9/30/11 -Friday: SO MUCH WORK DONE, SO MUCH WORK AHEAD...
With regards to the new system I've been building, I put in a ton of work today. As with yesterday, I refactored a lot of the code, centralizing as much functionality into the one library script. The goal is that any other script that has to call it has to just use one function, passing in an event structure. In the end, it's just good programming practice, nothing fancy.
What I did do however is take the system from testing quarters to the real thing. It's one thing to fight a bunch of enemies in my sandbox area, it's another to do it in the level I design specifically for this sequence. There are so many things to account for, it's crazy. I think the main thing is working around the current AI of the game.
Many, many, many times over the years, I've heard people complaing about the AI in CRPG's. "What the hell, that fighter is stuck behind that barrel!" "Why is that archer just not doing anything?!" We've all experienced. Over the years, I've come to realize it's not just the AI itself. You have to think about the level design. If you create a tight path with a bunch of objects in it, and expect a bunch of enemies to come barreling through, you're asking for trouble. Obviously I'm not saying all combat levels should be wide open, I'm just saying, be smart when designing your level. Make it work with the AI of the game, not against it. I'm not perfect myself, but I make an attempt to at least.
Besides that, there are just a bunch of small things that have to be done before this sequence is finished. It's nothing tough or anything, it's just A LOT of small things. The more and more I work on this, I'm realizing more and more how much work it's going to be. Every few hours I'm like, "Oh shit, yeah, guess I'll need to script this in. Damn." Oh well, it's comes with my design style. It's worked for me 2 times before, so hopefully, 3rd time is the charm!
So, in an effort to enjoy life again (okay, it's not that dramatic), I decided to DL the Battlefield 3 demo, and play it with a few friends. One of these friends and I put in a lot of time with Battlefield: Bad Company 2, so we knew what to expect, gameplay wise. As an aside, EA's marketing team are fiendishly clever. We all know most of the gameplay videos have been running on a PC, but playing it on the 360, it's clearly a small step down. Well played, EA.
Anyway, for what it was worth, the game was fun. There was only one map, and one gameplay mode (rush), so we only played for a bit. There were actually a lot of bugs, so good thing they had this BETA!
Speaking of first person shooters, checkout this storyabout a grown man going to the house of a child who was pissing him off while playing Black Ops online, and choking the shit out of him. Okay... Right... I don't condone violence and all of that... That said, there's a reason I mute people when playing that game. All I'm going to say is this... I hope the kid learned a lesson, being that he shouldn't act like a douche while playing online games :)
Today's music is another delightful piece from Eternal Sonata. If you've been listening to these tracks all week, you can clearly see the vibe the game has going for itself, musicaly at least. Anyway, enjoy!
9/30/11 -Friday: SO MUCH WORK DONE, SO MUCH WORK AHEAD...
With regards to the new system I've been building, I put in a ton of work today. As with yesterday, I refactored a lot of the code, centralizing as much functionality into the one library script. The goal is that any other script that has to call it has to just use one function, passing in an event structure. In the end, it's just good programming practice, nothing fancy.
What I did do however is take the system from testing quarters to the real thing. It's one thing to fight a bunch of enemies in my sandbox area, it's another to do it in the level I design specifically for this sequence. There are so many things to account for, it's crazy. I think the main thing is working around the current AI of the game.
Many, many, many times over the years, I've heard people complaing about the AI in CRPG's. "What the hell, that fighter is stuck behind that barrel!" "Why is that archer just not doing anything?!" We've all experienced. Over the years, I've come to realize it's not just the AI itself. You have to think about the level design. If you create a tight path with a bunch of objects in it, and expect a bunch of enemies to come barreling through, you're asking for trouble. Obviously I'm not saying all combat levels should be wide open, I'm just saying, be smart when designing your level. Make it work with the AI of the game, not against it. I'm not perfect myself, but I make an attempt to at least.
Besides that, there are just a bunch of small things that have to be done before this sequence is finished. It's nothing tough or anything, it's just A LOT of small things. The more and more I work on this, I'm realizing more and more how much work it's going to be. Every few hours I'm like, "Oh shit, yeah, guess I'll need to script this in. Damn." Oh well, it's comes with my design style. It's worked for me 2 times before, so hopefully, 3rd time is the charm!
So, in an effort to enjoy life again (okay, it's not that dramatic), I decided to DL the Battlefield 3 demo, and play it with a few friends. One of these friends and I put in a lot of time with Battlefield: Bad Company 2, so we knew what to expect, gameplay wise. As an aside, EA's marketing team are fiendishly clever. We all know most of the gameplay videos have been running on a PC, but playing it on the 360, it's clearly a small step down. Well played, EA.
Anyway, for what it was worth, the game was fun. There was only one map, and one gameplay mode (rush), so we only played for a bit. There were actually a lot of bugs, so good thing they had this BETA!
Speaking of first person shooters, checkout this storyabout a grown man going to the house of a child who was pissing him off while playing Black Ops online, and choking the shit out of him. Okay... Right... I don't condone violence and all of that... That said, there's a reason I mute people when playing that game. All I'm going to say is this... I hope the kid learned a lesson, being that he shouldn't act like a douche while playing online games :)
Today's music is another delightful piece from Eternal Sonata. If you've been listening to these tracks all week, you can clearly see the vibe the game has going for itself, musicaly at least. Anyway, enjoy!
9/29/11 -Thursday: ALMOST HERE!
It's almost here! What's that, you ask? Simple... The start of many small/large scale vacations. I have about 27 days I need to burn by the end of the year (because we were too busy to take them during the summer during crunch time), and I've started off with a simple Friday/Monday combination, giving me a 4 day weekend. Also, since I work from home on Thursday's (i.e. today), it's really 5 days, because the act of not getting up early and riding that freak train to Manhattan is vacation enough for me!
I'm not going anywhere, so it will just give me time to recharge my life batteries, forget about work, so I can do more work... yay! Heh, Rose of Eternity isn't really work, but you get the picture. Even still, I'm looking forward to it. I should have enough time to really knock out this combat scenario, or at least a good chunk of it. And so far, I've done just that.
