Interstellar Tortoise

2.27.09

My friend Sass is going to be doing voice over (VO) for the main speaking part. I asked her to do it over 6 months ago and she has been asking whether that is still going to happen. That made me start to look into VO a little bit. I REALLY REALLY want to include VO if I can manage the file space.

So… I started to do some tests to see what I’m working with. It looks like having external MP3 or WAV files would actually make the overall size of the game bigger. A bit of a shock for me. The best way to use audio in terms of space seems to be to import the audio into Flash as wav file. For some reason if you import an mp3 the size is considerably larger. Another shock. Weird. Good… but weird. This should be really good because it allows the game file to be an entirely stand alone file with no external linking.

It appears that it gets shrunk down to roughly 2k per second. My goal is to have each all of the audio (music + VO) in under 3 MBs – a very tall order. We will have to see…

We’ve just had our first interview!

Read interview here

(2.24.09)

Haven’t actually gotten down to balance and refinement for the Prequel game – I decided to start looking into sound recording and have allowed myself to get totally sidetracked down that direction for a while. I bought a program called ‘Mixcraft’ which lets me plug my guitar right into the computer and record with almost no setup at all. It is all addictively immediate.

I also figured out how to write a series of scripts that dynamically draws music loop tracks randomly from a set. This will allow me to have quasi-random music generation. This is exciting for two reasons: 1. From a relatively small set of music samples, the music will play with a LOT of variations. This will (hopefully) keep the music from getting stale for the avid player.

2. This will help to keep music file sizes much smaller than they would be if a finished mix of the same length was recorded using traditional linear music tracks.

Unfortunately, I believe that this whole excursion has bounced me a bit off focus. Not sure whether it was worth it or not yet. We will see.

(2.4.09)

Wow. It’s been a while since I’ve recorded my progress. All is going extremely well. The Art for the prequel is almost finished. Almost all of the rooms and the Display has been updated with prettier graphics.

The Display looks SO much better! My brother played the game before I updated the display and completely missed the fact the player has a limited number of moves – so I made that number huge and called it ‘Life’ so that It would be more easily understood. I also had it sit in a heart graphic to match the hearts that are picked up as PowerUps. I’ve also revamped the map so that it works really nicely – very similar to the newer castlevania games.

All of the sequential gameplay is put down and works (more or less) and I am really getting down to balance and refinement for the Prequel game. Then I will still need to make the entire full game.