8/30/14 -Saturday: ROSE OF ETERNITY - FAMILY & COUNTRY IS NOW OUT!
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You can now download Rose of Eternity - Family & Country at Nexus Mods.
Whew... What a long and difficult road it's been. I sometimes try to fool myself into thinking it hasn't been 5 years, but if I'm honest with myself, I was already deep in pre-production at this time, 5 years ago, right before I was to get BETA access to the toolset. So yeah, let's call a strike a strike and just say it's been 5 years :)
Now, for anyone who has been reading my journal on and off for that time, you know it hasn't been 5 years of straight, uninterrupted development. As you would expect, there were peaks and valleys, times of "God, why isn't this game out", and times where I would ride tides of great momemtum. I suspect it's pretty normal.
But at the end of the day, I did it. I finished it. I didn't give up. I always said I would see every project I started to the end, and I kept that promise. So if nothing else, I have that. I'm now 3 for 3.
And now, if you don't mind, I'm going to try to find my way back to the normal world. It's going to be hard, because after Cry The Beloved, my mind was still in "Shouldn't you be working on something" mode for many months after it was released. It was hard to just relax. And that was after 30 months of developing 2 games back to back. This has been 5 years... We'll see what happens...
Till tomorrow...
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Today's music from my New Age (Best of best) Spotify Playlist is from Michael W. Smith, called, Joy Follows Suffering. It is actually the perfect title for what I just posted in today's journal entry :) Enjoy!
8/29/14 -Friday: LET THE MARKETING BEGIN...PART 4!!!! [EDIT - GAME NOW AVAILABLE]
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EDIT: Rose of Eternity - Family & Country is now released at Nexus Mods!
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Introduction to Ranon of the Aran Dynasty
Development Diary #1 (Combat Systems)
I'm very happy with the 2nd video in particular. I've always wanted to do a development diary, I just never knew if the opportunity would come up or not. Well, when I had all that time last month while waiting for VO and such, I decided to just take a crack at it. Since th combat systems are some of the most defining features of this game, systems that differentiate it from other DAO mods, I figured highlighting them would make sense. Oh, and I still don't like my voice. But oh well, it had to be, not someone else, because then it wouldn't be genuine. And hey, at least I have one under my belt now!
So, where are we, you're asking...
Well, even though I said I wouldn't, I ended up doing another SUPER quick playthrough of the game. I was pretty confident that one of the 3 bugs, which was that the ending credits movie not playing, would work, but being the paranoid SOB that I am, I had to do another run through, just to confirm. Guess what? It worked! :)
Actually, I think a lot of how I handle the release of this game is how I handle software releases at work. I'm super meticulous when it comes to them, maybe sometimes to a fault. Nothing pisses me off more than software developers releasing something that actually hasn't been tested properly. I know it happens, and I should not care, but when I see it happen over and over again, and I see how it affects other people, it drives me crazy. So I sort of have this pride thing, where I won't release something until I know that 99 times out of 100, it will work. Ha, I even have this office joke where if I give something my golden stamp of approval, it means there won't be any issues. I don't hand it out that much, but I have at least 3-4 times.
Anyway...
I started creating the DL page for things at the Nexus, but was stumped when I got to the upload file part. The game exports the package as a dazip file, but the Nexus doens't support those files.... So I had to send out a message to this one MOD who has been helping me since I signed up on Monday. Turns out, you need to encapsulate the DAZip within another zip/rar/7zip file. Now that I know that, the file is currently uploading as I type this.
So what's left? Well, if there are any kind souls out there, as a final test, I'd like to send a DL link for the game, and have them simply install it, make sure "Rose of Eternity - Family & Country" shows up under "Other Campaigns" and "Downloadable Content", and that the intro cutscene starts. That's it, no testing or anything, I've done that to death.
So if you're one of those kind souls, please hit me up at gamecoder@optonline.net. The sooner I get confirmation it works on someone else's machine, I'll publish the file to the world.
