Iceman = Trigger?

frostytheplebe

Seventh Part of the Seal
I was just curious if there was any intentional similarities between these two pilots? Thier seem to be some similarities (minus the condition of thier service records). In the cockpit they both say very little, thier coms sound like whispers, and they are both way into flying.
 
Eh, I thought Trigger was just intended to be kind of a stock character stereotype, i.e. the local Dirty Harry Callahan with a little extra psychotic on the side. Iceman reminded me of Dirty Harry when I first "met" him in WC1, and I imagined that the gun he was always polishing in the mess hall was a classic S&W .44 Magnum revolver.

Trigger cracks me up, though. I'm glad he's in there.
 
Trigger wasn't in the plans until halfway through Ep 1 development when we had to switch some lines around due to miscellaneous voiceover actor troubles, and Tempest (our casting guy) offered to voice a new character. He came up with Trigger, me and Quarto merely gave it our okay (I believe the actual quote is in Tempest's signature here on the forums :p).

We really had to juggle A LOT of character development and dialogue and fiction due to missing voiceover actors, missing lines, corrupted files only noticed during the last month of testing, etc. than you can tell from playing the finished episodes. There's this one conversation that we had to cut from Ep 4 due to a missing actor which really bothered me, but apart from that we managed to (re-)write our way around most of these issues.

A lot of our important characters came to be because of these problems (which were more frequent in Ep 1, when we had nothing playable to show for our work and so it was more common for people to simply not care about helping us anymore)... Trigger, Popsicle, and Saxman come to mind.

Saxman was the only one who was already planned, but he was supposed to be merely a musically-themed generic (ie: no fiction or cutscenes) Firekka pilot, a kind of tribute to WC2's Jazz and WC1-2's "themed" in-flight comms (and because the voiceovers were done by our music guy, Michael Mahadeen).

When we had to upgrade him to be an old friend of Bradshaw's, we came up with Popsicle so that we could split the load between Mike and Pierre, and have two "Firekka veterans" onboard.
 
There's this one conversation that we had to cut from Ep 4 due to a missing actor which really bothered me, but apart from that we managed to (re-)write our way around most of these issues.
Yeah... it's really fortunate that the end user is never aware of these things, so we're the only ones who regret this stuff ;).
 
We really had to juggle A LOT of character development and dialogue and fiction due to missing voiceover actors, missing lines, corrupted files only noticed during the last month of testing, etc. than you can tell from playing the finished episodes. There's this one conversation that we had to cut from Ep 4 due to a missing actor which really bothered me, but apart from that we managed to (re-)write our way around most of these issues.

I wonder if you could make some explanation for why their voice changed or sounded wierd: they were shot down and a fire erupted in the cockpit; an explosion happened on the carrier, etc.. and they had an artificial voice box or written words.. something like that.. or maybe they could have had the conversation to the other pilot through an email left on the system computer.. something like that so you would still get the conversation or dialogue in?
 
We certainly do whatever we need to get the story across. We've never changed actors for any character, but all that other stuff, like emails, splicing dialogue together out of already-recorded lines, and even just changing somebody else's dialogue so that they tell you what the missing character said, it's all been done.
 
Yeah... it's really fortunate that the end user is never aware of these things, so we're the only ones who regret this stuff ;).
Sorry to come in late on this, but I would say that if the player doesn't notice any of this, isn't that a bit of a success on your part? That is, haven't you done such a good job on patching up the holes that we, the players, have no idea of your frustrations unless you actually say something about it?
 
Yes, but our frustrations are still frustrating... even if everyone still thinks Standoff is great, we know how it could be at least a tad better.
 
I think there's no use weeping over 'what-could-have-been'. Of course, with any product there are things which could be improved, but I think you ought to have a little pride in what you and the team have managed to accomplish, especially given how none of you are being paid for this.

Just trying to be a little encouraging, you know? ;)
 
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