Voices

As I had started writing about sound in games for my other blog and we had the tutorials on sound, I decided to think more about the sounds I wanted for my own game.

I wanted to create a sound for the suits power-up and a sound for the change itself. Obviously the change would take more or less time in the game depending on when/where it was taking place but I wanted a sound that I could use for all changes that would just be stretched or shortened as needed.

For the power-up sound, obviously it had to be something electronic, something not too loud that would build into the change sound. I began looking online, especially http://www.freesound.org/ which featured some excellent power-up sounds that I would just need to alter slightly in pitch and in length to get the sound I wanted. I found the following sounds...

Sound sample 1
and

Sound sample 2

Which I think worked best.

I then began work on the transformation sound itself, which was a little more tricky as although it had to be an organic sound of muscles rending and bones shifting, I wanted it to have a electronic sound to it was well to give the feel that the change is powered by the nanobots. On Freesound I did a lot of searching and came up with the following sounds which I intended to mix...

Sound sample 3

and...

Sound sample 4

I wanted the sound to be distinctive but not a cacophony of sound it needed to flow.

While working on the sounds, I began toying with the idea of using an actual voice, as the changes are voice activated. As the game is set in the US I needed an American to do the voice so I reached out to a few of my American friends who were willing to do it for me but the friends I knew had accents that were too distinctive such as Texan or Southern. I needed a more American accent so I began to search online for people who could do the voice for me, eventually I came across these two sites...

http://librivox.org/

and

http://www.voiceactingclub.com/

Which were full of people who wanted to get into the voice acting or audio book industry whom were happy to read the lines for me. Before long I had a slew of people who wanted to 'audition' for me and a couple of them were perfect. I chose the person I wanted and got him to read the voice commands and a few extra lines as I had an idea for a short game intro.

Along with the voice for the main character, I used the voice actor again for the Wii version of my game and just got him to up his pitch for the younger version of the protagonist. For the most part this worked quite well and I got recordings for all of the voice parts I needed.

Transmedia

With my parallel blog on coherent worlds and transmedia I began thinking more about how my game idea would work as a cross media world. There are certainly possibilities to expand the universe and I had already devised a graphic novel with a crime noir feel that would explore the story of a investigator hired to find an elusive assassin who would turn out to be one of my games antagonists.

With the Wii version of my game I also devised an idea for a serialised animation in which a young girl befriends one of the games low-level enemies who can take the form of a single animal (in this case a tiger).

Although the core concept is strong enough, I didn't feel it was distinctive enough to allow for a fully transmedia universe so I wanted my game to simply be part of a bigger universe. One where several games were taking place and would interconnect feed into each other in terms of narrative.

Ch, ch, ch, changes.

I had decided early on that the transformations that would take the place should look good. I wanted the characters transformations to be dynamic and done in action, not stationary. For instance if the character would become a cheetah he would be doing it whilst running, his back would arch down and his hand turn to paws as they stride forward.

In doing my research I quickly learned that visual changes like that were done using morphing which I really wanted to avoid as it's far too 'cheap' and over-used. There were examples of people changing into animals on YouTube but always using morphing or cheating by the character going behind a car and coming out the other side as a different animal. In the 1980's the TV show 'Manimal' had a man turning into animals and it used prosthetics and practical effects. Manimal transformation but the change was never dynamic. It was always completely static.

I struggled to find a way to show my transformation, the best way to do it would be to animate it frame by frame but that would take far more time than I had. So I drew a few examples of my main character in the transformation. I had to draw several stages of the transformation, as drawing just one would either look like a person, an animal or a hybrid and wouldn't illustrate the actual process of the change.

It took a lot of time as I had to draw each stage as a separate detailed drawing. I also had to draw the stages in a slightly different position to give the impression that the character is in motion.

Although I liked these images I still didn't think they showed any motion, so I created two of them as gifs...

Click to view

Click to view

Pitch

Now we had been given the brief and explained that we will need to deliver our concept as a pitch to a panel, things had got a lot more terrifying as although I could articulate my design easily to myself, delivering to another person would be another story.

As with all briefs, I began with research and started online looking for websites that described digital games pitches and came across a couple that were helpful.

http://makeitbigingames.com/2007/09/how-to-pitch-your-game/

http://game-linchpin.com/2010/06/improve-pitch.html

http://www.newser.com/story/14654/selling-the-video-game-pitch.html

A few were very useful such as the advice offered on http://makeitbigingames.com which explained in detail what to avoid and what to elaborate on but our added issue was that we were being timed and not a lot of websites or books dealt with that problem. Alas, there were also very few forums that offered advice on this.

My first concern was to decide what was relevant and what was not in order to make my pitch more concise, so I collated together the bare bones of my story into a short premise as you likely see on the back of a digital game box to make the concept sound appealing and intriguing and started to collate my concept art together.

I wanted to have a few brief animated segments to show the panel to illustrate my game but I soon realised that it would take  longer to design and perfect a short animatic than I could afford to lose.

One of the main problems I faced was trying to illustrate in concept drawings the transformation itself, as showing the start and end of the change was easy as it was just man or animal and drawing a mid-stage just seemed top portray a picture of a man-animal hybrid. I wanted to show that the transformation was dynamic and in motion and steered well away from the morphing software as I felt this was a 'cheap' and all too often seen effect.

The best I could come up with was a single picture of consecutive stages of the change which I used for my pitch background.