danielshae - Tumblr blog

[danielshae]

Four times the dastardly Paparazzi interrupted my busy life for pictures of a “big-shot composer man”.

[danielshae]

So I’m a composer—not a graphic designer, and certainly not an animator. This is my first foray into 8-directional sprite animation...for my sweet, marvelous sister’s 30th birthday. Happy Birthday, Devan. <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

[danielshae]

Pro Tip: Chrono Trigger TP Grind

Your Way to Becoming Deliciously Strong

By DANiEL SHAE

Psssst. Keep this between us, but I’m going to share how I’ve earned Luminaire since I was a kid. Most people wait until either the Ocean Palace or Mt. Wu, right before Giga Gaia. Chumps, I say. I’m here to tell you Magus’s castle is far more effective—and it’s pretty fast, actually.

In fact, in this most recent play-through, I cracked open a fresh Jolt Cola as I approached the castle (that sweet tilt shot up to the grotesque in front of the moon), and it was still a decent temperature by the time I sent Ozzie careening into Hell (I know...it doesn’t last).

Also, Magus’s castle sustains the pedal tones + ambient sounds even during fights, so you won’t be slapped with the first 15 seconds of the battle theme (glorious though it may be) 200 times in a row. I consider this a bonus feature.

MAKE SURE YOU GET THE SILVER STUD FROM DENADORO.

If you don’t have it, walk across the street and get it real quick. Just jump down the far end of the waterfall shortly before the Masamune cave.

Anyway, equip Crono with the silver stud, which halves MP use. You’re going to be spending the next two-ish hours pacing the right-most corridor of the entrance to Magus’s castle. The room with the imposter friends. Each of these battles nets 11 TP, and more importantly a Mid Ether. This is nice for two reasons: 1) these essentially grant you free spell-casting, and 2) each one of these bad boys sells for 1000 gold. Since you’ll be earning a couple hundred or so of these, you’ll occasionally need to leave and sell some off. Rest assured, this revenue + the money you’re already earning from battles will render you a hefty little retirement fund.

The first part of this grind is the worst, because you probably won’t have Lightning 2 yet, which means you’ll be killing enemies one-at-a-time for at least a short stint. I usually already have Spin-Cut/Cleave by this point in the game. If you’re in the same boat it should only take 20-to-30 minutes to acquire Lightning 2, and the rest is butter.

Crono is by far the fastest in your party, so he will always get the opening attack of your three. Quickly cast Lightning 2 to kill everyone but the Sorcerer. Let the Sorcerer cast heal if he hasn’t already and then use Frog and your third to both attack, which should, between the two of them, kill the Sorc. Eventually Frog (who is your second fastest anyway) will start one-hit killing the Sorc. This becomes more and more consistent as you approach level 36. It is worth noting that Fire 2 will kill everyone, including the Sorcerer, but Lucca is unbearably slow until much later, when you can steal all the speed tabs in Black Omen.

Watch your third (I usually use Marle, because I keep her and Ayla in my party most of the game for Twin Charm and Cube/Iceberg Toss). Frog + your third will likely earn their final techs before Crono, so you might want to trade the third out so as to not waste TP. TP is precious. #savethebutts

As far as handling this mentally, I prefer not to tally individual fights, as that drives me a little bit crazy. Instead, I simply count running forward and backward through the corridor as a whole. That is, I run into the Juggler/Flea room (don’t worry, it doesn’t auto-initiate the boss fight), and then back through to the room that had the four kids around the treasure chest, and I consider that all as one run-through. That’s 66 TP + 6 Mid Ethers. At 4 MP per Lit 2 cast, you only need to use a Mid Ether like once per run-through. Occasionally those damned bats will leech some MP off you if they get to shoot first. But they’re usually not an issue.

It takes roughly 30 run-throughs to get Luminaire.

Good hunting.

[danielshae]

Chrono Trigger on Steam: Dang-o

Well It’s Not Exactly Pretty

By DANiEL SHAE

No driving thesis here, just some thoughts and observations of the port.

Like many of you, I’m a lifelong fan of this game. I still have my SNES (actually, I have four of them), and my original CT cart with a “got all the characters to ** and defeated Pink NU Spekkio” file on it. Even went so far as to get a NU tattooed on me. Because I am a sucker for this game.

