Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Placeholders temporarily take the place of robust assets to follow—thus
living up to the term—but some provide no real sense of what the final as-
sets will be like. These are unreliable placeholders and are often not par-
ticularly helpful.
A console game on which I once worked included a plan for a robust
systemic VO system. During development, well before we cast actors and
recorded the thousands of lines of dialogue required for such a system,
technical work on the system itself proceeded apace. In order to “prove”
that it was working—i.e. firing off voice lines when appropriate trigger con-
ditions had been met—the audio engineers used a single placeholder VO
file (a man saying “One”) combined with caption text featuring the actual,
correct VO line.
Once the system was integrated, the first thing most team members did
was to adjust their audio options so they didn't have to hear the word
“one” constantly being spoken as they played the build—understandable,
but hardly ideal.
Worse, using a single placeholder audio file to stand in for the thousands
that were to eventually follow ended up concealing some major bugs in
the system. Once the final audio files began to be dropped in toward the
end of the Production phase, hundreds of strange errors started showing
up, such as female characters speaking with male voices and vice versa.
And because these numerous issues were discovered so late in the
cycle, many of them remained unfixed and shipped in the final game.
Game reviewers (and players, it can be assumed) did not miss these odd
bugs. So yes, we had placeholders, but they proved quite unreliable.
We will dig deeper into the subjects of audio systems design, audio en-
gineering, and support in the next chapter.
On-Site versus Off-Site
Narrative experts aren't always incorporated as full-time, on-site members
of a development team. While the aforementioned BioWare and a few
other studios have invested heavily in this area, bringing full-time writers,
narrative designers, and even editors on staff, it's still more common for
narrative team members to be contractors, often doing some or all of their
work from off-site. From an organizational point of view this can, of
course, pose a number of challenges. From an engineering perspective, it
has the potential to complicate the process by which these writers will in-
tegrate their content into the game.
