This week, there has been a few hiccups surrounding the narrative of Roast-It Notes. Although it is not a big concern on the audio side of things, it is still interesting and very rewarding to be a part of those discussions and meetings. The main focus was working out how to go back to the central idea of the game - post-it notes - as we had drifted a little too far from this, resulting in the player lacking direction or motivation to do anything in the environment they found themselves in.
Because of rewrites to the plot of the game, some of our audio either had to be used a different way or rewritten entirely. Last week, my teammate Stephen had put together a 7-minute loop full of our recorded dialogue, as well as some of his own produced music. To listen to the track, click below.
The added sound effects of the dial turning and the channels changing underneath our recorded dialog made our clips seem more realistic.
Unfortunately some of these clips were shuffled around in order to give the player more direction, but thats also good news because it means our radio asset is evolving to be an active part of the game, helping to communicate goals and situations, instead of just being a comedic relief in the scene. The solution that we came up with was to use the radio to shape the narrative of the game - most of the audio assets would be divided up into either important dialogue or filler dialogue. Important dialogue were conversations, news stories, or other pieces of speech that moved the plot of the game along, such as letting the player know they have a neat-freak roommate who has left them with a list of house chores to do, as well as giving them hints on the different ways they can interact with the objects in the space.
To implement this feature, I plan on integrating the assets through FMOD so that the different categories of audio can be triggered using code script and parameters.
If you are interested in how this would be done, I wrote a blog about it here.
This project is almost at its end! The next time you hear about it I will be wrapping up with final notes about how the project travelled as a whole and a link to the published product. :)
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