Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
testing, no one in QA was
andcouldweplease
remove the bark technology until more barks were recorded. The bark was so reviled, we had to
remove it entirely from the game.
“
ever likely to ever visit the @%$#& Hoover Dam
”
Game Fiction
Characters talking among themselves or straight to the player are an excellent way to
give objectives or clues. If you do this, you must beware of a few gotchas. First, you
shouldn
s heard it before. Second,
you should record a summary of the clue or objective in a form that can be refer-
enced later
'
t force the player to listen to the speech again if he
'
—
'
s too easy to miss something in a speech-only clue. The third gotcha
involves localization.
One game that comes to mind that solved the first gotcha in an interesting way was
Munch
it
s Odyssey, an Xbox launch title. Throughout the game, this funny mystic
character appears and tells you exactly what you need to do to beat the level. If
you
'
ve heard the spiel before, you can hit a button on the controller and your char-
acter, Abe or Munch, will
'
interrupt and say something like,
“
I
'
ve heard all this
”
“
…”
before,
and disappear. Very effective.
The second gotcha is usually solved with some kind of in-game notebook or objec-
tives page. It
and the mystic guy will bark,
Whatever
s too easy to miss something in scripted speech, especially when it tends
to be more colorful and therefore a little easier to miss the point entirely. Almost
every mission-based game has this design conceit
'
—
it keeps the players on track and
keeps them from getting lost.
The last gotcha has to do with language translation. What if you record your speech
in English and want to sell your game in Japan? Clearly, the solution involves some
kind of subtitle to go along with the scripted speech. Re-recording the audio can be
prohibitively expensive if you have a huge script and a small budget.
Lip Synching
Synching the speech files to in-game character animations is challenging, from both a
technology and tools standpoint. This is yet another one of those topics that could
use an entire book, so let me at least convince you that the problem is a big one
and not one to be taken lightly or without experience.
It turns out that human speech has a relatively small number of unique sounds and
sound combinations. You can create convincing speech with only a few dozen
sounds. Since each sound is made with a particular position of the mouth and ton-
gue, it follows that an artist can create these positions in a character ahead of time.