What I essentially did was refactor much of the code, to put as much of it in the one system script as possible. Sometimes, I can start out with this method, other times, I need to just start writing code, and with a few hours, I have a better idea of how it should be organized. So, at this point, I have a pretty lightweight system, and a few scripts that implement it. After that was done, I did some more testing in my sandbox area. Now that that is done, it's time for primetime. I need to integrate it into the area it will take place in, and set up specifically how it will be used.
As always, I'm very conscious of combat in general, making sure to not have too much back to back. Or in other words, some sort of pacing. You know, that old thing games need to be... fun! I think I've been handling it fine thus far, but I do admit, the player will do a lot of fighting here. However, I hope to keep it varied enough, so that it will keep player's on their toes. Also, as a first for me, I'm trying to integrate more dialogue into the combat sequence. I know that's sort of vague, but hey, I can't spoil everything. Though I can tell you, it's not just going to be ambient 1 liners.
So yeah, tomorrow, I'll do that, and hopefully get a lot of done. Here's hoping!
Here's some more super feel good music from Eternal Sonata. Enjoy!
9/28/11 -Wednesday: PLAYER CHARACTER SPEAKING IN CUTSCENES...
The minute I decided to do VO in this game was the moment I essentially removed the ability to have the PC speak in cutscenes. I'm sorry, let me back up... The minute I was forced to do VO... Yeah, that's more realistic :)
More specifically, in The Coming & Cry The Beloved, there wasn't any VO. But there were a hell of a lot of cutscenes. Since it was just text displayed over their head, I had no issue giving dialogue to the main PC in those games, Aramus.Plus, since he was a pre-gen PC, and already had a more or less set in stone personality, it only made sense. In this way, I was able to really craft his personality the way I wanted to, while at the same time, still allowing people to roleplay with a set of constraints.
Now, we have this game, (which oddly enough, I still don't have a title for) and this just isn't possible. I actually had written one cutscene where both the PC and a party member talk briefly, but that's going to have to be cut, because it clearly won't work with one person with VO, the other, captions.
It's not a big deal, as I've been designing everything else accordingly going forward, but in some ways, it seems to be a step back for me as a designer. On the plus, I feel like the majority of the people that will play the game will be happy that nothing that said by the PC won't be something they selected. *Shrug*
Today's music from Eternal Sonata is the standard battle music of a JRPG. That's not to say it's not good, but it's still pretty standard fare. Enjoy!
9/27/11 -Tuesday: IMPLEMENTATION TIME!
Today, I was finished with brainstorming. It was implementation time! As I discussed yesterday, I need the code to be as general and re-usable as possible. However, there are of course going to still be sequence specific code making use of this broader system I've created.
As it turns out, coding it didn't take too long, as the basis for things was already there. I can't really go into too many details, as I don't want to spoil anything, but the majority of my work was using existing custom events, and sending them to the right object, so they could be caught, and processed properly.
At this point, I decided to put things to the test in my test combat arena, to make sure it was working properly. After a few changes here and there, I had it working in about 20 minutes, and from there, I did a lot of balance tests. You'll see that many of my posts over the next few weeks will be about balance tests. Lucky for me, I know who will be in your party, what custom abilities you'll have, and have a good idea of what level you'll be, so it's not that bad. Even still, it has to be just perfect.
And yes, I'm a total nerd for saying this, but I'm having hella fun implementing all of this. Nothing better than conceptualizing something, only to see it come to life. That's what it's all about!
The next song from Eternal Sonata is rightfully named, Relaxing Place. I could sit at Quiet Cove and listen to this for hours. Enjoy!
9/26/11 -Monday: BRAINSTORMING...
So, happy with the results of the Vo from John's brother, I quickly put together the lines for the next scene. I may have mentioned this before, but while this character doesn't have that many lines, they're still super important, so I'm really looking forward to getting all they're VO out of the way. Also, one of the characters John is playing is in these scenes with the character his brother is playing, so half the work is already done. Nothing better than a fully voiced conversation with multiple people.
I also spent some time putting together some more lines for John himself. While we wait on the editing of some of the lines of the core character he is voicing, I decided to offer him up another smaller role, which he did quite well. This person only has like 17 lines left, so I expect he'll run through that easy enough.
Little by little, we're slowly chipping away at what I thought was going to be the impossible... I hope we can keep it going!
The other part of my day was spent brainstorming for this combat scenario that I'll be putting my all into over the next few weeks I suspect. The particular part that took up most of my time was figuring out how to script the system. Because of the programmer in me, I'm always trying to figure out how to make code as general, and re-usable as possible. In other words, if I can avoid making something work for a particular sequence, I will. Who knows, maybe I'll want to use the system again somewhere else. So, the brainstorming was less about what I wanted to do, but how I was going to do it. I think I know what I'm going to do, but I'm sure it will change up once I get my hands dirty.
Tomorrow, I will starting building the aforementioned system.
This weeks music is from a game that was beautiful to look at, but something I just couldn't bring myself to complete: Eternal Sonata. Enjoy!
9/25/11 -Sunday: BACK INTO THE SWING OF THINGS!
Okay, so I'm feeling better about things as a whole. I feel like I'm fully back into development, and not wondering where the hell am I, or what I'm supposed to be doing. It's good to be back!
Today, I was pleasently surprised to receive from VO from John's brother, and I'm happy to say, the talent definitely does run in the family. Maybe it's something in their water or something, who the hell knows? Who the hell cares? :) It's great stuff, and I wasted no time getting it integrated into the game. Now, with this particular scene it's in, the music is louder than normal. It's sort of a pomp and circumstance type of theme. Point is, I had to do a bunch of work in Audacity in order to get it sounding just right. I know I said I wanted to wait until the polishing phase of the game to work on normalizing all the sound in the game, but this scene has all the VO ready to go, and since it's a pretty important scene, I decided to spend 30 minutes or so perfecting it. I'm pretty happy with the results, though it could definitely change inthe future. Also, it's nice to be able to send videos to people to show what their work looks like in game, and that's exactly what I'll be doing.
Another thing I worked on, per se, is dealing with some dialogue inconsistencies that are totally my fault, unfortunately. The sequence of events is as follows:
Give Jason a copy of the database to use on his side, so he has all convos in the game, so he can do his editing.