Thanks.
Till tomorrow...
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Today's music from my New Age (Best of best) Spotify Playlist is from David & Diane Arkenstone, called, The Angel's Voice. Enjoy!
8/28/14 -Thursday: LET THE MARKETING BEGIN...PART 3!!!
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Introduction to Arik Lannen, leader of the Dantiran Boundary Wardens.
Introduction to Johnum Lyonars, Brother in the Ministry of Justice.
Introduction to Elric Sigerthur, mage from Stramadon.
The above videos are just a little glimpse into some of the important characters you'll run into in Family & Country. It's actually a pretty interesting story on how they came to be. One day, Alexander Baxter (voices both Arik Lannen & Elric Sigerthur; god it feels good to say those names on this blog!) sent me a little Arik Lannen monologue he had put together while messing around. It was meant to be a throw away sort of things, but he sent it my way nevertheless.
As I listened to it, and I was like, "Damn, this could go great in a trailer". I specifically loved the bit where he said, "But this is not my story" at the end. I was like, "I should get a monologue from all the important characters in the game, and have them do this, and always end it the same way."
So that's what I did. Around December of last year, I just started putting together scripts, gathering music, and getting some stuff prototyped. It took some time, but I was able to finally pull everything together, and well, here we are!
So, back to the game...
Well, things are looking, for lack of a better word, GREAT! I finished off a complete playthrough yesterday, and only ran into the following issues:
- background music not playing in one of the earliest levels in the game. I already know the exact issue. When I was putting together video for one of the trailers, I went in and remove all sound objects, and most likely forgot to put them back in. I feel comfortable putting them back in, and doing a quick test, which luckily, will only take like 2-3 minutes on an official build.
- a deprecated item was found in a chest. Again, pretty easy to get rid of.
- Ending credits movie not playing. I immediately assumed it was how I packaged up the game, and as soon as I placed the credits movie in another directory (working directly with the deployed package, it worked). It's pretty clear what I have to do, so again, no worries there.
Besides the above, that's it! And that's damn good, cause I would have had a seizure just thinking about having to play through the damn game again! Even rushing through the game (skipping all cutscenes, dialog, etc.), would take many hours, and having come off a recent playthrough... Yeah, I'm not with it :)
So what's the end result of this? Well, I fix the above things, cut a first official release, and get that sucker uploaded to the Nexus. So, barring some issues, we're looking at a release of either today or tomorrow...
I can't believe... I'm almost free :)
Till tomorrow...
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Today's music from my New Age (Best of best) Spotify Playlist is from David Arkenstone, called, Winter Dreams. Enjoy!
8/27/14 -Wednesday: LET THE MARKETING BEGIN...PART 2!!
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Today's piece of promotional material gives a small tidbit of information about what Family & Country is all about. As a plus, it's the first footage of the game in motion!
This trailer was pretty fun to put together. For the longest time, I had a temporary background for the bit with the written words. It wasn't until literally last week that I was able to take that animated background with the rose petals in it and combine that with the text, and boy, was I happy when I was able to get that working!
With regards to the footage, well, that took forever. A few months ago, I blocked out a week to literally just record every cutscene in every level of the game. My thought process was, the more I had, the better. Once I did that, I started to formulate what I wanted to show, and in what order. After that, the final piece was adding in the VO. Luckily, I just grabbed pre-existing stuff that seemed to fit the theme of the trailer, and boom, was good to go.
Actually, I had finished the core of the cutscene months ago, but at that moment, I was still in the hunt for 2 more female actors, whose dialog would finish off the scene. So once I got their stuff, then I was able to finish it off.
Oh wait, I'm lying :) The logo that is displayed at the end was just made last week. So, that was the final piece to the puzzle. In fact, I had to go back and re-do every trailer to add it in, which is a lot less work than you would think.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy it... As for game stuff...
