[casual_games] Dummy voice over

[Billy Cain]

I know exactly what you are talking about, Aaron. Use placeholders whenever
possible.

 

Let me repeat Aaron's message emphatically for everyone to hear: ALL
PLACEHOLDERS ARE GOOD PLACEHOLDERS (when done correctly). And I will expound
on the placeholder idea  - it's critical to all developers. 

 

AUDIO

My suggestion is to do the audio files with a ridiculous sfx in the
background (just not annoying). Imagine voice over with an ice cream truck
song in the background (at low volume!). The main reason you use temp audio
is so you can get the timings close and hopefully provide better direction
to the audio team when they are actually recording and editing it. This
includes creating and sticking with a well thought out naming convention for
the temp files. 

 

It's a hell of a lot better to tell the audio team that you need a 2 second
voice file than leaving the duration completely up in the air. And naming
conventions - OMG! Those are more important than you think. Just wait until
you have tens of thousands of files and see how you like the Wild West of no
naming conventions!! OUCH! Back in the "good old days" there was a file name
limit of 8 characters for the name and 3 characters for the extension. Try
to develop a useful, readable naming convention in that! Finally, it's a
hell of a lot easier to start with temp stuff and edit that than it is to
pull people BACK to record stuff. That is insanity! Not that I've seen it
done the stooped way before. J

 

ART

Get the sizes and file types sorted and then use placeholder everything.  2D
3D - doesn't matter. What DOES matter is having something COMPLETELY OBVIOUS
visually that indicates that this is bogus. Pink textures or anything else
that works. 

 

DESIGN / DATA

Pure design seems difficult to create placeholders for, but it will depend
on your game. 

 

I like to duplicate data to be sure that there's enough space in the final
build, to stress test the system so no surprises happen during the "holy
crap we're trying to ship and we won't fit on the disc / meet the download
requirements / can't change levels hear the end of the game - we overflowed
the stack! / fill in the blank" panic phase. The goal is NO SURPRISES!!!! 

 

EXAMPLES

On Wing Commander: Prophecy, we used placeholders for EVERYTHING! When we
had the first spaceship for the game delivered from the art group, I
duplicated it, and renamed the copies to match all the ships in the game.
Then I continued and added the ships to the mission editor (all with correct
names, subdirectories, etc.) and we were able to build almost the entire
game the week after we had the first ship handed over. This also meant that
we filled out the mission structure and found all the bugs that would have
hit us hard further in production. 

 

For audio, we used fake dialogue to get started, but since they were also
linked to video, I used fake art for the video part. You could easily see
that they were marking the bogus ones. There should be a million solutions
for audio. For instance, you could put a dot on the screen when fake audio
is heard. This could be handled by creating an XML file (or XLS if you like
Excel) and add a special tag for any audio that has been completed.  You're
likely an expert at what you can do, so figure out a way that works for you.

 

On games that I work on with CMI, I try to get the game working before we do
final art. Make it work, make it fun, and then make it pretty. As long as
you don't have a publisher breathing down your neck to show you "pretty
pictures," you can get much farther in development with placeholder
EVERYTHING! 

 

For example, on Crunch Time (which Aaron and I worked on) we used
placeholder art all over the place to get an idea of the sizes, file types,
and animation speeds required to fool the eyes. Creating assets ONCE is the
main goal. Wasting time is freaking expensive, not just to your pocketbooks
but especially to your personal time that you should be using to play Rock
Band, sleep, or spend time with your friends and family. J

 

Don't lose touch with everything because you decided that placeholders are
stupid and can't help. That's ridiculous. 

 

Rock on!

bjc

 

From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]
On Behalf Of Aaron Murray
Sent: Monday, October 27, 2008 6:46 AM
To: IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
Subject: Re: [casual_games] Dummy voice over

 

Hi Paul, 

 

Personally I like placeholder audio, but I've been advised against it by
some audio people because sometimes it gets left in, or even worse, the
developers get used to it and they want the real sound/tracks/voice to be
familiar, which can cause problems. That said, I use placeholder audio when
possible.

 

As for a tool, I've used this web tool before:
http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php

 

Surely there are some windows tools available, I just haven't used any.

 

-Aaron

On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 4:19 AM, Paul Steven <paul_steven at btinternet.com>
wrote:

I am developing a series of games that have a considerable amount of voice
over. Ideally I would like to record the voice over as late as possible so I
can be sure I have considered all eventualities. However I really need to
have some voice over to enable me to program and test the games. One
possibility is for me to just record a rough version myself however I
wondered if there is any other alternatives? Perhaps there is a program that
I can type into and it will output a wav of text to speech?

Any advice much appreciated!

Thanks

Paul

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-- 
Aaron Murray
Technical Director, Co-founder
Tandem Games
www.TandemGames.com
www.DomainOfHeroes.com
"Fun for All. All for Fun."

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