Tag: VO Design
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Narrative Structure Is a Budget Decision (Part 3)
If you’ve read Parts 1 and 2, you now have a vocabulary for the distinct structures that tend to get lumped together under “branching narrative.” This is the part where I tell you how I actually use that vocabulary — and why the most important conversation about narrative structure usually happens in a budget meeting,…
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Stop Calling Everything a Branching Narrative: A Field Guide (Part 2)
If you haven’t read Part 1, the short version is this: “branching narrative” means different things to different people, and that ambiguity causes real problems when you’re trying to design, write, or budget a game. The goal of this series is to give you a shared vocabulary that actually holds up in a production meeting.…
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You Feel Nothing: The Problem with Second Person Storytelling in Games
There’s a book I used to keep on my desk in the office. Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney. Every time someone came to me with a design concept that had a particular problem baked into it, I’d hand them the book, tell them to read the first chapter, and let them figure out…
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Less Is More: A Framework for Game VO That Players Actually Listen To
There’s a version of this post that starts with a rant about Claptrap. We’ll get there. But first, a principle. Good game VO — the kind that actually lands, the kind players remember years later — isn’t really a writing problem. It’s an attention problem. And attention, it turns out, is one of the most…
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Sound High Level Thoughts
A few months back I was given the opportunity to put together and present a talk to the whole studio about game audio. Keeping it under twenty minutes meant staying deliberately high level — which was harder than it sounds, because audio is one of those topics where every thread you pull leads to three…
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A Few Approaches To Directing Actors
(Blogtober Day 8) Directing actors is a skill on it’s own. Although admittedly it can often seem simple particularly if your only experience witnessing the skill in action is in a professional studio, with well experienced actors, and a talented director who has been working with them on various projects over several years. That is…
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Generic Can Be Another Word For Useful
(Blogtober Day 7) Generally speaking voice over is recorded in sessions ranging from 2 to 4 hours in length. Typically the aim is to record somewhere in the ballpark of 200+ lines in 4 hours, although depending on the complexity of the lines that number could go down, or even up as high as 400+…
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What Is Voice Design
(Blogtober Day 1) First things first. What is Blogtober? Blogtober is a challenge to write a blog or article each day, every day in the month of October. 31 posts in 31 days. Please wish me luck! What Is Voice Over Design? Voice Over Design is a practice and/or discipline within interactive game development in…