...I have officially started going through BETA 1.12, which will hopefully just be renamed to Main Release 1.0 when I'm done. Yes, I am pretty confident that there won't be any issues. Well, there was one, which drove me a little mad last night, but it had nothing to do with the actual game content.
I have always done my development on my laptop, and done tests of actual game builds on my desktop. Well, because that's how life is, the desktop's HD is having issues, and I don't have time for that shit at the moment. So I had to figure out how to keep my development files safe (storing them in backup folders), while deploying a game build on my laptop and using that to test.
Of course, just building the player package was a pain in the ass due to some out of memory bullshit error the toolset would throw. I've run into this before, but I would usually just restart everything, and all would be good. Not this time... Of course, because you know, that's life. I eventually found this old blog entry which highlights the exact issue I was having, and giving a great solution to it, which worked perfectly. I would have thanked the author, but for whatever reason, Bioware shut those blogs down.
In the end, I was able to start testing, but I started having flashbacks to October 2006, where I was running into similiar issues the week of the release of Cry The Beloved.
Not going to lie, it's stressful as hell, but I just have to make the final push so I can have my life back!
Till tomorrow...
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Today's music from my New Age (Best of best) Spotify Playlist is from David Arkenstone & Charlee Brooks, called, Lost. Enjoy!
8/25/14 -Monday: LET THE MARKETING BEGIN!
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Whew... Been wanting to get this off my chest for a long time now, and day has finally come. I know over the past few months, I've talked about putting together a bunch of promotional material, and this is the first of many I will be sharing with the world.
Though, I cannot take too much credit for this one. Oli Ferrando, lead artist for this series conceived the idea a few years ago. I honestly can't remember how it came up, but she was doing a project for school, and said that she could make an animated video for the Keeper of the Rose. I'm thinking, "Um, okay... I thought you were just really damned good as drawing :)". Shows what I know.
All I had to do was provide the piece of music that would need to be used, and I knew exactly what I wanted to use within a few minutes. This new album from Secret Garden, Winter Poem, was just released, and the title track, Make a Wish just had all that Secret Garden goodness wrapped up into a single track. Plus, look at the album cover. I mean, they must have directly made it for me! :)
Once the music was selected and given to ther, she put together a storyboard of everything that was supposed to happen in the movie. I pretty much gave her creative control over this, and let her go crazy. I just added in my own opinion every once in a while. Over time, the video would start to take shape, and as you can imagine, my excitement levels continued to rise.
The final piece of the puzzle was the beautiful voice of Marissa Lenti. She came on pretty late in development and was originally just supposed to voice the Keeper of the Rose in game. But after giving it up much, I decided to ask about voicing this movie as well, and it turned out pretty good.
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I've also started posting details about this game at different forums, such as the Bioware Social Network, and RPGWatch, with mixed results. I had actually posted at the Nexus, where the game will ultimately be hosted, but that thread was taken down due to the fact that they don't allow WIP threads since many people announce something, then never follow up with it. Eh, what can you do. I respect their decision, but it sucks that I don't have that additional place in order to get the word out. I will be able to start putting together the download page, and can actually get that setup before actually publishing to the world, which is pretty cool. I'll be starting that shortly.
With regards to my Facebook page, I've made some long overdue changes to it as well, such as changing the profile picture, the cover picture, and adding some new photo albums with a bunch of images in them. I'll continue to expand that as time goes on. I actually don't have many people who have liked that page, but who knows, maybe that will change soon? *Shrug*...
As for the BSN, well, it comes to no surprise that that place is just dead... Simply dead. I was very happy with the response I got on RPGWatch, as the first person to see the thread was already familiar with my NWN games, and even posted a link to the Keeper of the Rose movie on their front page, which was very, very nice.
In fact, the guy who had to take down my thread at Nexus admitted to having remembered my older NWN modules, which was pretty cool.
