Necstasy

Ca me donne envie de reprendre une MD et un MCD

La ca mérite le !Ban Pat

Plus sérieusement tes artworks sont magnifiques chef! Continue comme ca c'est du superbe boulot.

Ok, merci

Je ne suis pas vraiment surpris de ton témoignage, j'espère que tu ne baniera pas à jamais la scene PC Engine suite à cette histoire.

Non, Je ne reduis pas la scene PC Engine à quelques personnes.
En fait, même au sein de Frozen Utopia, c'est seulement 1 ou 2 personnes qui ont eu un comportement lamentable.
S'ils n'auraient pas été là, j'aurai sans doute été encore dans ce groupe.
S'il etaient + receptifs et moins lourds, ou pour certains moins arrogants, cela ne me generait pas de revenir parmi eux.

I do not speak French but my wife does, and was able to translate the posts in this thread. So, I would like to give my response, even if it's only in English.

First of all, I never once had a problem with Armen. I did find his attitude at the beginning to be rather forceful, but I was already used to that from one of our former members who we eventually booted out. I like his work a whole lot and was hoping we'd be able to work together. However, the real issue came with his clash with Black Tiger and Seldane. Artists rarely get along...this is common knowledge. Black Tiger didn't think the style was suited to a Neutopia game, and Seldane more or less said his work sucked. Black Tiger's comments are partially correct; Armen's work was not suited to what we were looking for at the time...for the most part. His rendition of Dirth was perfect, but the rest of the characters were not what we were looking for. Armen took this as an offense, which was rather immature. The two of them had some pretty nasty things to say to each other after that, and Armen left. Now, Black Tiger is still with the group, but Seldane has been gone for a couple of years now. I realize that Armen is passionate about his work, and that is a quality I respect a whole lot. But the attitude he expressed in the face of criticism was less than favorable, and that's not good for a team environment. If I were to work with Armen on a solo project, it would go very smoothly.

As for Mysterious Song...it originally started out as something I was going to do myself. It's a small game, so I figured I'd just write it all myself and release it as a bin/cue for free. However, several people at the time noticed this and wanted to join in. That's how Frozen Utopia was formed. We have long wanted to bring this game to completion. The original Mysterious Song was a very short game for the PC, developed back in 1999 by three people of Darkness Ethereal (of which I was a part of, but I did not contribute to this game as I was working on another one at the time for the group). The PC Engine version of Mysterious Song is vastly superior to its original version, being over six times as long with greatly improved graphics and sound, plus full-screen animated cutscenes and proper voice acting. It is also the first and only PC Engine game to be available in multiple languages on the same disc. But this is not our only game; we have several other games in production, including the before-mentioned Neutopia III, but also several original platform games and an original side-scrolling brawler (kind of like Final Fight), some of which featuring the artwork of Josiah Tobin, a very well-known and well-respected pixel artist. I am also considering doing a full-length RPG with a completely original story written by me over the course of over 10 years. I would gladly have Armen on such a project if he were up for it.

As for Kaminari...I talked to shub on the pcenginefx forum and he stated that K didn't want to do the French translation because it seemed as if the game would never be finished. Well, for awhile, I thought that too...real-life issues get in the way sometimes. However, that is now long in the past; I have 100% of my time dedicated to PC Engine development now. Other members of the group have lives too and sometimes our lives get in the way of doing this work. But one thing to keep in mind is that we all do this in our spare time; not everyone can devote 100% of their life to homebrew. We are not quitters though; this game has finally seen its way to the end of production and it's on the verge of release. Pre-orders have been going very well and we're just about out of bonus items...

So that about wraps it up for what I have to say. Feel free to contact me for anything either here or on pcenginefx.

Hi Nodtveidt,

thanks for your explanation ! I'm glad to hear we can pre-order Mysterious song , can you please tell us where ? Will it be a real commercial release(i mean like any other PCE game) or just an iso to buy ? Great to hear you're also having some other projects , is that on PC Engine too ??

Merci ! J'attend quand meme des précisions sur le packaging.

Hi Nodtveidt,

Actually, I don't remember anything about Seldane, or what he said about my work.
I don't remember having any problem with him as he already wasn't in the group anymore in october 2008, when I came.
I think it's about the work of Developer X (about his tile works and sprites if I'm not mistaken) he said bad things. Not about my concept art.
But this was before I even came. (Or then, after I left)

On the other hand, I remember that Black Tiger who was and still is in your group said that technically speaking (from the very beginning), what I had done was subpar, and that I was a copycat. That I was reproducing other's works and my drawing were getting cruder when I was straying away from a reference.


It is one thing to say the style I have doesn't correspond to what you want. I have no problem with that. Everyone has different tastes and I respect that.

One the other hand, the real problem came when your artist, BT criticized what I had done on a technical level.

As a professional, I've met lot of people who are much more talented than me and I have always accepted technical criticism. The only condition is that this technical criticism is not unfounded and that the person who's addressing to me this criticism has a technical level equivalent or superior to mine.
This is not the case of Black Tiger seeing the character artwork has produced. To be honest with you, even now I can see anatomy problems in some of the images posted.

He's the one who began to speak as he was superior, even saying that I was probably working for lower budget shows (without any proof and this has nothing to Do with the homebrew scene anyway) when I wasn't asking anything about what he does outside of FU. Then when I saw on the private forum all the time he had spent on several pages to try to make image comparisons between what I had sent you and other anime, I think this was too much to bear.
Can you honestly tell me who is immature and who is not ?
I was there to help the team and accept criticism if necessary, but not to deal with dishonest people who try to discredit other people's work.