As you’re probably aware, toward the beginning of 2018 SE granted us a “surprise release” of Chrono Trigger. Like so many others, I bought it immediately. Then? The backlash. Tremendous backlash. Mostly for the weirdly smoothed graphics that appeared to most like a “bad mobile port”. So, somewhat responsibly, six months later SE pushed an update attempting to appease the mobs of enraged fans by allowing the game to be viewed with graphics “similar to the original pixel art”. That description is straight from the in-game menu.

The release of the update was surrounding by a flood of articles purporting that “SE put the original graphics back in Chrono Trigger and now it looks WAY BETTER...” (I’m paraphrasing here). And to a degree, sure, it is certainly better than it was. But dang-o. Guys, this game is still pretty mangled. For a game whose original was so thoughtful, beautiful, and meticulous, this feels sloppy AF. And I know that some people likely worked their asses off, because I too work in the game industry and I understand how it goes. This isn’t just any game, though; it’s Chrono Trigger. I would think that, regarding a game which was completed 23 years ago and is considered by millions to be a masterpiece, people would be a thousand times more careful touching it now than even the original team who created it back then. That’s certainly the case with nearly any other art you’d find in a museum. But that’s not the case here. Square Enix has the resources to do it right, but this port is unfinished.

First 15 minutes of gameplay, I encountered some triggered events which caused me to become stuck inside another sprite and I had to reboot the game to continue (the specific one I remember is returning the girl’s lost kitty at the fair). Thank God for the “bookmark/resume” feature, which is actually a pretty cool addition to the game. Anyway, I’m now 20 hours in (Death Peak after a lot of grinding), and I’m glad to say that pattern has thankfully not persisted.

But there are other issues. Some minor. Some kinda hideous.

I won’t bore you with pixel uniformity (or the apparent lack thereof), but as you can see pictured above, there are some serious issues with mixed aesthetic. You may have to give it the ol’ “right click, view image” to better see what I’m talking about. Most of the assets are displayed in clearly defined “pixels”, but then there are bits like the Epoch, which appear more like, for my lack of real terminology, freaky blurred nonsense. Flying this bad boy around is a uh...well it’s a “trip”. I’m not one to easily embarrass, but between you and me I keep my head ducked and hope to God an NPC doesn’t walk out onto the world map to see my smeared-ass ride rippin’ across the sky to elevator jams. Also I tried switching between “Original” and “High resolution” graphics—Epoch appears to be the same in both. Maybe I’ve just unearthed a bug in my game, but then if so that’s still a problem.

There are lots of other graphical issues: Orphaned pixel noise that becomes painfully visible during effects like white screen flashes. Freaky solid black pixel chunks during the “cool parts” with the Ocean Palace and the Black Omen. The area around Giga Gaia’s face gets honorable mention for some extra weird shit going on when you slap him around (I was using Cube Toss/Iceberg Toss).

As they say: The list goes on.

I’m actually fine with how the battle menu and gauges look now, even if the gauges sometimes cover sprites a little crudely. I get it. Sacrifices must be made. However, the speech panels and game menu panels don’t look like they belong at all to the same game. They’re bizarrely clunky, a different resolution than the rest of the game assets, and frankly the texture on them looks as though somebody was just dicking around with the spray paint tool. Which might be fine if they were the same resolution as the other assets.

SIDE NOTES ON THE MENU: 1) “Settings” can be accessed from the title screen menu and from the in-game menu, and it offers completely different options depending on which you’re in. That’s what they call a UI/UX “no no”. 2) The behavior of the title menu is...weird. That’s as profound as I’m going to be on this bullet. 3) From the in-game menu, to find the “Quit” option, one first has to navigate to “Settings”.

How the hell is quitting a “game setting”?

The hit boxes, or colliders, or [whatever the hell they are] are unpolished as well. This version of the game feels much stickier in places than previous releases I’ve played (SNES, PS, DS). I’ve encountered several NPCs whose colliders are perhaps double their actual width/height, making it a real pain to traverse certain areas.

I can’t make up my mind about the anime cutscenes. I was super pumped at first when they added them to the PS release, but now I almost wish they were a separate thing from the gameplay. Watching those moments in anime, only to immediately see them again in the original 16 bits, ends up feeling a little disjointed. Plus, occasionally (specifically I’m thinking of Frog blowing open the cave to Magus’s keep), it causes the sound to break for a few moments when it comes back from the cutscene to the 16-bit animation. I dunno. Mixed feelings.

