Monthly Archives: July 2015

Noisier Than Before!

Pheeeew, 3 weeks ago, there was 40 sounds in the game, now there are 450 !

I nearly have my ears bleeding¹, but now I’m finally (almost) done with the Sound FX !

It’s a bit strange to hear the difference ; now, there’s growling, explosion and whzzzz everywhere in the combats, and it makes wonder how I didn’t miss all that while beta testing the whole dungeon a couple months ago²…

Anyway, now my planning just dropped under 2 months of work, so you should be able to enjoy all that soon. I guess it means the release date for end of September is still viable, although I might take 1 week of holidays in August to avoid my head exploding during the final rush. My planning also doesn’t account for the many little things needed on release (like setting up the payment stuff, packaging the game with an installer, etc.), so it might delay by 1 more week. It’ll also of course depends of the accuracy of my predictions for the final tasks I have to do.

The next one is to create the ending & the credits ; I hope I’ll be able to do all that in the incoming week, although I’m not sure it’ll be possible or not, as I’ll have to complete the little scripting engine I created, so it’ll be able to handle the special stuff I want to do for the ending sequence…

Same as usually, we’ll see where I stand in 1 week, cya !

1. I’m from the South of France, we have a slight tendency to exaggerate over here  ↩

2. ok, I know why ; it’s because there was already all the sword sounds & a few grunts, so the battles were far from being completely quiet, and there were also the great ambiance tracks to accompany me during the exploration ↩

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Dare to Jump ?

I’m back on track ! (or almost)

Start of last week has been a bit hard, as I was still sick, but after a few more of days of tests & tries, I finally managed to understand what I should do for the sounds, and how to do it !

So now a good bunch of mobs already have their correct sounds, and in a couple of days, all should be done. The mobs are a lot more convincing & frightening now that they yell, scream & grunt all the times..!

I also added a few other sounds : for the inventory, the force fields, etc… Once I’ll be done with the Mobs, I’ll do the sounds for the spells & abilities, and then the weapons, and it’ll be all done, and it’ll allow me to do a new gameplay video.

On another aspect, I got the armor loot created by a 3D artist freelancer, so that’s 1 thing less to do.

That’s all for now, cya !

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Slash & Big Slash

Ouch, last week I got sick, so I wasn’t able to work for the best part of it…

I got some kind of bad throat-ache with fever & all, and right now I’m still not 100% healed, but fever is gone and globally I’m almost alright so I’m ok to work today.

Nevertheless, last week, I started to work on the audio improvements. Footsteps are now much better. Throwing items does a woosh sound, and a poke sound when they touch the floor.

I also started to look into mob sound. I had hoped to find some game ready sound library, but actually, the existing ones are very low quality, so I had to get a more advanced library ; quality is much better, but I’ll have to adapt (or remix) the sounds so they can be used in game. Overall, I guess it’ll be better for the game, but it’ll take a lot more time than planned initially to manually handle each sound creation. I’ll try to do all that this week and see where it goes.

That’s all for now, cya !

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I’m on Fire !

Woh, last week went exactly as planned !

So 1st, you can see on the screenshot above the new Scorch visual FX, which is pretty neat ! And you can also see the slash effect for all the melee attacks (some attacks produce a bigger or smaller effect). This allowed me to create the 1st gameplay video of the game. Check the previous post if you want to watch it.

For the 2nd part, the story, it hasn’t been as much easy. One year ago, when I was thinking about it, I imagined a ton of stuff, but it’s pretty hard & long to put all the stuff in the game, especially without creating specific 3D models & environments to match the story details. So I did the bare minimum to get a little story going on, all that with dialogues and a few notes (and a tomb with a dead body ). My 1st hope is that the players won’t think “oh doh, it’d have been better to not have anything at all instead of this”, and my 2nd hope is that the players get slightly intrigued and curious to know how all that will end.

Building the story into a game is very different than writing a book. I wrote a couple of books, also short stories, but in a game, the story telling is much different and requires a lot of visual support, so it requires a lot of effort & thinking to put all the elements together, even when there’s not much to tell.

Anyway, it’s done now ; maybe I’ll polish a bit some details after the Beta Test reports, but it probably won’t change much.

This week (and possibly a part of the next one), I’m going to work on the sound FX. It is long due, as they didn’t change since the Alpha 1 ! If I can manage to do everything I want, this should greatly enhance the game atmosphere (and will deserve a new video! ).

Cya next time to check how all of this will have turned out !

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