{"author_name":"Cosmologicon","cat":"LD #24","comments":[{"author_name":"johnfn","time":"August 27, 2012 4:37 pm","epoch":1346103420,"text":"Hey Cosmologicon, I remember you from the last Ludum Dare! This entry was great – even better than your last one, I think.","spam":"N"}],"epoch":1346101740,"likes":0,"metadata":{"p_key":"51810","p_author":"Cosmologicon","p_authorkey":"1151","p_urlkey":"87508","p_title":"Rise of the Morbels \u2013 postmortem #1: story and audio","p_cat":"LD #24","p_event":"LD24","p_time":"1346101740","p_likes":"0","p_comments":"1","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"1151","us_name":"Cosmologicon","us_username":"cosmologicon","event_start":"1345766400","event_key":"12","event_name":"LD24"},"text":"

[ play the game<\/a>\u00a0]<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wanted to make a game that focused on the story<\/strong> for once.\u00a0I 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.<\/p>\n

The story for Rise of the Morbels is based on one of the plots from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency<\/em> 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.\u00a0The story is delivered in voiceover<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

The sound quality’s not great, but I’m really happy with how the audio turned out<\/strong>, 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<\/strong> for a game. Even though it’s just four notes, I feel like it’s appropriate for the mood<\/strong>, especially since I don’t know anything at all about composition. Combined with some creepy sound effects, it’s not bad.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0Every line of dialogue is a separate sound file, so you have to download 89 ogg files<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/strong> here. It’s not the most fun or replayable game I’ve ever made, but I may talk about that in another post.<\/p>\n \n

Tags: postmortem<\/a>, story<\/a>, voiceovers<\/a><\/p>","time":"August 27th, 2012 4:09 pm","title":"Rise of the Morbels \u2013 postmortem #1: story and audio"}