As a bonus, another forum user added another factoid in a comment:
"Don't forget the trivia that Maxwell was based on Steve Buscemi."
I like this because a few months ago I was researching 1920s fashion for DS related reasons, and found that the show Boardwalk Empire has a lot of great examples of the period. And I distinctly remember thinking that Steve Buscemi's character reminded me of Maxwell! I mean look at him!
So that was fun. I hope this blog was interesting. It's nice to record my process of finding things so soon after a discovery.
Thanks for reading!!! And if anyone has more info on this stream, please let me know!
- TheModster (talk) 23:47, October 7, 2018 (UTC)