{"author_link":"\/users\/atmospherium","author_name":"atmospherium","author_uid":"atmospherium","comments":[],"epoch":1713892775,"event":"LD55","format":"md","ldjam_node_id":394571,"likes":17,"metadata":{"p_key":"206606","p_author":"atmospherium","p_authorkey":"1004925","p_urlkey":"443140","p_title":"Seance Postmortem - Audio","p_cat":"LDJam ","p_event":"LD55","p_time":"1713892775","p_likes":"17","p_comments":"0","p_status":"WAYBACK","us_key":"1004925","us_name":"atmospherium","us_username":"atmospherium","event_start":"1712966400","event_key":"120","event_name":"Ludum Dare 55"},"node":{"_collation":{"body_sanitizer":"TextUtils::SanitizeHTML via existing importer","event":"LD55","removed_author":false},"_superparent":383062,"_trust":5,"author":4925,"body":"![Detective_basic_1.PNG](\/\/\/raw\/ec3\/31\/z\/646ba.png)\n\n### Welcome\nWell, that's probably the most work I've ever gotten done over the course of a single Ludum Dare. [Seance](https:\/\/ldjam.com\/events\/ludum-dare\/55\/seance) is my 20-somethingth collaboration with @alexrose, and it very well may be our best yet. It's definitely our most ambitious. A fairly complex story (especially by gamejam standards) written by Alex and mapped out to facilitate work between @lowri-bowden on the graphics, our 7 voice actors, and me on the audio editing\/processing side. Over 400 lines of dialogue auditioned, edited, and processed. I personally handled 2+ hours of voiceover takes resulting in ~350 lines of dialog. There were some additional audio efforts from @sonnybone, who took care of processing his own voice for the detective, and @alexrose, who did some additional work on our friendly neighborhood malevolent being's voice. Scope creep is real, but we powered through.\n\n### Voice Casting\nThis was the first time we've attempted to create a game with anywhere NEAR this amount (or quality) of voice acting. We needed to find people who could record themselves at a sufficient quality, could get the tone of a character, and give a compelling delivery of their lines. We started off with a fairly broad call on Twitter that resulting in Mike Bithell(?!) saying he'd be down for a quick take or two.\n\nOnce we had Mike on the list we doubled down on trying to find the best voices we could for the other roles. We got some long-time Ludum Darers (@sonnybone, @sheepolution, @rincs, @naetoid) and some friends that we turned into first-timers (@chrissiecodes, @loriston4shoriston) to jump in. Everyone killed it with their roles. I think I've heard each character referred to as someone's favorite character (#RendellGang4Lyfe), which shows that we didn't end up with any weak points.\n\nAdditional thanks to @pomo and @blay09 for their work over the weekend trying vocal takes and helping make connections with some of our actors.\n\n### Art\nVoice did a bunch of the heavy lifting in this game, but art was instrumental in pushing the quality forward - both in the final result, but also in giving people a visual to tune their vocal deliveries to. This was our second time working with @lowri-bowden and she absolutely killed it.\n\n### Music\nI had a bunch of ideas for how to handle the music, but the rest of the work ended up eclipsing the stuff that I had in mind. We ended up with about a minute-and-a-half of music which, when spread over the course of an hour-long playthrough, means you hear the same thing a LOT. We added some dynamic controls to allow some variation depending on who you're talking to, which helps out considerably, but I had planned to lean into this dynamic control a lot more. I wish I hadn't focused as much on my (failed) solo entry in the early part of the weekend or that I had figured out some efficiencies in the vocal editing earlier so I could have spent more time focusing on the music.\n\nI still REALLY like the [Soundtrack](https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/atmospherium\/whodunit) that I created, I just wish there was more of it.\n\n### Audio Automation\nIt took MOST of the jam period, but eventually I got a suitable workflow for processing the 2+ hours of audio takes I had to process. Initially I started with a VERY manual process to ghostify all the voices (pre-verb in particular required extra steps) - make sure the voice ROUGHLY matched the tone and volume of the other voices, find the take I wanted, normalize it, bounce it, reverse it, add processing for pre-verb, un-reverse it, add additional processing, export as wav, convert to ogg. About halfway through the first characters takes I realized this was COMPLETELY unsustainable. I ended up developing an Audacity macro that allowed for me to automate the bulk of this process.\n\n### Audio Editing\nOnce I had the macro sorted out, I still had the much smaller (but still fairly large) job of vocal matching and mining the raw audio for the best takes. This was COMPLETELY new territory for me, so I had to learn as I iwent. Initially it took an ABSURD amount of time for me to properly process, edit, and bounce the clean audio takes. After hours and hours of doing things inefficiently, I eventually got a workflow that simplified things. By the final set of takes, I was able to power through half-hour of dialogue in right about an hour. If I had figured out my process earlier in the weekend I would have saved SO much time, but I got there. If we do something this absurd again in the future, I'll be prepared.\n\n### The End\nOverall, I'm incredibly happy with how this complex of a project ended up pulling together. Huge shout-out to the entire team - everyone did their part to elevate the quality of what we attempted. Extra huge shout-out to @lowri-bowden for killing it on the art and helping formulate this story. And hugest shoutout to @alexrose for creating such a clear structure for all of us to be able to do our parts effectively and then tying it all together into a cohesive project at the end.