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Four and a half months since my last post. Wow. Sorry, been busy! Crunch will do that to a person.

In that time, two new games have been released that I had involvement. The biggest of the two is Forza Motorsport 3, the newest iteration of the acclaimed racing franchise from Turn 10. The game has done incredibly well since its release in late October, achieving an average of 93 on Metacritic. This is the highest rated game I’ve ever been involved with, and I am ecstatic about its reception.

The other recent release is Gearbox Software’s Borderlands, a hybrid role-playing/shooter with more than a hint of Diablo-style gameplay. It too has done well, floating around the 84% mark on GameRankings, and selling strongly. I spent some time on this project before I made the move to Raven.

There’s a demo available for Forza 3 on the Xbox Live Marketplace. No word on a demo for Borderlands yet.

In other news, I recently spoke to two groups of students from Flashpoint Academy in Chicago, discussing the basics of what game audio people do every day and how to get a job in this particular field (ProTip: hire a hitman, then apply for the mark’s job). I’ll be part of a panel of game audio professionals at the November 19th IGDA Madison chapter meeting (7PM at Roman Candle in Middleton), discussing some audio topic that is yet to be determined. So if you’re in the area, stop by!
I’ve also been spending a lot of time in Visual Studio lately. Programming is a new addition to my skill set, but I’m doing well so far. I’ve been able to add some interesting and useful audio functionality to the Unreal engine, and I’m learning and doing more amazing things every day.

That is all! I’ll try to update again before March!

How many times have you seen something like that in a game script? Or something like “I need you to…” only to be followed by a line from another character cutting the initial character off? This is a HUGE pet peeve of mine. Humans don’t talk like this, so our game characters shouldn’t either.

I want you to practice cutting someone off verbally. Let them start a sentence and then talk over them half way through it. When you stomp on their sentence, listen carefully to how they react. They don’t stop talking immediately, if they even stop at all. Some people will keep right on going, happily ignoring your interruption. Most, however, will still get a word or two out after your interruption. The stop isn’t immediate. So why are we writing our scripts this way?

There are two steps to follow in order to solve this problem. First, write a complete line in the script, and use notation to indicate that the character is being cut off and where in the sentence he or she will be cut off. Then act out the scenes together. If you can get both characters in booths at the same session, great, but even if you can’t the voice director can fix this by playing the extra character. Make sure your actor knows that the line will be interrupted, but that they do not where in the line they will be cut off. Their copy of the script should be missing this notation. Instruct them to react as they normally would when being interrupted. Then have the other actor or the voice director cut them off by talking over them in their cue mix.

When you mix the results together in game, you’ll find that the transition plays out in a much more natural way.

A cousin of this problem is the cliché radio interference line. You’ve heard it in numerous games, and it often sounds unnatural. Why? Because the line, in the script, is often written as it is in the topic of this post. An actor trying to recreate this will not sound natural. Give them a complete line, let them read it, then make edits in post to distort or cover up the words you don’t want coming through. The result will, again, be far more natural.

These two issues are pet peeves because they’re simple to spot and simple to fix, yet games continue to get this wrong. It makes no sense to me. I’ve given you the solutions. Stop doing this. Please

Here’s your first (rather underwhelming) Unreal tip. I plan to write up more detailed and complicated items when I’m out of crunch. Soon I hope!

Kismet is your friend. It can do amazing and wonderful things, especially with some of the more recent features like Sound Modes. One problem I’ve encountered when scripting audio behavior in Kismet is controlling when an event fires off. Sometimes you want to ensure that a sound event is only triggered once, but you want to attach it to something that fires off multiple times. An example might be firing off a music track the first time one of a handful of checkpoints are activated. However, as the player moves through your world, you don’t want to hit play on the music track again when they pass the NEXT check point. Or maybe you want to play a scary sound effect the third time a player tries to open a locked door.

Enter the Switch. This little object has a series of outputs (definable in the properties) that will fire off in sequence every time the input is hit. The secret is that, no matter how many outputs you define, the switch will continue moving sequentially down the list. The definition of outputs in the properties only controls how many outputs are VISIBLE in kismet, not how many actually exist (which is a large number I imagine). So if you want a sound to fire off once and only once, drop a switch in the path from your activating event and the input of your PlaySound/Play Music/whatever. Connect output 1 to the Play input, and any further attempts to trigger the event will do nothing because they’ll be firing off the other outputs, which aren’t visible or connected to anything.

To create the above example of firing off a sound the third time a player tries to open a locked door, do the same thing, only expose three outputs on the Switch and connect the third output to your PlaySound input. Only on the third time will the sound fire.

The same technique can be used to ensure that two (or more) different events occur before a sound event occurs. Just connect the output of the two required events to the input of the switch, connect the second output to your play sound and you’re in business. This is fantastic for hooking up a dialog line to play when the player has completed a handful of tasks.

More to come.

last updated 11 April, 2009