getinthedamnbox: games, sounds, and other work by Matt B

Bulwark in the City of Flesh

Developer Diary #003

March 25, 2018

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Hi, welcome back. Here’s how I did with the to-do list from last time:

  1. Improve audio cues. Done.
  2. Clean up transitions between city and daydream. Done.
  3. Record and produce more placeholder dialogue. Done.
  4. Write dialogue.

With the audio cues I added, the audio game is inching closer to being playable. I added a tutorial that starts the player with a three-by-three grid and explains what to do. Then, later, they get ramped up to a six-by-six grid, and then finally the nine-by-nine Sudoku monster.

The video below demonstrates how the tutorial works. (Just like last time, there are no game visuals on screen. It’s a video of me working the keyboard and mouse.) After the three-by-three puzzle, I fast-forward to the first six-by-six puzzle.

Please forgive the placeholder voice work. Someday, the all-characters-voiced-by-me version of this thing will finally be done, and then I’ll be able to summon some help.

Thanks to 11linda for the horror vocals. They’re utterly bone-chilling and they make me feel bad for the trapped NPCs. I had intended to use those sound effects only as placeholders, but I might actually end up keeping them in a couple of spots.

If you’re curious, the game does have graphics, even though I hide them in the audio-game mode. I think it sort of ruins the magic of an audio game if you have the option to turn graphics on. Maybe I’ll make that an unlockable mode, though.

To-do list:

  1. Design puzzles.
  2. Add more audio cues.
  3. Write, record, and produce more dialogue.
  4. Program the interstitial Earth sequences.

I haven’t written much more dialogue since last time, but I did record and produce a lot of it. I’m up to around 400 clips total. That’s already ten times the number I had in HEARtREAD, but thankfully the systems I’m using make them much easier to manage.

The Earth sequences have been on the backburner for a while, but hopefully I can return to them over the next few weeks. The way I’ve set them up, they should work pretty much identically for both the audio-game and video-game modes.

Thanks for reading.