Dev Journal: Finding One’s Voice

It’s been about a month since my last public dev journal, when I broke the news that Project Voice had hit a wall on the concept stage, but that I was finally really getting things rolling with it. Then a couple weeks ago I dropped a whole bunch of behind the scenes commentary about the process I’ve been going through on my supporters with the supporter-exclusive dev journal. At that point I was just about done with the writing for the project, and the last two weeks have been turning more to focus on the audio side of things, both for recording lines and exploring how to turn those recordings into actual game assets.

In other words, after all this hubbub, I’m finally getting to the challenges I have no experience with– the challenges I wanted to force on myself, which led me to start this project in the first place. I was practicing and preparing to play at being a voice actor for a while now ahead of time, but this was the time to sink or swim, and I ran into a pretty intimidating variety of challenges… which I’ve tucked away in the journal linked above to keep my quiet madness contained.

But I think I’ve gotten better at dealing with all that! And I’ve recorded a significant chunks of lines at this point that will probably be going into the game, which is both exciting and horrifying. There’s still a ton of editing work to be done, though, and the game’s code base, while simple, still needs a lot of work. I’m not happy with how long the project is looking like it will take at this point, but I’m making steady progress every day, and learning how to find a steady rhythm for getting things done with the new challenges this is all bringing.

And I’m learning a lot, which is arguably the biggest goal of Project Voice. At this point I’m not sure if I’ll want to do a ton of voice work in the future, but this should go a long way in helping me work more sound into my other projects more easily and reliably. It’s always a little series of surprises with some things being easier than expected, and some much harder. And, for that matter, just today I finally got a back-end utility up and running that I’ve been meaning to get familiar with for a long time.

It’s probably less urgent for this project in particular, but I know that I’ve often heard it’s bad practice to store all your text content directly in the code itself, especially if it’s in very large quantities. Well, that’s what I always did in MVOL, and it’s how things were shaping up with PWO, but I knew there’d be better solutions out there for storing text in its own archive and having the code interact with it. There’s basically no way to convert MVOL to that sort of thing now, but if I can get familiar with that sort of setup, it would probably serve a lot better for PWO in particular, and potentially open the door for easy addition of user-generated content, one of the features I hoped to make possible in PWO down the road. Add your own character with their own absurd array of anatomy and traits, that sort of thing.

So I was struggling with that today and finally found the trick to get it working for me! One more small victory. There’s still a lot to get done before Project Voice is ready for release, but I’ve overcome a lot of the big challenges I knew would come with the job, and several I hadn’t seen coming. It’s still going to be incredibly intimidating putting this out on the internet and saying “so hey, come be aroused by my voice!” That has certainly made for a stranger, more intimate experience than I’m really used to, knowing I’m working up to that, but it’s also been kinda nice just to have a game to work on that is specifically meant to be small and focused in what it’s doing. I don’t have to worry about being ready for a hundred far-off possibilities or regretting decisions I made years ago, I can design and code for everything the game will ever be in one go.

So! It’s been a very new kind of journey, and that’s exactly what all this prototyping is for! I think that’s all the news I’ve got on my recent doings for now. Thanks for reading!