Jaosn edits some dialogue, sends me a small B2B package, I integrate into the game.
Perform step 2 over and over again until dialogue is perfect.
Right, so what's missing from this list? Well, that would be me giving him another database dump (annoying), or a simple B2B package containing all the update dialogue in the game. While he does all the writing, I do have to make my own changes to them, like adding in plot scripting, camera angles, animations, etc. In fact, I'm damn near embarrased that it's come to this. Essentially, he has some changes to a file he wants to make (rightfully so), except his version is not up to date as mine, so if I accepted his changes, it would blow away mine.
In fact, this is fucking pathetic, since I'm a software engineer by day. Totally unforgiveable. So, once I finish sending out some more VO related things to some actors, I'll be checking in all the dialogue in the game, and getting that package together for him.
You know, Sunjammer warned me about this maybe a year ago, telling me how he came up with a way to have people remotely connect to my database, and check in their changes that way. I assured him that since it was only one person making the changes, it would be manageable. You win this round, Sunjammer!
Interestingly enough, even though I missed like a week's worth of updates, I'm still able to end the week with the final song from Shadows of the Colossus. Enjoy!
9/24/11 -Saturday: LET THE COMBAT TESTING BEGIN!
Yesterday, I started the long and arduous process of designing the largest combat scenario I have ever conceived. For those that played Cry The Beloved, that means larger in scale than everything that happened at Fort Brigance.I've been debating on how to do this for a long time, and could have taken the easy way out, but I decided to just go full balls. Screw it, it'll be worth it in the end. Yeah, it's gonna add some time to development, but what can you do...
Now, whenever I start to design new combat sequences, which always include new types of enemies, I add said enemies to my combat playtest sandbox, make sure the player and the party members they're supposed to have with them are the right level and have the right gear, and simply.... fight... Over and over again, until things are balanced just so. It's a pretty involved process, but it has to be. Plus, I actually enjoy doing this!
Today, I didn't create any new enemies, I essentially took existing enemies, and added more of them. More specifically, I took enemies you would have fought at the beginning of the game, and put them into this situation, where you're hours into the game. One way I have always liked to show just how powerful the player has gotten, is letting them fight an enemy that used to be tough. I feel it gives them that sort of "Yeah, I'm a lot stronger" feeling, that sense of accomplishment. This is why I'm not a fan of level scaling, though to be fair, the ranged level scaling Dragon Age used was a step in the right direction. Definitely better than what they use in The Elder Scrolls. At the same time, I'll be at Gamestop on 11/11/11 to get Skyrim for sure :)
Anyway, it was nice to increase the number of enemies, and see how strong the party really had become. And no, just increasing the enemies isn't my way to make things more difficult. It's just a small % of the sequence I'm designing. So away with you and your negative thoughts, naysayers, away with you all!
Tomorrow, I'll be working with another set of older enemies. Once I feel comfortable with that, I'll add in another party member, to see how that works. It's hard to explain, but I really need to test out every combination of, with regards to # of party members, and # of enemies. Once I'm done with that, I'll need to start scripting a system that will essentiallly run this entire combat sequence. This, I'm also looking forward to. Ah, good times...
Here's some more epic music from Shadows of the Colossus. Enjoy!
9/23/11 -Friday: WHERE THE HELL AM I?!
See the title of today's daily (ha!) update? See the expression on the cast member's face in the above picture? Yeah, that's how I've felt for the past week or so. Ah, life...
So, I've been terribly busy doing my part in supporting the iHeartRadio Music Festival In Las Vegas. No one really thinks about these things, but as a backend developer, my biggest concern is user load. More specifically, I don't want millions of users to break shit, which messes up the user experience. The fact that we rolled out the BETA first, and slowly grew our numbers, was probably the best way to handle this.
Anyway, my night was spent watching the live stream of the event, and watching the uptick in user subscriptions, making sure that all welcome emails were sent out properly. I wrote this batch job that runs every hour, checks for all newest subs within that hour, and then sends out the emails. I think I scaled it pretty well, and thus far, it's been able to handle the load of all the new users. As expected, as the concert was going on, the subs per hour started shooting up, as I sat with my heart in my throat, hoping nothing broke. In the end, all was well. By the way, nice concert, wish I was there... Though to be fair, I only cared about Alicia Keys & Jay-Z, and I've already seen Jay in concert before, and his set was pretty much like the one I saw earlier, so it wasn't that bad. Though, a free trip to Vegas wouldn't have hurt.
So what else have I been able to do, with regards to Rose of Eternity? Not much, unfortunately. The biggest thing has been brainstorming various parts of the story, accompanied by some new music. As I mentioned in another post, I used Pandora for years, discovering new music, lots of which will be in this game. Well, I've been obviously using iHeartRadio, and I've been finding even more new music I never even knew esisted. I already have a Spotify playlist setup with all the new music I've discovered, which sits at about 24 songs at the moment. I'm actually really excited, because new music is definitely what I need, and it will only result in adding more depth to the world. Haven't had this much new music to play with since early 2009...
I did try to get back into actual development, but being gone for so many days in a row, it was a struggle. However, I promise I will have more to talk about tomorrow.
Continuing where I left off (a while ago!), here is another track from Shadow of the Colossus. Enjoy!
9/15/11 -Thursday: IT'S ALL BEEN A BLUR...
This week has flown by so quick, and I've been busy with so many other things, it's just bee a blur to me. Let me try to summarize:
So, a while ago, I started to consolidate a bunch of different dialogues into single files, and then had plot conditions to determine when they were spoken. For instance, I used to have a file like 1008_johnum, 1009_johnum, 1010_johnum, etc. (the number stands for the area). I ended up moving all of them into one file, called johnum. That's all well and good, except, I forgot to get rid of the superfluous ones.
Now, when I sent out lines of dialogue for John the other day, I grabbed the wrong file. Luckily, the contents of that file, and the consolidated one were the same, so he doesn't have to do any extra work. However, for me, I need to name each line with the id of how it shows up in the dialogue editor. Problem was, I was giving it the ids of the lines of the dialogue I should had deleted from the system. So I integrate all of this VO, and for the longest time, couldn't figure out why in the HELL it wouldn't work. Sigh... Once I figured it out, I just had to go and re-name everything.
