Greetings and salutations!
First, a quick update regarding my post-mortem for my "Week of Awesome" entry: I now have enough feedback from the judges that I intend to write up my post-mortem today. Look for it to be posted in a few hours time; if not, then likely several hours later.
As to this week's screenshot, with sound-work being again the focus of the week, there isn't much new on the visual side. As a result, let me do something similar to what I did last week: below is a video showing a partial playthrough of the prologue/tutorial level, sounds included. (The tutorial itself has been skipped in this playthrough.)
This week just past was another slow one--again in part due to sleeping issues and inexperience with sound-work, and exacerbated on Tuesday by the internet connection acting up. Nevertheless, progress was made, I do believe!
Monday, September 5. 2016
Hopefully not Noise-some!
First of all, Tuesday saw my first post on TIGSource! I intend that this and future posts--those relating to A Door to the Mists, at least--be cross-posted to my TIGSource devlog--as you might be aware, if you're reading this there. 
(Blog-posts regarding other projects--such as my recent "Week of Awesome" entry--may or may not get TIGSource devlogs; we'll see as things go forward.)
As to work on the game itself, once again I spent the majority of the week creating and implementing various sound effects. Some worked out fairly well, I think, while others have given me some difficulty.
One set of sounds in particular vexed me for some time: exclamations of pain from the protagonist, played whenever something should hurt (such as when hit in combat, or falling too far). The problem, in short, is that I'm male, my protagonist isn't, and I fear that I lack the knowledge to reliably convert recordings of my own voice into something that I'm satisfied with as a representation of the protagonist's. I do have one sound-clip that I'm happy with, but thus far haven't managed to replicate that success. For now I'm setting aside these attempts, and am exploring other means of getting appropriate sounds.
I had been wanting to replace the "chime" sounds that played when one gains lore, picks up an item, acquires a collectible, etc. These sounds were perhaps okay, but as I've added more sounds that I'm happy with, I'd been finding myself less pleased with this set. Perhaps, as the soundscape of the game has become more defined, they had become more obviously unsuited to it, or their relative quality had become more apparent--I'm not sure.
Either way, I've been working on a replacement for them. Specifically, I'm trying bells, aiming for something perhaps a little mysterious (but with the thought of drums set aside in the back of my mind, too). You can hear the current bell-sound in the video above at various points, but I also have it in mind to perhaps try something simpler--a single, somewhat-light bell-chime, echoing a few times.
The main difficulty in creating these sound-effects has been generating something that actually sounds like a bell, as opposed to a gong or metal tube. (At one point I tried a recording of a metal lampshade being gently struck--this almost worked, but wasn't quite what I wanted, I believe.) After some time, I found and have been using a plugin for Audacity that generates bell sounds, and which I think produces at the least a good starting point.
Finally, these are by no means the only sounds created this week--I also added the sounds of a metal point touching stone, and a metal hook catching and scraping on the same; improved (I think) the sounds used for small pieces of paper, and the scroll on which minigame instructions appear; produced a sound to represent the character picking up an item; and added a simple, light "click" sound to be played when selecting an image in the "ideogram" puzzle. (There may be others that I'm omitting.) I'm not sure that I'm happy with all of these, but I'm reasonably happy with at least some.
That's all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
(Blog-posts regarding other projects--such as my recent "Week of Awesome" entry--may or may not get TIGSource devlogs; we'll see as things go forward.)
As to work on the game itself, once again I spent the majority of the week creating and implementing various sound effects. Some worked out fairly well, I think, while others have given me some difficulty.
One set of sounds in particular vexed me for some time: exclamations of pain from the protagonist, played whenever something should hurt (such as when hit in combat, or falling too far). The problem, in short, is that I'm male, my protagonist isn't, and I fear that I lack the knowledge to reliably convert recordings of my own voice into something that I'm satisfied with as a representation of the protagonist's. I do have one sound-clip that I'm happy with, but thus far haven't managed to replicate that success. For now I'm setting aside these attempts, and am exploring other means of getting appropriate sounds.
I had been wanting to replace the "chime" sounds that played when one gains lore, picks up an item, acquires a collectible, etc. These sounds were perhaps okay, but as I've added more sounds that I'm happy with, I'd been finding myself less pleased with this set. Perhaps, as the soundscape of the game has become more defined, they had become more obviously unsuited to it, or their relative quality had become more apparent--I'm not sure.
Either way, I've been working on a replacement for them. Specifically, I'm trying bells, aiming for something perhaps a little mysterious (but with the thought of drums set aside in the back of my mind, too). You can hear the current bell-sound in the video above at various points, but I also have it in mind to perhaps try something simpler--a single, somewhat-light bell-chime, echoing a few times.
The main difficulty in creating these sound-effects has been generating something that actually sounds like a bell, as opposed to a gong or metal tube. (At one point I tried a recording of a metal lampshade being gently struck--this almost worked, but wasn't quite what I wanted, I believe.) After some time, I found and have been using a plugin for Audacity that generates bell sounds, and which I think produces at the least a good starting point.
Finally, these are by no means the only sounds created this week--I also added the sounds of a metal point touching stone, and a metal hook catching and scraping on the same; improved (I think) the sounds used for small pieces of paper, and the scroll on which minigame instructions appear; produced a sound to represent the character picking up an item; and added a simple, light "click" sound to be played when selecting an image in the "ideogram" puzzle. (There may be others that I'm omitting.) I'm not sure that I'm happy with all of these, but I'm reasonably happy with at least some.
That's all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
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