>>926815
>I think a bigger question is how it takes 2 full years to make a rather simple flash game.
It was mostly backgrounds. Or more specifically, artists who swore they could do painted backgrounds easily, proceeded to not do them for months, and then actually started and realized they /couldn't/ do paintd backgrounds. It turns out Makkon is the only person I know who can do environmental art, but far from the only person who thinks they can do environmental art.
That's not an attempt to shift blame. If anything, it's my fault for not pressing the artists to start the backgrounds (and subsequently realize they couldn't do them) as soon as I paid them.
There were a lot of minor inefficiencies elsewhere, too. Like, we transitioned to a trigger system that was much more versatile, but required 8 coordinates for every trigger (compared to a simple X and Y when we were doing tile-based triggers). The rotoscoped sprites, too, turned out to be a lot more work than they sounded on paper. All of these things were ostensibly supposed to save time and make production easier (ironically, that was even the intent behind outsourcing background art), but ended up compounding into something that took forever. And once you already have half the triggers laid or half the backgrounds made, there's an unfortunate sunk-cost thing going on where you don't want to switch systems or art styles and /invalidate/ all that work.
I'm happy with how it turned out overall (even the invisible movement, which seems to be about as divisive as the slippy movement in the sidescroller minigame), but the sheer amount of time everything took was miserable. I have no intent to ever touch painted graphics, rotoscoping, or non-tile-based map design again. I'll probably make more interactive stuff eventually, but it'll be, like, a Katia you can boop on the nose.
>>924534
>The vast majority of all Elder Scrolls "fan content" is actually interns and shills working under an alias. It's all bacterial marketing.
Speaking personally, I've only met a Bethesda employee once. I don't remember it well because I was really drunk, but I think he said he was a dungeon designer for Skyrim, and I told him Morrowind's dungeons were better.
I wouldn't be surprised if marketing forces were behind those "TOP FIVE MOST BRUTAL WEAPONS IN SKYRIM"-type videos, but I think most fanfiction comes from people who love the source material's concept but are very critical of its execution. Or perhaps conversely, I think people can't write good fanfiction unless they're a bit critical of the source material.