While I'm talking about irritating things (all of my fault!), I have to bring up my use of day/night areas. Before I switched over to night versions of the levels, I just used the day ones for everything. When I switched over, I ported everything I needed from the day version to the night one, but forgot to get rid of things that were no longer needed. This includes triggers, inactive npc's, scripts, etc. What ended up happening was that when I did need to go back to one of these day levels for the first time in over a year, I was literally confused, like, "Why in the hell is this trigger here? Do I still use this? Why is this inactive NPC here. Am I transitioning him somewhere else" My issue is that I'll know I have to do something, but I'll put it off because it's small. Then, I'll forget about it. What all of this amounts to, really, is just a bunch of cleanup. But, it's too small of a task, so I'll leave it for later :)
On a semi-related note, I came across this articlein Gameinformer, talking about all the trademarks of a Legend of Zelda game, like The Master Sword, Heart Contained Pieces, Musical Instruments, etc. Now, I'm all about taking things forward, innovating when neccessarily (i.e. not innovating for the sake of innovating), but there is still something special about playing a game, and having a moment where you're like, "Oh, okay, that's right, I'm playing Legend of Zelda".
I have not been shy about wanting the same thing for this series. I've already achieved it to some extent for instance, with the "new party member cutscene", where the trademark music plays while the camera spins around said party member. For me as a designer, I try to think about those special moments I had as a gamer, and try to infuse them as much as possible into my games. In fact, for a number of reasons, I need to re-install the older NWN games on my laptop. I'm seriously considering spending a few days, going through the game again, making sure I haven't lost the essence of the series. The last time I played it, I kept coming across situations where I was like, "Oh shit, I forgot I added that in the game", which is quite sad, since it's only been 5 years. Anyway, we'll see. Because, as you can all imagine, there are always more important things lying around the corner.
Since this will apparently be a short week of updates, I think it's perfect time to show off 4 of my favorite tracks from the PS2 (and the recent HD PS3 remake), Shadow of the Colossus. I remember this being of the first games I played during my 2-3 year layover from making games, and wow, what an impression. I never did beat it, but the concept and scale of the game was ridiculous. I was actually honored to be in attendance at the 2006 Developers Choice Awards where Rose of Eternity: The Coming won an award for best NWN module. Anyway, once they got past all the indy games, it was all about the AAA titles, and Shadows essentially swept the awards. It was impressive. The only other game I remember winning an award was this little obscure game named Guitar Hero. I wonder what ever happened to that franchise :)
Anyway, I hope you like the music. Enjoy!
And here is an orchestrated version.
9/11/11 -Sunday: PRODUCTIVE DAY!
Okay, let's get the important stuff out of the way: Sports! Bad weekend for me. Serena Williams lost today, and the Giants lost as well. On the plus side, the Jets beat the Cowboys, so my weekend is somewhat salvaged :)
Right, so, it was a pretty busy day, with all things dialogue, from the conception, to the actual writing, to the VO. I was finally able to take the ideas I brainstormed at Quiet Cove yesterday, and get them into the final major dialogue I need to write for this sequence. I particularly like this conversation, as it really let's the player know where a particular party member is coming from, while also slipping in a little history lesson (remember, I don't want all history to come from codexes and NPC's that act like wikipedia).
I also sent out more lines to John (what else is new?). Now, I kept telling him that his stuff for one particular person is going to slow down until more of it gets edited, but damn, I keep finding new stuff I forgot about everyday. One sequence that occurs in the beginning of the game, which is like 10 something lines, I just forgot existed. Then, there was another 15 or so lines from another point in the game. Regardless, it looks like he's going to take on a very iconic cast member soon. He's still trying to nail down exactly how he wants to do the voice, and since he's the expert, I'll let him handle that. This person doesn't have that many lines in the game, but they're all important as hell.
Next up on my list of things to do was finally write the bio for the last major character in the game. Rememer way back when I was supposed to do 2-3 a day, and I actually stuck with what I said I was going to do? Well, this person slipped through the cracks somehow, and when I was sending lines to John for potential actors, I unfortunately had to leave them out. While sending out lines, and integrating VO, I've been slowly (I guess I'm slow...) realizing that this person has perhaps, the 2nd most lines in the game. It's like every conversation I'm dealing with, their in there too. So, if I had to pick someone I wanted to get casted as soon as possible, it would be them.
Now a few days ago, I mentioned that Jason had to do some editing to some dialogue, that sparked a discussion on our forums, regarding a little... historic item in the world. That really got me inspired, and so I took some time to brainstorm some ideas for it. There are of course the story parts of this item, but there are also gamepay related things as well, which have me the most excited. I'm not entirely sure how much of it we'll be able to get in this game, but it doesn't hurt to think about it anyway :)
Finally, after a friendly nudge from Sunjammer (thanks, man!) , I've decided to definitely give an hour to his sound thread. I was supposed to do it yesterday, but ran out of time, but dammit, I'll definitely do it tomorrow at work on my lunch break.
Tomorrow, game development wise, I have some more of John's VO to integrate (the guy's a robot, but thankfully, doesn't sound like one!). After that, I need to put the finishing touches on this last piece of dialogue. Then, I think I'm going to jump slightly ahead and do some combat testing. This will be interesting, because a new party member totally changes the dynamics of things, especially when fighting enenies you've fought before. Then of course, there are new custom enemies I need to create, custom abilities, etc. Ah, this is where it's at!
Okay, this is the end of Final Fantasy Tactics week, and since I missed a day this week, I have 2 tracks for you. This first one is just... I don't know... You would have throught a Final Fantasy game with music from Nobuo Uematsu just wouldn't be the same, but these guys really captured the essence of the game, especially with this track. Enjoy!
And here is a fan made piano version, which is simply stunning.
This final track is simply the music that plays during the credits. By far, the best part is the beginning, but overall, a good track.
9/10/11 -Saturday: WHAT A LONG ASS DAY...
This was one of the longest days in a while for me, and not all having do with game development, unfortunatelty. Everyone who follows this blogs knows I'm a huge Roger Federer fan, and since this US Open semifinal match went 5 sets, that took up a lot of my time. That fact that he had 2 match points, and still lost to Novak Djokovic just kills me. And now, we will never talk about this again.
