A lot of the development for Project Voice has been characterized by frustration, delays, and a lot of anxiety. It’s been a huge challenge on many different levels, and keeping any kind of momentum going on the project has been pretty tough. So it’s hard to overstate my relief at this point to report that the project is finally coming together and looking better every day! I just got the game to the point it actually “plays” and all the basic functionality actually works this week, which I’m coming to really respect as a huge factor psychologically in engaging with the game and all its needs.
At this point, the main thing standing between us and v0.01 is a whole lot of editing work. Picking out the best takes, tweaking timing and such, and cleaning up all the little extra noises has turned out to be a tremendous amount of work, though I’ve found it helps a good deal to split it up into multiple passes focusing on different things. There are still a lot of little touches that need to be added, but it looks like that’s the single big job left at this point. It’s hard to say we’re close to release, but it’s getting to the point it’s fairly clear what all is left, where there was a lot of uncertainty on how much work things would turn into up until now, so that’s certainly an improvement.
The main challenge I could see sneaking up on me is just… It was pretty tough recording all those sex noises, and I could see having to listen back and edit a hundred lines of me moaning and growling and such being… mortifying? This project forces me to come to terms with a lot of things about myself and get comfortable with how I sound, and this is probably going to be a whole nother layer of that. I can’t say I’m looking forward to it, but the finish line should be in sight at that point, so I’m hoping I can power through.
Every time I stop to review how I’ve been doing and how this work fits into the larger scheme of things, I remind myself that I said earlier I’d be working on Project Wild One whenever things slow down with Project Voice, to add variety and help me stay productive when things get frustrating… But it still hasn’t really happened. I even tried setting aside some time for poking around at the possibility of making my own port of MVOL to Unity, but when I tried to focus on that it turned into a ton of questions and design decisions I wasn’t ready to make calls on. It feels similar with PWO.
I do like the idea of hopping projects day to day to change things up, I feel like it could make things more efficient, but so far it just hasn’t been working. It’s felt wrong whenever I tried. I’m not sure to what extent that may mean that I need to give one project my full attention at a time, that there’s too long a “transition of focus” before I’m really embracing the full idea of what a project should be so that I can work on it… or if it just means I could only make these hops when all the big decisions are out of the way and it’s just smaller scale work that needs doing? Maybe if I was working on PWO and needed a break, doing some audio editing for P Voice would be practical, or maybe if I was only adding more content to PWO it’d be practical to do a little on the side right now, but right now PWO is slated for pretty huge mechanical upgrades that come with loads of design choices for the foreseeable future. Maybe instead of PWO, I should keep “write a little content for MVOL” in my back pocket as an alternative for keeping myself productive when I need a break from P Voice?
If that is the case, I guess it means that technically, the prototyping phase isn’t really a good time for project hopping. I know folks are wanting me to ease off on making new projects and start focusing more on one in particular to build it out into a proper game, so maybe it would be a good idea to transition to mainly working on PWO but making sure I have options for small ways to improve and expand content my other projects without having to make heavy choices for them. Then when PWO reaches the point its mechanics are more stable and it’s appropriate to start adding lots of content, I could work on a side project for a couple months but splice in simple work on PWO to fill the gaps. At this point, it’s feeling like that might be the smartest way to approach this. Still needs testing, of course!
To be honest, I’m less confident in how P Voice will turn out than anything I’ve worked on in a long time. But then, that’s mainly because the game’s quality largely hangs off the quality of the voice work, and when I play it all I hear is me being a dork and making a lot of mistakes no matter how hard I’ve tried. But I know that I’ve put a lot of work into this, and it’s a lot better than it could have been, so at some point I have to accept that and just hope that it sounds better to other people than it does to me. Worst case, this will be a bit of a flop of an experiment, and that’s okay. It’s still done its job in forcing me to learn and grow in a lot of different ways, so technically we’ve accomplished a lot of our big goals already. And who knows, maybe it’ll still make for an interesting contribution to the body of erotic voice work out there, to help inspire others to build on my ideas and do better than I have.
I’m definitely looking forward to being done with this version, though. PWO is looking more appealing than ever, and goodness knows it deserves some more attention by now. I don’t know if it will be the same kind of crazy, fascinating whirlwind of productivity as v0.01 was, but it’s bound to be a breath of fresh air after all the trouble this project has given me.
Well. For all my complaints, this is still a great job, and I’m immensely grateful that I can make a living like this. And that’s thanks to you guys! So thank you for your support, and for playing my games, and for reading all this. And thank you especially for your patience, I feel terribly guilty every time one of these projects ends up stretching out to take more time, but I know that it’s the quality that’s most important to folks. Maybe more than anything, I’m grateful that I can work a job where my own compulsion to “always do it the right way” is vindicated and accepted. We’ll just keep working on finding a way to get updates out a little faster once the dust settles a bit.
That’s all for now. Stay safe out there!
…Oh! And I’ve been a little more active on my Twitter lately, if that’s your thing, so that may be worth checking out.