It’s beginning to feel like there’s a pattern to these posts. I write about how much better I’m doing, and immediately spend the next week being punished for my hubris.
Sure enough, after my last post I took a nice little weekend day trip, and immediately got laid out by some sort of cold for several days. No one else I visited, nor worked with got anything more than a little sniffle. Meanwhile, I get to spend 18 straight hours in bed. Neat.
Ultimately, it seems like it was nothing particularly major, but it’s hard to make a game while your brain is full of snot. And yet, here I am. Doing so.
One of the last things I did before getting KO’d by the universe was work on a little dialogue system for Ayanna – my in-game Cortana knock-off. Like Ayanna’s eye itself, I’ve rigged up the chat HUD with a few preset modes that I can switch between at any point. By combining them with her existing movement patterns and animations, and hooking them into my scene transitions, I’m aiming to be able to create some more complex, dynamic conversation sequences – with (relatively) little extra overhead on my part.
This kind of feels like a different ballgame to a lot of the previous stuff I’ve worked on – not in terms of the tools, really, as much as the considerations I have to make while making it. Functionally, this game is about the process of trying to navigate a desktop interface while the dialogue system from a visual novel actively tries to distract and/or kill you; there’s multiple layers of interface going on at any given time, with varying levels of dynamism, and some which, by design, have to interfere with one another. And they have to be set up in a way that feels like intentional level design, not crappy UI.
So, a fun challenge for me, basically.
As it stands, I’m using my tutorial sequence as a quick way of figuring out what does and doesn’t work. It’s a little ironic to be using the part of the game that teaches systems to design them, maybe – but if it works, it works!
There’s plenty of other new things this week, but the thing that’s actually relevant to this post is the sounds. There are sounds now. Entirely because I got tired of not having any.
Plenty of little clicks and shuffling sounds for UI clicks/movement, but the big one is the startup effect:
I’m not really much of a sound designer, historically, but I’ve spent enough time listening to actual startup sounds for the IT job to know what I wanted to do here. The startup jingle is just a standard, two-note doorbell sound I made in Google Music, and then ran through several layers of filtering. But, where the real-life Windows startup sounds have a calming, ethereal sort of echo to them, I wanted something a bit more sinister – so I gave it some vocoder/choral qualities to it. Like Ayanna is whistling it herself!
The other sound of note is the weird background noise.
Not exactly melodic, is it? Well, it wasn’t meant to be. I was aiming more for unsettling.
This is the sound of a computer fan. My computer fan, as it was running this Godot project. And then run through many, MANY layers of audio filters to the point that it sounds like it’s coming from the other end of a tunnel. Made of meat.
Is this a permanent sound effect? I doubt it. It was a bit of an experiment.
I spend a lot of time around the whirring of computer fans. Sometimes it feels like a soothing white noise, and sometimes (usually after 4 hours in the IT basement) it’s more of an irritating drone. After some fan noise snuck into one of my early YouTube uploads about this project, I was a bit curious about incorporating into the background of the game – while, of course, making it a bit weird.
Results are… eh. I think it works for a little prototype video, but I might look for something else soon. We’ll see.
Good lord, this was supposed to be shorter. This wasn’t even the post I was intending for this week. I’m almost done editing one about Riverboat Pachinko from before the whole… Unity situation. Oh well. That’ll come eventually.
In the meantime, thanks for reading this! In an effort to NOT get struck down by sudden illness for the third week in a row, I won’t make any statements about my project timeline – except that I vaguely plan to return to the slug-based dating sim I’m working on at some point soon. But that’s for another day.
Have a good one!
The Chep Site 
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