So, I got some new VO from one of the actos, and as usual, it was great stuff. I think I mentioned it before, but he must be using some $10,000 mic or something, but I don't have to do any post-processing work on it at all, except for maybe amplifying it. Another impressive thing was the actual acting itself. In this particular role, he is playing someone who is sick, damn near dying, and has one hell of a cough. I was very anxious to here the end result, but it was damned good.
John continues to find more and more contacts about filling particular roles, which I am very appreciative of. As I said, if they're just as good as him, we're golden. Also, that one role I mentioned, where he just gave me some sample lines, looks like it will be the final stuff. I let Jason listen to it, and we both agreed it was good stuff, and what were looking for. And since Jason has just recently edited that dialogue, the VO is ready to go. So, assuming John is up for it, I'll send those details over. And, as a plus, he has played through The Coming, and some of Cry The Beloved, so he's already well aware of how this character should sound, as they were in both of those games.
On the editing side, I've received a flurry of edits from Jason these past few days. In particular, one had to do with the change in the story we made on the forums a few days ago. I was actually putting off re-writing this particular piece of dialogue, but he just went ahead and did it, and it came out good. So now, yet another piece of dialogue is ready for VO!
On the music front, since I've been listening to a particular custom radio station on iHeartRadio, I've been discovering a lot of new music. I actually had seeded the same custom station on Pandora, but because of the fact that we have more music than them, I'm getting more of a variety of stuff. But, I won't say it's perfect, because it's not. There are still duds that come up. Thank god for the thumbs up/down functionality. It's interesting, actually, because this station has just been evolving to how I like it, and it's getting better each session I use it. I'm still holding out hope that I will discover that one artist that blows me away. Remember, I said I discovered 2 artists who's music damn near defines these new games. It's not even just that. One of them has like 7 albums, and they're all classics in my mind. That says a lot, because usually, I just cherry pick the 1 or 2 tracks I like, and move on to another album. With this artist, anything they do is good. Not since Yanni, or Kanye West have I found an artist like this. And yes, I did just use Yanni & Kanye West in the same sentence. Music styles aside, album for album, 95% of each of them are totally listenable in my eyes. Oh, and the best part about finding artists I like? I can immediately open up Spotify, and listen to their entire catalog. Ah, technology...
Oh, and remember I said it was a long day? Well, after watching tennis for hours, and doing a bunch of work, I was kicked out of my house, because my wife was having the last part of her friend's bachelorette party at our apartment. Okay, I wasn't kicked out, but I wanted no part in it :)
Tomorrow, I have some more VO related lines to setup, and I will finish that dialogue. I actually went to Quiet Cove today, just to sit and brainstorm for an hour about the conversation, and I'm really happy with what I have. Just gotta find the time to do it!
Today's music from Final Fantasy Tactics is really special to me. I don't know why, it just has that feel good, fantasy feeling to it. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If I'm going to be involved in an hour long strategy RPG battle, it better have some epic as music. Enjoy!
9/8/11 -Thursday: NEWLY REVAMPED IHEART RADIO BETA IS NOW LIVE!
So, every once in a while, I vaguely bring up this little irritating thing I do during the day, which takes away from Rose of Eternity: my day job. Yeah, like everyone else, I do what I gotta do to pay the bills. Clearly, my love is video game development, and it's what I want to do for a living, but I'm not there yet.
Now, I know I've also discussed how freaking busy I've been as well, and now I can finally show off the fruits of the labor of myself and my entire company: iHeartRadio!Prior to this update, the application was simply a radio station streaming service. For instance, if you lived in New York, and were a fan of Z100, and moved to California, you could use this service to continue to listen to it. So that's what's it's been for a few years.
Well, Clear Channel Communication bought my company, Thumbplay, earlier this year, in order to add a new feature to the app: Custom Radio Stations. Much like Pandora, this feature allows you to create a station based off an artist, or a song, and through some super futuristic logic provided to us by a company named Echo Nest, we're able to add similiar songs to the station. Then, much like Pandora, you can thumbs up/down a song to further customize your station. If you want your radio station to be less granular when picking songs, there is a station control that goes from "Familiar Artists" -> "More Discovery". Also, if the data is present, you can even see the lyrics to the song you're listening to. I'm proud to say I did the work on that feature :)
The last thing is the tight integration with Facebook. You can decide to share what stations you've created, the songs you've liked, etc., and any of your friends that are using the app can see this as well. You can also comment on songs you're listening to, which will be posted to your wall as well.
I think that if this is your type of thing, it's a pretty good service at the moment, though remember, we're still in BETA. I have about 6 custom radio stations I've been listening to, and they've been good, especially after I've thumbed down the crap I didn't like. At the moment, it's only available on the web, but this coming Monday, it will be available on the iPhone, and Android will be coming shortly after that. The full release will coincide with the iHeartRadio Music Festivalin Las Vegas, which will have performers such as Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, Alicia Keys, Nicki Minaj, and a whole host of others. Yeah, they're marketing the hell out of this!
Now, I've worked on a lot of apps over my career, and it's been more of a "I need to get paid twice a month, so whatever" feeling. This time, however, I would actually use this service. For me, it comes down to numbers. Pandora has 900K songs, versus our 11 million+ songs, which pretty much speaks for itself. While I'm still a fan of the more on-demand types of service (spotify, my own iTunes library!, etc.), I will be using this as well, because of one reason: I discovered 2 artists whose music pretty much defines these new Rose of Eternity games on Pandora a few years ago. Who knows what I'll find now?!
Well, you get the picture. Here's hoping everything works out. Oh, and things have definitely slowed down, since we hit our target. So, I sort of have a life again :)
Today's music may be something players of Rose of Eternity remember as well. Simply classic stuff. Enjoy!
9/7/11 -Wednesday: WHAT THE... OKAY, THERE GOES THAT PLAN...
So um... yeah... Remember that great idea I had, where I was going to programatically lower the volume of the sound effects I use for custom music, when conversations started/ended? Yeah, scrap that idea... Apparantly, there is no function for that. I must be getting old, because I would have bet the salaries of everyone reading this blog (oops!) that I saw such a method... Must be thinking about my NWN days where such functionality existed... Ah, good times, those...