At the very least, I have a little name recognition, which always helps. In the coming days, I'll be looking to find other dragon age forums where I can spread the word. If there is some site you think would be perfect for this, please don't hesitate to hit me up at gamecoder@ptonline.net and let me know.
As for actual work with the game, I have cut BETA 1.11, and will be doing a final run through of the game myself. As I said before, I may send it to some folks just to make sure they can install it, but this final test is really just about me. Not much has changed since BETA 1.1, so I'm confident things are in good working order.
Till tomorrow...
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Today's music from my New Age (Best of best) Spotify Playlist is from David Arkenstone & Charlee Brooks, called, Slip Away. Enjoy!
8/18/14 -Monday: VERY, VERY BUSY COUPLE OF DAYS...
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Man, it's been a very, very busy couple of days. Where to begin...
Well, I've been doing work on a bunch of material off and on since the end of last year. You know, recording video, writing scripts, getting VO when possible, etc. This latest piece of promotional material was, lucky for me, all about me. I didn't need the help of anyone else (i.e. VO), which as you all can probably tell during these "end days", is a huge win for me. The downside? I'm voicing things, and like most people, I absolutely detest the sound of my voice.
It's actually a testament to the skill of all the actors out there that can do this work. Hell, I would end up reading lines about 10-15 times just to get it right. It was a long and arduous process, and there are some changes that need to be made at some point, but in the end, I was glad I did it. I'm all in with this game, and that includes doing a lot of things I've never done before. Nothing like experience, right?
The other thing that has taken a lot of my time was the implementation of a new Unison Ability. Yeah, yeah, I know, no more changes to the game, right? Well, as I was creating the aforementioned video, I sort of got inspired out of no where. I swear, inspiration can come from damn near anywhere, and I'm still not sure what happened, but I immediately had an idea for not one, not two, but three new Unison Abilities!
Sigh... I really wanted to stick to my original plan, but the good thing is that I haven't changed any actual game content, so that's good. I feel very comfortable implementing these new abilities without breaking the core game. Of course, I'll still be doing my test of BETA 1.11 before releasing to the world, this just delays things by 2 days, maybe less if I focus like hell today.
So yeah, tomorrow, I'll be finishing off the last of the 2 abilities, and be ready to go with the final test. Whew, not going to get excited, as I've been there before, but... Eh, forget it. No reason to jinx things! :)
Till tomorrow...
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Today's music from my New Age (Best of best) Spotify Playlist is from Capercaillie, called,
Him Bo. Enjoy!
8/9/14 -Saturday: MAN, WHAT A DAY FOR VO INTEGRATION!
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At long last, earlier this week, I received the final "in game" VO from Alexander. At least, I'm pretty sure that's it... There's so much, it's possible I could have missed something, but for the love of God, I hope not! Ironically, this last piece of VO is the first that the player will experience in the opening cutscene of the game.
Now, as I do with all actors, I told him he could change the dialog where he saw fit. In fact, with him in particular, most of the lines I send him are more of an outline than anything else. In this particular situation, the only real structure that needed to be kept was the number of lines themselves, and that they still matched up with the action of the cutscene. Because there's no way I was going to go back and make changes to it. I made the decision to not touch anything else in the game, and I'm sticking to it.
Anyway, he did as he normally did, but this time, it turned out to be damn near an entire re-write. In the end, what he had was better, but it did mean I had to do a lot more work changing the actual lines that show up as subtitles, as well as making little changes to where each line would show up on the cutscene timeline. For example, one line may have been 4 seconds long, but his version would be 9 seconds long, which would make it overlap with the next line. So just a lot of maneuvering. But first things first...I had to cut up his dialog...
