[ play the game ]

I wanted to make a game that focused on the story for once. I really like writing dialogue for games, but it’s hard to justify taking the time to write a good story during a game jam. That’s probably why I don’t do it too often, but it’s still fun.

The story for Rise of the Morbels is based on one of the plots from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams. The character’s name is a reference to Samuel Taylor-Coleridge, whose “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was supposed to be about this event. The story is delivered in voiceover that plays while you have control of the character, to avoid that “wall of text” feeling. I feel like this was a good choice, and it contributed pretty well to the feel of the game.

The sound quality’s not great, but I’m really happy with how the audio turned out, given that my last game had no audio whatsoever. This was the first time I’ve ever incorporated any voiceover into a game, and I think it actually sounds pretty good, even though I usually dislike my own voice. Speeding it up by 15% makes a huge difference, I guess. This was also the first time I’ve ever composed music for a game. Even though it’s just four notes, I feel like it’s appropriate for the mood, especially since I don’t know anything at all about composition. Combined with some creepy sound effects, it’s not bad.

For the most part, the audio work went smoothly. The music only took a few minutes, and I got five minutes of dialogue in less than an hour. I did have a technical glitch at the end, though. Every line of dialogue is a separate sound file, so you have to download 89 ogg files for this game. About an hour before the deadline, this was causing Chrome to crash. I managed to avoid it by downsampling some of the sound effects, but it was really tense for a while.

Of course, every minute spent on story or audio is a minute not spent on gameplay, so I knew that I would be making sacrifices here. It’s not the most fun or replayable game I’ve ever made, but I may talk about that in another post.

Tags: postmortem, story, voiceovers