Now look, I'm not one to sit and waste time complaining about how this or that won't work. Well, I may rant about it, but then I'll get on with it, and find another way. The first idea is to have duplicate sound effects in each area, one for normal exploration mode, one for conversation mode. It would be more monkey work than anything, but it would be easy enough to switch off the 2 different sound files, as I could just prefix them accordingly. Like I said, I do like to just man up and move forward with these things, but even I have my limits, so I'm going to think this over a bit, and try to pop in Sumjammer's sound effect threadto see if I can get any more answers there. One way or another though, it'll work. It'll all come down to how much time I'll have to spend on it.
In other related news, I am happy to say that I have put the finishing touches on one of two pieces of dialogue, quicker than expected too. Even better, I wrote a lot for the final one. Going back to first one however, I know I touched on this briefly before, I just wanted to expand my thoughts on it.
In most CRPG's, you have these party members that start off a certain way, and throughout the game, you can change their views on life, which may change certain things in the game, from favor/relationship points, to outright class changes (i.e. Paladin vs Blackguard).It's a pretty cool concept, something I would never want to remove from RPG's. However, something I think is even more interesting is a party member changing the views of YOU, the PC.
Now, I have to start off by saying that, for those that don't know, you use a pre-generated PC in this game. There, I said it. Either you like it, or you don't. I'm not here to change your views (and yes, I understand the irony in making party members try to change your view while I personally won't, so don't bother pointing it out, lol). Okay, now that that's out of the way... Even though you are using a pre-gen, you will be able to roleplay within a set of constraints. I think people liked it in my earlier games (no one complained at the very least!), so I'm sticking with it.
So anyway, I'm taking moral issues that I personally deal with on a day to day basis, and trying to infuse them into the pesonalities of the party members. Nothing revolutionary, except for my... views themselves... I clearly won't go into specifics, but one my best friends, who've I known for 18 years has recently started to call me Anakin Skywalker, referring to the changes that occurred to Anakin towards the end of Episode II, and throughout Episode III. I'd like to think I'm just growing up and thinking on my own, and not just believing what the media shoves down our throat every day, but I think he's scared I'm sort of radical, or something like that, lol. Anyway, yeah, it's been fun to write these particular pieces of dialogue :) Maybe via the party members, I can get my subtle messages across to those who are really roleplaying their character... MUA HAHAHAHA...
Till tomorrow...
P.S. Nothing related to Rose of Eternity, but something interesting nonetheless (to me at least). I have been using a computer every day, all day for close to a decade. At some point, I lost my skill in writing, as in, with a pen/pencil. I don't know, I remember learning cursive in elementary school, and I'm having one hell of a time writing it (except for my signature) whenever the chance comes up that I have to (maybe once or twice a year). You would think the simple act of writing is like riding a bike.... So yeah, totally random, but just something I wanted everyone to know, because, well, this blog can't always be about music and video games :)
Today's music is one of the battle themes from the game. Since the game is pretty based on... battles... they had to nail all of those pieces of music, and for the most part, it was good stuff. Enjoy!
While I'm at it, I wanted to post this interesting rendition of the song as well:
9/6/11 -Tuesday: NOT AS MUCH AS I WANTED TO...
Well, definitely didn't get as much done as I wanted to today. I did my obligatory VO work, of course. I had sent John some audition lines yesterday, and he ended up finding someone who agreed to do it, which was pretty cool. It's a pretty important role, so nice to potentially have it filled. I also put together some more lines for him for the character he is playing, as well as some lines for another one of our actors (who claimed to have no acting skills, I disagree!).
Besides that, I didn't really do any actual development, unfortunately, as I had other things take priority. Also, I was pretty tired on the train, so I opted for sleep this time. Even still, I had various pieces of instrumental music on as I attempted to sleep, so I at least did some brainstorming on the upcoming dialogue I will have to write in the next few days. So, all is not lost!
With the way the week is going, I'm not even going to talk about what I would like to get done. We'll just see what happens!
Today's musis is the music that plays during the intro scene, which describes The Lion War, and sets the stage for the upcoming events of the game. Enjoy!
9/5/11 -Monday: LOND DAY/NIGHT...
So, I was up relatively early today, so I could take care of somethings before places started to close. Weird, but I love when I have to be up early for something, because if not, I'm not strong enough to get up myself :) The day also ended late, as Roger Federer didn't take to the court until like midnight because of course, the Wozniacki match took much longer than it should have... sigh...
At any rate, I wanted to have a semi-peaceful day, so I didn't go crazy or anything. I finished integrating all the VO that John and his son sent me, and got to work on creating the audition lines for 3 more characters. I had asked him earlier if he knew anyone that wanted to do VO, and he said he would check, so I wanted to get that to him as fast as possible. Also, he sent me some sample files for the VO of a particular character that would be well known to anyone who played the NWN mods. I've never been entirely sure how this person should sound, so it's nice to get some ideas.
On the design front, we had this interesting thread in our forums about the legendary Sword of Galladoran, and it's... how would you... heritage. Jason and I were going back and forth over some pretty important details, and he had wrote a response maybe 2 weeks ago that I finally got a chance to reply to today. We're now both on the same page, and some really good ideas came out of the dicussion. Besides combat design, this would have to be the next most fun thing to do. Anytime we can add to the existing lore of the world, I'm all for it. It's amazing how far it has really come since 1999. I can still remember how I thought the game should have been back then, and in retrospect, damn, it was missing a lot of detail!
Finally, I just wanted to point out a thread made by BSN community deity, Sunjammer. He has created a new threaddealing with sound/music, god bless his heart. I've been down this road before, but he has managed to take it even further, so when I get a good half and hour to spare, I'll enjoy sucking up every morsel of information on there. Even though I already have my own music system, if I could use Bioware's, it would be more preferable, most for one reason: The music doesn't stop playing during area transitions. This just isn't anything I can do with plain old sound effects.
Tomorrow, I will spend more time putting together some lines for John, as well as two other actors (who I haven't asked if I could use their names/tags on this blog yet), and if I'm lucky, write some dialogue as well.
