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Stellaris Dev Diary #110 - Creation and Beyond

Hello all interstellar readers!

It is time for me to write another entry and this one will be a special one for me to write. For those that doesn't know me, my name is Björn Iversen and I work as Audio Director at Paradox Development Studios.

Hope that you all have been enjoying Stellaris since our update and Apocalypse expansion, it was sure super fun working on audio assets for blowing up planets! But working on Apocalypse was also the beginning of the end for my part. The plan was that when I was done with my work for Apocalypse it was time for me to move to another project here at Paradox.

When I first started at Paradox, I was really excited about creating cool sounding audio assets for our historical games and what kind of challenges I would be facing! Fun note, I have been trying out PDS games since Europa Universalis 1. So imagine how surprised I was when I first walked into the office, did not ever imagine that I would start working on a new PDS IP, that also was a Sci-Fi game! It is like every Sound Designer’s dream to work on a game like this! Who doesn’t like working on lasers and explosions! But in reality I started working more with kazoo’s and clarinet to create all those sweet UI sound effects.

My first workstation at Paradox back in 2015 when I was high tech.

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Btw I still have those white headphones, but I have changed my keyboard to something more modern and my surroundings has changed to something much more comfortable.

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Here is a screenshot of the madness that was my first audio session for Stellaris and it was not easy going through it all today due to lack of structure.

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My folder structure did not make any sense today or even back then.

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There was some problems opening all these old sessions.

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Going back and looking at the VO sessions to see how I did edit everything:

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You will see some attached audio files to this Dev Diary which are some really old and early drafts of audio assets that I recorded for Stellaris. There is a good mix of clarinet and other weird things, and to be honest I don't remember everything that I did back then.

It was a bit weird for me in the beginning thinking about the whole idea of me not working any more on Stellaris, it was THE project I started on from day one as a Audio Director. But over the years I have been involved with so much with Stellaris, been able to make additions that you as the community has appreciated and also some additions that you have might not been as pleased with. It has been a long and bumpy road for me, but I have learned so much along the way!

I’m really pleased with my work on Stellaris and what I did achieve. What I’m probably most happy about is well VIR turned out to be. It was quite refreshing including VO into a PDS title since we haven’t really have any VO before in our titles. Also how we have expanded with VO in Stellaris with all the new additions in Synthetic Dawn and Humanoid Species Pack!

But after working for a couple of years on Stellaris I need to start focusing on other titles, so I’ll give a short introduction to Franco, forum name @Audiomancer, that will be focusing more on Stellaris in my place.

Hello beautiful community! My name is Franco Freda, and I'm a Senior Sound Designer here at Paradox Interactive. I met Björn last year and I was honoured to have gotten the opportunity to join him and the Audio Team. I was lucky to get to work with Stellaris as soon as I joined in January, right on time for the wrapping up of Apocalypse and was immediately blown away by the quality of its soundscape. Let's just say that if Space could actually have sound, I would want it to sound like that XD!


I'm looking forward to sharing this journey with all of you, and hope to be able to share some of the new awesome stuff we're working on very soon!
 

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I've thought, that this dev-diary was a joke, so that I've waited for the real one ...

By the way, an official patch without localisation ? - That's a joke - For sure ?! - Or not ?
To hopefully calm people's fears: yes, we are going to go a little quiet for a bit as we start work on future plans. That doesn't mean we are stopping anything, quite the reverse...we just have less to declare publicly until it's time to announce. We're not done supporting 2.0.x, we're going to get a patch with missing loc and fixes out when we can.

Dev diaries are a nice bonus thing we do to reach out to you, our fans, and give insight in to various parts of the game development process. They are never guaranteed to contain spoilers or reveals, nor can they possibly answer every individual player's craving for perfect information. My advice if you're uninterested in the content is to simply use your time on something you do like. We'll be back with info about future plans when those are ready to be announced.
 
Are there really so many new people that they've never seen a dev diary that's not focused on upcoming features? As far as I'm aware it's been a regular thing since Stellaris came out?
 
Maybe it's just too early to start talking about the new features? Or perhaps there is another dev diary incoming? Anyhow, I as a person do like to find out more about the people behind one of my favourite games.
New features are one thing we dont need. We need massive amounts of fixes. We need things to work before they starting trying new things which will again break everything.
 
New features are one thing we dont need. We need massive amounts of fixes. We need things to work before they starting trying new things which will again break everything.

They need to fix the lag issue first. It is so bad late mid-late to late-end game. I've had this problem since the machine uprising.
 
Cheers for the DD Metal King and welcome Audiomancer :D. Stellaris' sound 'arrangement' (sorry, non-audio person here, so don't know the lingo) is both unique and engaging - thanks for all of your work King of Metal, and looking forward to what more of yours Mancer of Audio :cool:. Always great to hear about the team :D.
 
Almost every post: "Where's the REAL Dev Diary?"

Funny, considering the definition of the word "diary", while it may not have been the information desired, it was still an entirely valid entry. In fact, if anything, most of their previous Dev Diaries have been everything but proper diaries of developers. Blast it, I want to know the juicy gossip! Who's cheating on who, and why?

Nevertheless, be prepared for really all of the longest-standing bugs to never be fixed, diplomacy to never get the treatment that warfare just got (or any, most probably), and no other significant changes or improvements to come (such as finally a proper balancing of the different possible playstyles, or an expansion on such options). Look forward to more strictly, and minor, cosmetic changes that have to be paid for.

Yet another 4x game that had high hopes, and then just did the same thing every other one has. Roman Empire syndrome. Yawn. But hey, it's pretty, so I'll probably keep playing from time to time. Just like sometimes I get into GalCiv3 just to tinker with their ship builder for fun, though I never bother to start a campaign anymore.

Oh well, time to wait for the next great white hype.
 
Those are human beings working on the game we so love. Remember that when you're responding to them. I think it is very considerate of them to notify us of changes on the Stellaris Development team and Bjorn just wanted to give a nice farewell to the community of a game he put a lot of work into. They don't always have a dev diary, chances are if Bjorn hadn't updated us on the personal change we wouldn't have gotten any dev diary today.

The tweaks and fixes for 2.0 have been amazing (2.0.3 was actually really exciting for "just" a post-release patch) and I look forward to more fixes and just enjoying Cherryh and Apocalypse for a bit before getting hyped on new content again lol.
 
Those are human beings working on the game we so love. Remember that when you're responding to them. I think it is very considerate of them to notify us of changes on the Stellaris Development team and Bjorn just wanted to give a nice farewell to the community of a game he put a lot of work into. They don't always have a dev diary, chances are if Bjorn hadn't updated us on the personal change we wouldn't have gotten any dev diary today.

The tweaks and fixes for 2.0 have been amazing (2.0.3 was actually really exciting for "just" a post-release patch) and I look forward to more fixes and just enjoying Cherryh and Apocalypse for a bit before getting hyped on new content again lol.

Wait developers are human beings? What are the slaves doing outside of the mines!?!?! =p
 
Wait developers are human beings? What are the slaves doing outside of the mines!?!?! =p
We needed someone working on unity - and the habitability was too low for mechanized units.
 
Wiz has explicitly stated that they are moving on to other aspects of Stellaris outside of war mechanics. In no way does that imply they are done with development.
On the whole I think the war mechanics are in a pretty good place right now. I like to see some changes to the effects of war exhaustion, and making the AI submit to demands other than conquest is still unreasonably difficult, but the system is leaps and bounds better than before.