Ready or Not/SWAT 4 - Update #1

It's that end of the week update on the pre-production work. Good news and bad news.

The bad news is I came down with a common cold on Tuesday. Probably caught at a family lunch on Sunday. Meaning it feels like someone has been running a marching band through my sinuses.

I blame one of the little cousins/nephew, which is why all kids should be declared illegal immediately.

The good news is, weird sleep patterns permitting, it let me knuckle down on the bullshittery in the absence of streaming to the point that most pre-production work was completed by the midweek. And I've even gone so far as to start cutting the bullshittery together. Everything has been going really smoothly.

The preproduction scrubbing produced 59 clips for Ready or Not and 39 clips for SWAT 4. For reference, your average bullshittery consists of 40ish clips, depending on duration, pacing, etc.

Character wise they are very balanced. A mixture of rapid-fire quick moments of silliness, with longer conversations and recurring jokes during the banter that happens during briefings, at locked doors, or general moments of quiet. It's a lot of really great material.

It also has that sweet-spot number of 5-7 players. Meaning communications aren't too rapid-fire. People are able to talk about topics, bantering with each other, without being interrupted by the gameplay in a negative manner. I'm anticipating no issues with the overall structure.

Of the pre-production work remaining, 5 of the 38 streams are what I call 'unscrubbed'. Meaning their notes were trash, or lost, or jokes too difficult to identify in the moment.

For example there, maybe something funny happened at the end of a stream. But it was only funny in the context of some things happening before. But you never actually hit the timestamp button before because you had no idea that was going to be the case.

So that's about 10-11 hours of stream footage to review manually.

I could do that now, of course. But I've always considered that to be an inefficient use of time. Better to watch those on a third monitor during the keyframing phase of a bullshittery. Where moving a Null Object 400 times through a smoke cloud gives you plenty of free brain power to listen to audio. Or a dogwalk with Lulu where I can listen to an .mp3 version of the livestream for the references to the specific joke.

On that part 1, here's a shot of the rough timeline as I've been working on it. The Ready or Not clips are in GREEN. And the SWAT 4 clips are in blue.

I've already identified a whole bunch of fun sequences from both games. Most notably a return to the creepy Fairfax serial killer level in SWAT 4, chaining gags from two different segments together. And a Ready or Not game where we we infiltrate a port run by the Russian Mafia.

In both examples, the serious tone is quickly undercut by shenanigans, and our SWAT team gets lost...confused by locked doors...and generally makes a pigs breakfast of the whole operation. Should be a fun watch.

I'll keep cutting this video together and will let you know what I craft. But you can easily expect me to start the keyframing effort very soon.

Thank you all. When it's done I hope it pleases you.