I am not the one who began.
I restrained myself from responding to these kinds of attitude which are gratuitous and bring nothing but discord.
This is why I left the team before having any other regrets because I knew this wouldn't work out.

If you don't believe me, I still have a copy of the messages.

Actually , I think you really liked what I did, but some other didn't like it or just didn't want another artist than BT aboard. That's all. You have to recognize that I was not wanted from the beginning by some people from your team and no matter what I would have produced, it wouldn't have been good enough for them. Yet, all the artworks I showed here had been created within only 1 week, which I think is quite short, whereas other members hadn't even shown anything before joining FU (as it was stated by one of your team members)

I'm currently the character illustrator and cutscene director of Pier Solar. I would have gladly shown you some of the cutscene artworks but unfortunately the director doesn't accept that anyone shows anything at the moment. Hope that things will change though in the near future.

It's really a pity I can't be part of your team. Malducci, Lord Cack and you seem to like what I did, It would have been great to help you because I was interested by your Neutopia 3 project and am a fan of japanese pc engine RPGs. But for the now, I guess this won't happen. By the way I still think that Neutopia 3's style should be reminiscent of Conan the Future Boy and Ys (if you keep in mind Neutopia 2's art done by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko) and not Dungeon Explorer 2

Nonetheless, I hope you succeed in your current and future projects because I know you're a cool and talented coder.

Armen

Quelqu'un peut traduire globalement svp?

Armen: I've already seen some of the screens of Pier Solar; the first thing I thought was "Hey look, Lunar-style artwork!". But I had no idea that it was you doing those drawings...guess I should have guessed though, hehe.

Actually, I believe the both of you were being pretty immature. It really matters not who started it; the wise person knows how to finish it, and then drop it and leave it alone. I still have all of the messages as well, and all of the forum posts are still there. But it's all water under the bridge as far as I'm concerned, and it actually rather bugs me that this issue has been brought back to the surface again rather than buried in the ground where it belongs.

The look for N3 was chosen to maintain the original style of the game. However, neither of the first two games featured cutscenes, so what we wanted to do was to have more of a dark theme since the storyline for N3 is much darker than the prequels. Also, because of the huge difference between the Japanese and USA cover art for the two titles, it was rather difficult finding a happy medium; the Japanese covers are vivid and cartooney, but the US covers are more aggressive and "urgent". I personally felt that the more aggressive theme was more appropriate for the written storyline. Of course, N3 may not even happen at this point; it's been shoved to the backburners to make room for two unique platformer games anyways, and the game engine was tossed out entirely since it was too limited and requires a total rewrite from the ground up in assembly.

Thanks for the good wishes though; I wish you the same luck with your work in the future. If there's ever a time you want to collaborate on a project though, just let me know. Frozen Utopia is a democratic group, but when it comes right down to it, I'm in charge so the final say is pretty much always mine. And like I said, I have a huge RPG I plan on taking on in the near future. It will be the first-ever multiple disc PC Engine RPG, so there will be plenty to do. Your style would be perfect for it, so if you're up for it, let me know anytime.

cosmos99: Frozen Utopia is PC Engine exclusive group; we only make PC Engine games. And we're focusing only on commercial releases for the time being. Any games for other platforms are released under a different name.

The cutscene artworks found on the PS site now aren't from me. They've been redone now and are much more detailed and correctly drawn.
The overall style of the character's look like the portrait found on the main page (that I created.)

For Neutopia (as it's an RPG created by the japanese), I've always considered the japanese sources (art) to be canon. Moreover, the japanese illustrator Yoshikazu Yasuhiko is a very respected animator/illustrator since the early 60's. He's among other things the character designer of the original Gundam series, Venus Wars , Arion and such. He has also worked on the famous japanese series Spaceship Yamato.

Neutopia 3 could have a very dark atmosphere and style but nonetheless adopt a character design close to the original. The are lots of japanese anime which paradoxically have very young main characters dealing with grave/violent situations and at the same time, have other characters drawn more realistically

As for your epic PCE RPG on 2 discs, I'm 100% with you when you're ready, man

Armen

Ah wait, it was this that I saw, not a screenshot:

http://www.piersolar.com/images/layout/hoston_intro.gif

The epic RPG is likely to be 3 discs due to the heavy music usage and large amount of cutscenes, plus the very long storyline. It's at least a 2 year project for the PC Engine. It is also likely to be rather expensive... I will probably be starting production of it in about six months' time so I'll let ya know.

I'm not a "fan", per se, of Yoshikazu Yasuhiko's work, but I've seen plenty of it and have observed that his art style is incredibly varied, so it can really be tough to say something like "hey, this is Yoshikazu's work" just by looking at it, without knowing its background. If I remember correctly, he was involved in Lovely Angels/Dirty Pair, which looks a LOT different than, say, The Venus Wars or Neo Devilman, and even they look pretty distinct. Good stuff all around though.

Yes , that's what I did

You're correct, YY is the one who originally designed the 2 girls from Dirty Pair.
You recognize easily his main male characters due to his way of drawing them.

3 disc is very huge. Are you sure you're not too ambitious ?
I guess this will require a good organization and planning .
Let me know when you're ready.