BLACKHOLE

I’d be lying if I said I’m writing today’s entry with joy. I’d be lying if I said that at the moment, everything feels jolly. Because that’s not the truth. Indeed. It’s 1:30 AM a I have just finished editing and exporting the last part of Selassie. I thought I’ll die during the editing. Don’t get me wrong, the dialogs are great, Selassie is, too. But my sound editing software just keeps crushing down.

I don’t know what’s wrong. First 50 % replicas for Blackhole for all the characters was problem-less, yesterday I restarted my PC and bam! After like 3 saved replicas came a crash. Not even the process got saved, so I had to synchronize according to what I could remember, ID at the screenplay and a time mark. It’s not that much of a problem, but those who know me can imagine how I just snap when stuff like that happens.

Listen to a sample of soundtrack

Finally the boys, Jakub and Honza, our dear composers, just settled down on the pieces that we’ll show to the world! We let out the soundtrack preview, and we’re hoping you’ll like it! Enjoy!

Seeker‘s finals came about

Haven’t I told you? Not all of us are able to focus on Blackhole 100% of the time, some of us are still studying. So Seeker is having a bit of a pause – and I needn’t remind you that he’s one of the most important people for Blackhole. Seeker is the one to do the main programming and to put ‘the director’ together (the animations and scripts). It’s not just fun and games, honestly we already wanted to hire a helping programmer before, but none that’d fully understand Seeker’s complicated code has come up yet. They usually leave us with: “Nope, he’s a madman.” Or “That’s too short.” Or better yet: “How the heck was he even able to write this up in one line so logically?!”

Simply said, it’s Seeker’s doing that we’re able to create the game in Game Maker Studio, because if he hadn’t optimized the code like he had, the game would keep crashing because of the lack of memory, the characters would probably get stuck at walls and the game would load for an eternity.

And I’m not even speaking about the final optimization. I mean that not me, not Gelu, or anyone from the team who can actually program, understands some of the coding. Not that we don’t know how things work – you can work that our just by looking at it. But we’d never think of this kind of approach.

Let’s make this short: Seeker rocks. He’s in finals time. We need him to manage. The team has split as much of the work as possible between each other. As for me, I’m going to do designing of a couple of levels. Sort a looking forward to it :).

Dubbing is 70 % ready

I hope to finally get to cutting the final Auriel tomorrow. Both Czech and English. Honestly, I’m not very excited. First off, I have all her lines perfectly memorized - I wrote them, after all. But mainly, this will be my probably 60th time hearing them.

How does the preparation of dubbing even happen? First the recording is done in a studio. There is, as you probably expect, also the parts which you want to cut out. And that’s why you need to sit down and cut out everything you don’t want in the game from the record. The final cut-down travels from you to mastering (in my case it goes to Jakub), and that is where all the necessary edits are taken care of; the removal of hum, rustle, echo, artifacts, the normalization of the volume and fixing the tone of voices or the parts that you, for example, can’t understand.

A record that is edited like this comes back to you and you have to load it and cut out the voice actors breathing, cracking, simply anything that the mastering didn’t take care of, or made hearable.  Then you take what you have and send it for final editing again. And when you get it back once more, you load it again and finally, cut it into parts according to the game screenplay and you apply filters. For example, when Ati speaks to the player on Entity, he speaks through walkie-talkie. But when they speak on the spaceship, they speak normally. Usually, effects like these are made ingame, but we want to keep the cross-platform support with Game Maker Studio, so we don’t have that opportunity. Everything is done the hard way. 

All that is left is to finish up on Auriel tomorrow. And I’m going to pray that my software stops crashing down, because otherwise I’m gonna go crazy. Because Auriel has more than 1 hour of dialogues in the game. So the export of the final version will take about 3 – 4 times longer than my recording. Four hours Czech Auriel, four the English one.

It is a repetitive. Longish. Hard work. But I can do it, I’m just going a tiny bit mad from it all. Now as I lay down to sleep, I can hear Selassie whispering fairy tales about Entity in my ear. That’s no good at all.

A while we are at the repeating...

If you’re interested in how Gelu’s doing. Well… let’s just say that this explains everything. Today, he discovered how much he needs to remake in the labyrinth, where you save Selassie. 

Yes. All these points are waiting to be replaced. Mwahahaha!

We all need a hug and some decent sleep. We’ll turn up tomorrow again ;). Keep your fingers crossed for us.