Hello Reclaimers,
Back with another update on Rogue Core’s development! But this won’t be the usual Dev Diary format. In fact, we’re changing things up.
There’s loads to do as we push toward Early Access, which means our writing team (me) doesn’t have as much time to work on Dev Diary posts. Moving ahead, we’ll focus on Dev Peeks (genius name), which are gonna be shorter, more focused, and more frequent. Exactly how frequent remains to be seen.
Until we get our Writer Cloning Machine working, this is how we’ll balance our own needs for in-game writing with keeping you all updated on what we’re up to.
Figuring out how to do this feels like the picture below.
Writing voice lines
Confronting a real-deal Early Access launch means that the thousands of placeholder texts scribbled down over the past few years all need proofreading, and fast. That means tooltips, the reference manual, tutorial texts, everything.
It also involves finding areas where we still need voicelines (from dwarves or OMEGA), and writing lines so we still have time to get them recorded.
Down below is a peek at the document we use for writing and archiving all our voicelines. We have one for dwarves and one for OMEGA. They're just regular old spreadsheets, spooling down for thousands of rows.
Here’s how the process works:
- The Game Design team flags a need for a voice prompt (“We want to guide players to check their Intel progression system regularly, and reward them for collecting Intel. Maybe OMEGA could say something when you get back from a mission?”)
- Writer comes up with lines that meet this purpose. You need to come up with a lot of variations, more than you’d think. This is so that it doesn’t sound repetitive when that line prompt comes up multiple times.
- Writer sanity-checks this with the Game Designers, to make sure we’re accurately representing how the game systems actually work.
- Writer, who in this case is also the voice of OMEGA, goes in and records the lines in our sound studio, with the help of Sound Engineer.
- Sound Engineer then masters and filters the voice, and hooks it up into the game, so the lines cue at the appropriate time.
- Development team playtests on regular intervals, and lets us know if the lines are cool or if they suck. In the case of the latter, we revise and redo them.
So far, OMEGA has just under 1,000 lines written, and the dwarves already have a couple thousand lines. It’ll keep growing, though.
The Ramrod's Memorial Hall (WIP)
One spot where we're writing and testing voicelines is for the new Memorial Hall. Still unsure of how that whole process is going to work, and the hall itself is still WIP. But here’s a first look at the space:
Okay that’s it for this one! Hopefully we can announce a Playtest 06 one of these days. Maybe this coming month? Nothing locked in yet though. Stay tuned.
See you soon. Rock and Stone, Reclaimers.
With love,
-The Ghost Ship Crew