As he always does, he did the entire sequence in one take, instead of recording each line separately. So I had to go into Audacity and chop it up into the little chunks I needed it in. Of course, since all the dialog was re-written, I had to make sure that each part I cut up mapped to each line in the editor. That took some time. Also, I had to make little changes here and there, like removing some silence in between spoken words, as well as flat out cutting out some bits of dialog. I can get pretty creative in Audacity, and no one would ever be the wiser, except me and the person who recorded the VO. The main reason I had to do a lot of this editing was to make sure each line fit within the constraints I had set myself. The scene itself is a little over 4 minutes, but there is only like 3 minutes or so where there can be dialog, and if I included everything, it would have went well over that mark. But, I'd rather have more VO than less, that's for sure. I love options!
Once I was done with that, I generated the VO, and tested the cutscene within the editor as well as in game. Unfortunately, towards the middle of the music that plays during the scene, it hits a crescendo, and it ends up being louder than the VO. Usually, I would go into the area, select the sound object being played, and lower the volume. Unfortunatey (you can see how my day/night is going at this point), the sound object that represented the music was encapsulated within the cutscene object itself. This is so I can have the music play at the right time, and end at the right time. For example, if I just had the music be the background music, there is the chance that when the area is loaded, it takes longer for the cutscene to load. At that point, the music would have already been playing, which totally screws up the timing for, well, everything. Anyway, since the sound object was there, there was no way that I know of that allows you to modify the volume. Argg...
My next plan was to open up the sound object in FMOD, the packed in software you use to get sounds/music/etc. in the game. Luckily, I found an option to adjust the volume there. I changed it a few times until I got something that sounded better in game, where I could at least hear the damn VO throughout the scene. Then the next problem arose... The beginning/end of the music has some light singing in it, and now that I was lowering the volume of the entire track, this was starting to get too hard to hear. Damn...
I finally bit the bullet, and decided to create my own track in Audacity, that included all the VO as well as the music, all in one. From there, I could make volume changes as needed so the entire thing sounded good. As you can expect, that got annoying very fast, because now I had to lay out each individual VO line onto a single track, and also space things out as they were spaced out in the cutscene editor, so the VO would continue to sync up with the action of the cutscene, not to mention the subtitles.
Once I had all the VO laid out onto a single track, I imported the music, messed around with the volume settings, and then integrated both into a single track. From there, I created the neccessary object via FMOD, got it into the game, and dammit, it just worked! Whew!
All that is left is some fine tuning of the audio. From there, I'll be ready to start another (hopefully final??!!!!) run through of the game. I may pass off this last build to some folks, but only to confirm that it loads on their computer. Not much has changed game wise since BETA 1.1, so there is no reason to spend yet another month or so of testing.
Till tomorrow...
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Today's music from my New Age (Best of best) Spotify Playlist is from Capercaillie, called, Don't You Go. Enjoy!
8/3/14 -Sunday: THAT WAS QUICK :)
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Well, that was quick. Maybe I'm scarred from many of my other experiences with actors, but when the last one I've been working with said she'd have the lines to me by the end of the week, she wasn't playing! Of course, I knew she was that type of professional that speaks to my heart with responsiveness and whatnot, but there was always this dark thought in the back of my head, where things wouldn't work out. Man, I've been traumatized :(
Anyway, I actually received the lines pretty late the prior night, so I just spent that time giving it a once over, to make sure I was happy with it, which I was, and then some. I was so impressed with her that I was showing my wife her website, and lo and behold, there's a picture of the Keeper of the Rose on it. Man, she works fast. Respect!
So today, once the high of having all the lines wore off, I had to get down to business. Cause 40+ lines requires at least a few hours of uninterrupted work. Actually, even more so, because of the type of VO she created.
Essentially, this VO needed to have some, extra filters to it, so to speak. So, there's the normal VO, then there's the reverb, then there's some other efffects. After I questioned what the best way would be to make changes to these different variables, she suggested that she just straight up send me Audacity project files of everything, so I could go in and tweak things the way I wanted to, without having a bunch of back and forths. As expected, it worked out perfectly.