I’m still having a blast playing through it. It maintains maybe 85% of the original charm—and 85% of Chrono Trigger is still a hell of a party. I’m glad they added the DS content. I’m not overly pissed that they only opted to keep half of Woolsey’s localization (frog still charmingly speaks in Old English, just not when he’s having flashbacks to being a child/young adult for some reason) but modified parts of it to include some of the newer English dialects (featuring phrases like “nom nom nom”). OK. Cool I guess. We need the newer generations to “understand” our art.

OK, that’s more-or-less the end of my thoughts on this. It’s enjoyable, but extremely messy. I don’t recommend this version for first-timers to the game. If you can swing it, play the SNES cart. On a CRT. Play it with scanlines. Sweet, beautiful, hot, sexy scanlines. And if you can’t, get a DS copy.

Actually I’m not so obsessed with the “glory days” that I’d turn my nose up at a full-on remake of this game. Pls. I’d take a modern Chrono Trigger in a heartbeat.

EDIT: 49 hours. Beat the game. Multiple times. Got all 13 endings. The most noticeable of the graphical issues are: Epoch, beating Magus and warping to 65 Million BC, Ocean Palace appearing, Black Omen appearing, random buildings throughout the world maps, racing Johnny, scenes with the Gurus/Janus being warped away from Lavos, Black Omen after killing Mammon, and pretty much all of the endings. The Epoch and ending credits sequences are the worst. Still, tremendously fun—just not impressive looking compared to the product that was completed 23 years ago.

[danielshae]

Sordid + Somewhat Chippy is a killer collection of tunes containing some of the highlights of Shae's work from 2015 through early 2018. It combines pop, rock, and orchestral sounds with 8-bit chip synth and lo-fi 16-bit samples to present a modern yet nostalgic signature. And hey, there's a little synthwave thrown-in for the hell of it.

Featuring cover art by the master, Joel Heires, Sordid + Somewhat Chippy is available now on several major digital platforms (iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, etc.).

CHECK iT HERE!

[danielshae]

Working on a fun soundtrack for the DSoP Cart Jam. Check it out.

[danielshae]

Hello, Friends! Sparrows of Outrageous Fortune is OUT.

In this spunky, absurd, fast-paced game for Windows, try to dodge and deflect exploding, suicidal birds. If you can win, press [enter] in the credits screen to replay with increased enemy speed and difficulty. See if you can rack-up the highest score in our online leaderboards.

Game by SOFT RESET.

Music by DANiEL SHAE.

Get it FREE today on itch.

[danielshae]

The Recording & Mixing Quickie List

A Simple, Suggestive Study Guide for the Budding Audio Pro

By DANiEL SHAE

PREFACE: Audio Production, like any exercise of creativity, is a non-linear process. But most Humans try to distort all the things into a super linear mindset. Everything from traffic lights to phonetic characters becomes a task of taking turns and doing things one-step-at-a-time. In fact, when something is broken we term it “out of order”, as though it has fallen outside the great checkout line that is the Universe. But brains don’t really work that way. It’s more like lanes and clovers on highways. If something is slow or obstructing your path, there’s no need to wait or stop; simply change lanes to pass it, or clover onto a different highway. An idea can be a thousand distinct concepts all happening simultaneously, and you’re free to pursue them in whatever fashion works best for you. There may be a lot of switching around as you work. That’s OK. Roll with it. That said, there are certain phases that make a lot of sense to complete before or after others. Equip shoes before you run. That sort of thing.

This is an outline. Often, when beginning a thing, we don’t even know what questions to ask. This is meant to address that. It’s a hyper-simplified guide intended to get you started. People may disagree with parts/all of it. Cool, man. It’s great to have opinions. Print it. Scribble notes. Check things off as you learn. Develop your own ideas. Make music.

Download the 2-page checklist here.

[danielshae]

#usingyourletters #shank

[danielshae]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Daniel Shae Gerlach (@danielshae)

#thegoodpart :)

[danielshae]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Daniel Shae Gerlach (@danielshae)

#wejustgotsomenews #uhoh

[danielshae]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Daniel Shae Gerlach (@danielshae)

#sample a #treat

[danielshae]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Daniel Shae Gerlach (@danielshae)

#unbox a #treat

[danielshae]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Daniel Shae Gerlach (@danielshae)

#usingyourletters #bored #badger

[danielshae]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Daniel Shae Gerlach (@danielshae)

#freaky

[danielshae]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Daniel Shae Gerlach (@danielshae)

#usingyourletters #roadkill

[danielshae]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Daniel Shae Gerlach (@danielshae)

#usingyourletters #grammar #vicar