sonofableep

don’t it feel good when intense preparation pays off?  like a fighter who’s been training all those long hours, conditioning the muscles and reflexes just so, building the perfect punching machine…and then he finally gets to HIT somebody.  BAM!  oooh, that feels good!

that’s putting way too manly a veneer on my own little thrilla in manilla today, but still.  i’ve been working on VO design stuff for weeks – abstract abstractions of how some hypothetical tech might work with some future assets in a myriad of conditional scenarios.  i do enjoy the mental exercise, really – i just need an eight ball to get through it all without losing focus.  it’s like writing a rubik’s cube solution guide without actually getting to play with the rubik’s cube.

but as i inch towards a complete VO design and a list of the tech needed to support it, bits and pieces are finding their way into the game.  a prototype here, a prototype there…and the design and tech start to resemble systems you might find in a completed game (and then some…we *are* trying to push the envelope at least a little, after all).  but nobody’s really heard the results outside of my office – the badly acted temp VO, the text-to-speech test VO – we’ve just been churning along, getting ourselves ready for The Real Thing.

well we got a taste of The Real Thing today, in the form of a content team wanting to get some dialog exchanges into the game with dialog good enough to demo internally (ie not badly acted, and most certainly not text-to-speech).  and of course, the demo is on monday, so it’s got to get into the test build by friday, so the data has to get pushed up by…(looks at watch)…the next few hours?  how does that sound?  that sounds (looks at rubik’s cube solution guide in progress)…by god, i think that sounds doable!

dive in like a bat out of heck, record six people reading through dozens of lines, chop ‘em up, edit ‘em quick-n-dirty (having edited tens of thousands of lines of dialog in my lifetime comes in handy from time to time), drop ‘em in the build, check all my knobs and dials one last time, and ding!  pencils down!  time’s up!  how’d i do?

awesome.  well, as awesome as six non-actors reading dialog can be, but that’s not the point here.  :)  the point is, everything WORKED.  triggers triggered, volumes attenuated, audio spatialized, polyphony was managed, parameters updated, rulesets were obeyed, and so on.  a minor triumph.  i’ll have to remember that sensation the next time i’m slogging through design & tech docs (which would be, ah, tomorrow).  BAM!  the payoff.  feels good.