Once my tweaking was done, I just had to chop up the large file into the individual lines the game needed, export them in the proper format, and do some other integration steps. After messing around with the background music that plays during the scene, adding in some gestures to the cast member, things were looking damn good. As usual, I made recordings of the scene so that she could see herself in action. The only thing that needed to be changed was the pronounciations of some of the unique words in the game (Galladoran, Dematolians, etc.). But part of that is on me, because Jason Melancon urged me to create an audio phonetics collection, with me speaking each of the unique words in the game. I did that years ago, just forgot to send it her way. I have since done that, so I expect some revisions to about 5-6 lines soon.
The addition of this VO was pretty monumental for the progress of the game, because it means that I'm done with my search for new actors. Every role is casted and done. I know bitch and complain about the whole VO process (rightfully so), but man, when it comes together, it's a wonderful thing.
Tomorrow, I'll be taking some of her VO, along with the stuff from the last actress I worked with, and will be adding them to some promotional material I've been working on... That's if my laptop battery survives... Yep, it's that time of the year ago, where I need to order a new one, because the charge on this one lasts about 30 minutes on the train if I'm not doing any graphically intensive...
Till tomorrow...
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Today's music from my New Age (Best of best) Spotify Playlist is from Enaid, called, Guinevere's Tears. Enjoy!
8/2/14 -Saturday: WELL, MAYBE NWVAULT IS DEAD? :(
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So, after some false alarms and the such, it seems like NWVault is gone for good (again)? *Tear drop*
I know there is some hope that it could come back, via this Twitter conversation started by Andarian, creator of the Sanctum series. I know some people are like, "How could this happen", "Why aren't they communicating with us", etc., but after working in the corporate world, all I can say is... meh... To me, this is business as usual. And I'm not just talking about people communicating with their customers/clients. Hell, I'm talking about communication within an organization. It's gotten so bad that I just assume that people don't give a shit enough, unless it's a high priority project that the higher ups care about.
So my interpretation of this whole thing is that they have an annual hosting fee for the site, and because no one there cares about it, it was not paid. I figure that because apparently, the site came down the exact date back in 2013. Anyway, when there is something people at a company don't care about, it gets dropped in priority on the task list. Once someone actually gets to it, they're like, "Okay, who worked on this, how does this work? Where's the documentation?". Of course, that person has long left the company, so now you have to become Nancy Drew and track down how things work, how to fix it, etc. Of course, that person probably doesn't care too much about the project, and since it's not a high priority, things sort of languish.
Now of course, I'm clearly projecting my own experiences at work into this situation (I see this happen EVERY day, sadly), and could be totally wrong. But I wouldn't be surprised if most of what I'm saying is true. Let's face it... Even though we care, how many people are really going to that site anymore? Is it even worth it for them? Now, I think the proper thing to do would be to give some time to say, "Hey, this shit is going down in x months, so get everything you need from it before x date".
Lucky for me, someone took my content and uploaded it to the new Vault. It's not how I would present the game on the page, so at some point, if the old vault doesn't come back, I'll ask to somehow get the rights to the page to set it up how I want it. But hey, all the stuff is there, so there's that.
Of course, for me, the most important bits are the comments/votes/reviews, which is something they did not include. So for now, via wayback machine, I can still get to that stuff for:
And as I've said in a previous post, I plan on getting all that content onto this very website (once I hire someome to revamp it for me). Because in the end, I don't want to depend on someon else for the history of Rose of Eternity.
Till tomorrow...
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Today's music from my New Age (Best of best) Spotify Playlist is from Hayley Westenra , called, Veni, Veni, Emmanuel . Enjoy!
8/1/14 -Friday: CAN'T HAVE JOY WITHOUT PAIN...
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STATE OF THE UNION
One of things I've always tried to do with this blog (which I'm sure I've said many times over) is to be completely honest about the game development process. The highs, the lows, and everything in between. It's really as transparent as it can get. For me, if I can help some aspiring developers know what they're signing up for, it's all the better.