\n\n\nCheck out our [Game](https:\/\/ldjam.com\/events\/ludum-dare\/55\/seance)\n\nCheck out the [Soundtrack](https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/atmospherium\/whodunit)","comments":6,"comments-timestamp":"2024-04-24T00:59:49Z","created":"2024-04-23T16:54:23Z","files":[],"files-timestamp":0,"id":394571,"love":17,"love-timestamp":"2024-04-24T00:58:42Z","meta":[],"modified":"2024-04-24T00:59:49Z","name":"Seance Postmortem - Audio","node-timestamp":"2024-04-23T17:40:12Z","parent":388726,"parents":[1,5,9,383062,388726],"path":"\/events\/ludum-dare\/55\/seance\/seance-postmortem-audio","published":"2024-04-23T17:19:35Z","scope":"public","slug":"seance-postmortem-audio","subsubtype":"","subtype":"","type":"post","version":1236219},"node_metadata":{"n_key":"394571","n_urlkey":"443140","n_parent":"388726","n_path":"\/events\/ludum-dare\/55\/seance\/seance-postmortem-audio","n_slug":"seance-postmortem-audio","n_type":"post","n_subtype":"","n_subsubtype":"","n_author":"4925","n_created":"1713891263","n_modified":"1713920389","n_version":"1236219","n_status":"WAYBACK"},"source_url":"https:\/\/ldjam.com\/events\/ludum-dare\/55\/seance\/seance-postmortem-audio","text":"![Detective_basic_1.PNG](\/\/\/raw\/ec3\/31\/z\/646ba.png)\n\n### Welcome\nWell, that's probably the most work I've ever gotten done over the course of a single Ludum Dare. [Seance](https:\/\/ldjam.com\/events\/ludum-dare\/55\/seance) is my 20-somethingth collaboration with @alexrose, and it very well may be our best yet. It's definitely our most ambitious. A fairly complex story (especially by gamejam standards) written by Alex and mapped out to facilitate work between @lowri-bowden on the graphics, our 7 voice actors, and me on the audio editing\/processing side. Over 400 lines of dialogue auditioned, edited, and processed. I personally handled 2+ hours of voiceover takes resulting in ~350 lines of dialog. There were some additional audio efforts from @sonnybone, who took care of processing his own voice for the detective, and @alexrose, who did some additional work on our friendly neighborhood malevolent being's voice. Scope creep is real, but we powered through.\n\n### Voice Casting\nThis was the first time we've attempted to create a game with anywhere NEAR this amount (or quality) of voice acting. We needed to find people who could record themselves at a sufficient quality, could get the tone of a character, and give a compelling delivery of their lines. We started off with a fairly broad call on Twitter that resulting in Mike Bithell(?!) saying he'd be down for a quick take or two.\n\nOnce we had Mike on the list we doubled down on trying to find the best voices we could for the other roles. We got some long-time Ludum Darers (@sonnybone, @sheepolution, @rincs, @naetoid) and some friends that we turned into first-timers (@chrissiecodes, @loriston4shoriston) to jump in. Everyone killed it with their roles. I think I've heard each character referred to as someone's favorite character (#RendellGang4Lyfe), which shows that we didn't end up with any weak points.\n\nAdditional thanks to @pomo and @blay09 for their work over the weekend trying vocal takes and helping make connections with some of our actors.\n\n### Art\nVoice did a bunch of the heavy lifting in this game, but art was instrumental in pushing the quality forward - both in the final result, but also in giving people a visual to tune their vocal deliveries to. This was our second time working with @lowri-bowden and she absolutely killed it.\n\n### Music\nI had a bunch of ideas for how to handle the music, but the rest of the work ended up eclipsing the stuff that I had in mind. We ended up with about a minute-and-a-half of music which, when spread over the course of an hour-long playthrough, means you hear the same thing a LOT. We added some dynamic controls to allow some variation depending on who you're talking to, which helps out considerably, but I had planned to lean into this dynamic control a lot more. I wish I hadn't focused as much on my (failed) solo entry in the early part of the weekend or that I had figured out some efficiencies in the vocal editing earlier so I could have spent more time focusing on the music.\n\nI still REALLY like the [Soundtrack](https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/atmospherium\/whodunit) that I created, I just wish there was more of it.\n\n### Audio Automation\nIt took MOST of the jam period, but eventually I got a suitable workflow for processing the 2+ hours of audio takes I had to process. Initially I started with a VERY manual process to ghostify all the voices (pre-verb in particular required extra steps) - make sure the voice ROUGHLY matched the tone and volume of the other voices, find the take I wanted, normalize it, bounce it, reverse it, add processing for pre-verb, un-reverse it, add additional processing, export as wav, convert to ogg. About halfway through the first characters takes I realized this was COMPLETELY unsustainable. I ended up developing an Audacity macro that allowed for me to automate the bulk of this process.\n\n### Audio Editing\nOnce I had the macro sorted out, I still had the much smaller (but still fairly large) job of vocal matching and mining the raw audio for the best takes. This was COMPLETELY new territory for me, so I had to learn as I iwent. Initially it took an ABSURD amount of time for me to properly process, edit, and bounce the clean audio takes. After hours and hours of doing things inefficiently, I eventually got a workflow that simplified things. By the final set of takes, I was able to power through half-hour of dialogue in right about an hour. If I had figured out my process earlier in the weekend I would have saved SO much time, but I got there. If we do something this absurd again in the future, I'll be prepared.\n\n### The End\nOverall, I'm incredibly happy with how this complex of a project ended up pulling together. Huge shout-out to the entire team - everyone did their part to elevate the quality of what we attempted. Extra huge shout-out to @lowri-bowden for killing it on the art and helping formulate this story. And hugest shoutout to @alexrose for creating such a clear structure for all of us to be able to do our parts effectively and then tying it all together into a cohesive project at the end.\n\n\nCheck out our [Game](https:\/\/ldjam.com\/events\/ludum-dare\/55\/seance)\n\nCheck out the [Soundtrack](https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/atmospherium\/whodunit)","title":"Seance Postmortem - Audio","wayback_source":[]}