As the summer comes to an end, that can only mean one thing: games, Games, GAMES! A whole slew of games will start to come out soon, reaching it's zenith around Thanksgiving. While I plan on actually partaking in these events, there is one particular game that has been catching my attention. For the past month, I've been hearing about various groups of people uniting online (ha!) in order to force Nintendo to release a
Wii
game, called, Xenoblade Chronicles. I guess it was released in Japan last year, and is one of the best JRPG's to come around since Lost Odyssey.
I'm sure Nintendo of America has their reasons (crazy, I know, that people would know how to run their businesses), but they have been pretty steadfast in telling people they will not be releasing it in America. However, for whatever reason, it is getting a release in Europe and Australia. So, most likely, the localization is already done, and it could be released in America? Maybe Nintendo is holding that card close to their chest, hoping to surprise the world at the Tokyo Game Show? Only time will tell.
Anyway, Gamespot has taken it upon themselves to show the first hour of gameplay on an episode of their famous Now Playing series. Check it out here. While ther is nothing revolutionary about it (at least in the first hour), it does have that JRPG charm I haven't seen in a while, something pulling at my heart strings, bringing me back to the mid 90's. Doesn't help that I'm listening to the soundtrack to Grandia as I write this, adding to the nostalgia.
So, I essentially have 4 main video game sites I go, being Gamespot, IGN, Gameinformer, and Gametrailers. They all have their pros. For instance, I like Gamespot's video reviews, as they seem to take their time making them as good as possible, and therefore, they tend to last longer than those at IGN. Then again, they also come out after a game has already been released. IGN is good because they normally have reviews of AAA games the day of release, sometimes earlier. Gameinformer is good, because they have a lot of opinion pieces by their various editors.
Gametrailers, however, is starting to pull away from them. I think I originally got hooked to the site watching all the retrospective videos for games such as The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, etc. Then, it was the Angry Video Game Nerd, who has sadly, fallen off... Then, it was the Bonus Round, where I could watch industry experts discuss all the things I'm already thinking. At this point, I know new Bonus Rounds come more or less, every Sunday at 3:00pm EST, and I'm right there, waiting. The final piece is a man by the named of Michael Pachter. His 100% complete honesty in what he says, where he doesn't hold anything back, is why I respect the guy. And let's face it, while many of his predicitons are wrong, it is interesting to listen to him. If only they had more episodes of Bonus Round & Pac-Attack more often... Oh well...
For anyone out there wondering if I am close to running out of music, there is.... NO :) I've got music for years, so this tradition is not going anywhere.
This week, I'd like to highlight some of my personal tracks from one of the top 3, maybe top 2 strategy RPG's of all time. It may have been #1, but after playing Fire Emblem on my DS/Gameboy Advance a few years back, as well as Shining Force, and the game that reallly started it, Tactics Ogre, I'm not entirely sure anymore. What I am sure is that the music is timeless, again, stuff bringing me back to the mid 90's, during my high school days. Good times.
Anyway, that game is: Final Fantasy Tactics. The music is composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto, who would go on to compose the music for Final Fantasy 12, which takes place in the same world of Ivalice. As an aside, it's this game that has inspired me the most, with regards to possibly making my own strategy RPG (set in the Rose of Eternity world!).
Today's track is the opening theme, something players of Rose of Eternity may recognize, even if they never played Final Fantasy Tactics :) Enjoy!
9/4/11 -Sunday: DRAGON AGE NEXUS...
So, I didn't get a chance to do what I wanted to yesterday, but such is life... If I had to sum up the day in one word, if would... yep, you got: VO :) Not going to go on and on about it, as all I did was integrate some new stuff.
One thing I did want to talk about however is a certain site that goes by the name of the Dragon Age Nexus. When they first came about, it was during the time that I thought the BSN was going to go through a bunch of changes to make it the site it should have been (from a modders and mod players point of view). Clearly, almost 2 years later, we know that never happened.
However, back then, I was very positive about it, and really didn't give the site a chance. I think I was looking at it from the perspective of, "I don't want to maintain my games on multiple sites". Plus, I will admit, I wasn't a fan of the site design, and how they handled ratings and such. In fact, BSN never got it right either, and I will most likely go to my grave claiming the NWVaulthad it right all along. God I love that site *tear*.
Anyway, with their new design and all, I'm liking the nexus site more and more every day, and I am actually looking forward to releasing Rose of Eternity there. Hell, I'll most likely get the majority of my DL's from there. Even more importantly, it helps me reach my goal: having the most people possible play this game. I'm still not a complete fan of the rating system, but you can't have everything...
The final music from Soul Blazer is a song people will appreciate, even if they haven't played it. Enjoy!
9/3/11 -Saturday: UM... OOPS?
Right. So yeah, I guess I forgot what date it was, and didn't do my monthly state of the union address. So, without further adieu:
STATE OF THE UNION
In my last state of the union, I discussed how much of a crunch I was under at work, and how I hoped it would ease up the following month. In short, it only got worse. I've been doing this long enough to know it comes with the territory, the positives totally outweight the negatives of being in my industry (from my perspective, anyway). Anyway, there was nothing to do, except buckle down, and do what I could, when I could, knowing that things were eventually going to ease up.
The big thing I really wanted to accomplish this past month was actually getting new content in. I'm so close to the end of playable content, it's driving me crazy. A few more levels here, some more conversations there, sprinkle in some more cutscenes, and I'm done. Anyway, I am happy to say that I not only created the new level, but I finished one hell of a cutscene that took quite some time. I also wrote a lot of dialogue that goes hand in hand with the new level and cutscene. I'm leaving out a lot of smaller details, but all in all, it was a great success.
The only other major thing going on was of course VO integration. Thus far, we have had 8 actors step up to the plate, and I am very, very appreciative of it! That said, we're still looking for more, so if you'd like to help, send me an email at gamecoder@optonline.net.
I expect this month to be more of the same, except for a lot more combat related things. There's a huge combat sequence coming up, something I've been wanting to do for a while, and I know it's going to take a long time to get it exactly how I want it (or damn near close enough). At the same time, this is the funnest part of development for me, so I'm looking forward to the challenge.
