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Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical

Freshly Squeezed Progress Report – Finished Help Pages, Custom Worker Barks

Last week, I reported that I was making decent progress towards the last tasks before Toy Factory Fixer was ready for a v1.0 release, starting with adding music to the menus, allowing the player to mute and unmute the audio as they please, and starting work on the in-game help menus.

I continued my work this past sprint.

Sprint 47: Release criteria

Planned and Complete:

  • Create How To Play menu

Planned and Incomplete:

  • Update worker grunts

I did not get as much game development in the last week as I usually do. That said, I finished the in-game help, including giving the player an indication of which page and how many pages they are currently viewing.

Toy Factory Fixer - help page

Toy Factory Fixer - help page

As for the worker grunts/barks, the current audio that plays comes from a royalty-free collection of audio I got either from a GDC giveaway from Sonniss or a Humble Bundle. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough variety in those collections, so I decided to make my own.

I spent part of an evening in a room recording myself saying various phrases that I want the workers to say. My USB microphone and laptop weren’t giving me the quality I needed, so I used a Sony IC Recorder I bought in 2012 for a conference I was helping to run as I was recording the presentations.

When I felt I had recorded enough options, I used Audacity and sorted the phrases into tracks so I could choose from among the best options.

Toy Factory Fixer - Audacity with multiple worker audio tracks

I cleaned up the noise, lowered the pitch down on a few clips, and ended up with a bunch of barks for the Strong Worker to say.

Unfortunately, since I didn’t get as much time in for game development, I didn’t get to repeat the same kind of work for the other two worker types.

I expect I will be able to finish it early this coming week, and despite having a relatively slow week, I think I’m still on track to get this game out later this month.

Thanks for reading!

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