So with that said, I gotta tell you... I may kill myself if I have to write yet another State of the Union that isn't lead by the headline, "Rose of Eternity - Family & Country Released!!!!". It's super demoralizing to be here, 5 years into development, literally sitting on the game for the past few months. Part of me just doesn't want to care about it. The other (more sane!) part of me knows I've made a pledge to see every personal game I've ever worked on make it to completion. And so, here we are. Some days, I don't even think about the game, other days, it consumes me. Some days, I remember what life was like, other days, I feel as if I'll never get back to that life. Some days, Rose of Eternity is one of the best things that have ever happened to me. Others days, it's the bane of my existance.
Right... So what's new?
The Keeper of the Rose has finally been cast. As with the last female actor I found, this new one was found on the Voice Acting Alliance's demo reel section. Interestingly enough, she was in the same section as the previous actor I found, just a few posts down, which is why I missed her the first time I was there.
Now, I haven't really been doing things the conventional way on the site. Usually, you make a thread/pitch in a particular subforum, describing your project, your VO needs, and other such things. Then, you allow some time (i.e. a month) for people to send you their submissions. Out of that lot, you choose who you want and go from there. And for what it's worth, I can respect that process. You want to give everyone a fair shot at the role. I totally get it.
Unfortunately, for me, I ain't got time for that shit :) All all seriousness though, if the project was inthe early stages, that would be fine, but I'm scrambling at this point. The first "great" audition I hear, I'm gonna wanna grab that person immediately, and like I said, it's not fair to everyone else.
So what I've been doing is sifting through these demo reel sections, and emailing people who I think have what it takes. And in some respects, it's worked out great. I found my first actress from the site that way, and this new one is no exception.
Actually, I had a great feeling about her from the start. She's young (22 I believe), and has just set up a facebook page, a website (full of demos), created the demo reel post on the forums, and in general, the way she presents herself, you can tell she's about her shit. You know, this isn't just something she's doing for fun. This is what she does. And from the jump, I can tell that she's hungry, that she wants to continue to hone her craft, and get as many projects under her belt (which is a lot, looking through her portfolio).
Honestly, she reminds me of a young me, circa 2004-2006 (ages 24-26), when I was working on The Coming & Cry The Beloved for 30 months straight, only coming up for air every once in a while to let my wife (girlfriend at the time) that I still loved her :)
So yeah, when I saw her, everything just seemed to make sense. Not to mention the first voice in her demo reel sounded exactly like what I was looking for for The Keeper of the Rose. So I did my thing, creating my pitch to her, with the following stuff:
- I found your stuff, think it's great, would love for you to join the team
- Here's some history about me and my many projects over the years
- Here's some video of the current project, to get a handle on how things are panning out
- If you're up for it, here is the character, and some sample lines for an audition
- The simple request that even if you can't work on the project, just shoot me and email telling me as such
Roughly 3 hours later, I had 6 demo lines to integrate into the game that next morning on the train. That's what I'm talking about! Responsiveness! The next time I'm interviewing someone, I'll tell them, I value responsiveness over skill. If only we had that at my real job down in the city... But I won't pollute this blog entry with complaints from there!
Anyway, long story short, her work was as great as I anticipated, and I ended up sending over all the lines that need to be recorded (roughly 45-50). I hope to get it by the end of this week, allowing me to close the door on yet another character.
From there, I'll just be waiting on one person for VO, and one person for a special little something.
Then I can begin to start looking at Rose of Eternity as a great thing in my life, and not just a burden...
Till tomorrow...
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Today's music from my New Age (Best of best) Spotify Playlist is from David Arkenstone, called, Cascades of Color. I just want to point out that I was using Spotify one day, listening to my new age playlist, and I must have hit the "radio" button by mistake. All of a sudden, a track from this album started playing, I'm thinking, "Hmmm, what the hell is this... This is really good". Ended up becoming one of my favorite albums from him. Anyway, Enjoy! |