So, I did a little bit of everything today. I started with some scripting to handle changing music when talking to certain party members during a particular sequence. Just call me old school (i.e. console old school, that is), but every important person in an RPG should have their own unique theme! Anyway, since I did a lot of work with my music system a few days ago, this was a pretty quick change.
I also did more level design, this time though, I just focused on adding props and such. I actually did this while watching some US Open tennis matches, as for me, it's the ultimate monkey work, where I only need to give 10% of my attention. Plus, rendering light maps and exporting the levels is a lengthy process, so it was the perfert timing for it. I'm not done yet, but I'm happy with what I have so far. As with all the other levels, I'm really going to leave that for the end of development, during the polishing phase.
I also spent some time integrating some more VO from John. While doing this, I actually learned something new using Audacity. Usually, I raise the volume of all VO I receive using this Amplify feature of the program. Well, if you amplify the entire file, as soon as even one part of it reaches some boundary (which you can see by the spikes of the actual audio), it can't go even further. So, let's say I'm trying to do this on one piece of dialogue, and in the middle, the actor raised their voice a lot louder than the other parts. If that section has already reached that boundary, then I can't perform it on the entire file. Well, for whatever reason, I just found out that I can actually select certain sections of the file to amplify, and so now, I have much more granular control over things.
Tomorrow, I hope to write some more dialogue, as well as spend a bunch of time putting together some more material for some actors. Because of the nature of the story, it's looking like the majority of the VO needed will be in the first half of the game. 4-5 more roles, and things will be looking good (for the first half of the game, that is!).
Today's music is the world map theme for the game. Enjoy!
9/2/11 -Friday: REALLY?! AGAIN?! SIGH...
Just when I thought life was back on track, the internet decided to stop working when I got home from work. To make matters worse, the cable also decided to call it quits. I had already watched all the tennis matches I cared to see, so that was good. I'm sort of getting used to this, so I just hunkered down, and did some old school development, old school meaning I had absolutely no distractions. Probably paid off in the end.
But before even all of this happened, while at work, I shelled out the $30 or so for the full license to this tool I use to convert audio files. I'm sure I could have found another one for free, but I was really comfortable with this particular one, and thought that the developers deserved the $. Once I did that, I was in business with regards to integrating more of John's VO work. It was about 18 lines spread across 3 pieces of dialogue, so it took an hour or so to get it integrated properly.
Now, I think I have talked about this before, but one of the things I have been very conscious about it is balancing the sound for all the VO. Clearly, you want the player to be able to hear it, but when you have multiple actors in one scene, who are using different recording material, a lot of work has to be done to make it consistent through the conversation. So, for the few conversations we have where every line is current spoken, I've done that work. For those where we're still waiting on the work for others, I just leave it as is. Better to do it all at once, instead of potentially having to do double work.
Then of course is the music that is playing. One thing I have been doing is going and lowering the sound of the music in each area. However, I really want to take some steps in doing something more smart, like what I discussed a few weeks ago: auto-lowering all music when a conversation starts. Well, since I had no internet, and was feeling slightly encouraged, I decided to in fact take some baby steps.
A long time ago, possibly a year or so, I fully implemented my own custom music system. As you all know, I never was able to figure out how to get music in the game through the existing Dragon Age music system, so I decided to go with sound effects, which I do know how to get in the game. Once I had my sound effects playing my music, I knew I needed a system to be able to switch back and forth between music on the fly. With sound effects, you can essentially enable them, disable them, and lowering the sound. So, if I was switching music, I would first have to disable to current track, then enable the next one. So, I set up a system using the Talmud Variable Storage Ssytem to keep track of all of this. It's really pretty simple, actually. When the game starts, I initialize the music of each level, and cache it using the system. Now, whenever I change music in the level, I know how to disable the current music playing (since it's already stored), and start up the new music. And of course, when the new music is started, that value is stored as the current one. So yeah, the key is just storing the default music unfront, and then it just works from there.
Now, somewhere along the way, I ended up with this horrible bug with that system where if I modified one of the caches before or after auto-saving, things went all FUBAR on me. While I have since fixed this issue, when it happened, it totally screwed up the music system, and since I wasn't sure how I was going to go forward, I started switching the music the old pedestrian way, meaning I was having to explicitly know which track I wanted to stop before starting the new one.
So now, I have half of the game using the old system, and half of the game using the hacked to hell version. Before I can even start to think about a system of lowering music when convos start, I need to fi the 2nd half of the game and start storing the music in the cache properly. Yeah, maybe this sounds boring to some people, but this is what I started yesterday. And if it sounds boring to you, trust me, it was just as boring to implement as well!
Finally (yes, there's more!), I started the work on another really important conversation. I think it's natural for the thoughts/personalities/world views of an author to be sprinkled throughout the various characters in their own stories, and I won't even lie about: a main part of this character's personality is part of my own. I'm clearly not going to give anything away, but because of the reactions I get in the real world when I discuss certain things, I knew I wanted to get that in the game somehow, hoping the players would react the same as those people in real life. And to be fair, I truly believe what I say, so there is some naturalness about it (unless I'm stark raving mad!).
Tomorrow, since I have no internet, I'll be back at my Dad's house, taking care of some stuff I should have done tonight. Then, later in the night, I'll integrate even more of John's VO (of course it gets sent to me 20 minutes after I lose the internet). Then, I'll hopefully finish off this one piece of dialogue, and move on to the final one. Then, finally, oh finally, combat design!
Here's some more music you just had to be there for. Enjoy!
9/1/11 -Thursday: BACKUP PLANS...
So, of course I lose my internet on the day I work from home... I quickly made preparations to setup shop at my Father's house, who luckily lives one town north of my apartment. It was nice to spend an entire day in the house I grew up in. Oh, the memories!
Anyway, I wasn't really able to do anything today, as my real job and other things took priority. I did receive some VO from John Erath, the actor who is doing the work for one of the party members. Unfortunately, I was only able to listen to each line and dump it into the corresponding conversation folder. My trial (that I didn't even know I had) has run out on the software I was using to convert wma's -> wav's, and since I had no connection, I could purchase it online. They did have some thing where they could give a 3 day extension to the trial, if I allowed them to install one of those annoying search bars to my IE page, as well as making their search the default one (which I assume I could change immediately), but I decided against it.
