Exchange of the session:

Them: wait! I thought the pitch shift was limited to 100% but you can type in any number you want! I shifted my voice frequency up 3000%!

Me: ...can you still hear it?

Them: Sort of! It sounds like a demented mosquito!

The last week of our "Making 2D Game Assets" online course for teens looks at creating audio. Most of the session was spent in the nitty gritty of how to normalize samples from different sources and clean up recordings so things sound good together, but we did also talk about a whole range of topics from voice acting to Foley work. We shared the references last time we ran the course as well, but the list has expanded a bit so I thought I'd share them again!

General recording advise

Remember: the secret sauce of audio is always the same! Get as quiet a space as you can, and start by normalizing and reducing noise. Save that version before you do anything else, you'll thank me for it later.

Royalty free music

Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) is a composer and musician who has a huge collection of high quality music searchable by a number of different criteria and freely available to use - with the one limitation that you must credit him somewhere appropriate for the place you use it. Apart from using it in games, a lot of it is just solidly good music and worth a listen. incompetech.com/music/royalt...

How to create 100 distinct voices

This is a video from a voice coach on how to get started creating distinct character voices, starting with the easiest aspects to vary and moving on to more difficult skills. youtube.com/watch?v=FVmAEezr...

Sonic Pi

Sonic Pi is a musical live coding tool, which can be used both for creating music live as well as for setting up a full piece of music in advance and then letting it play through as you record it. The tutorials and examples are first rate, and it is a useful tool for both turning music that's already written into a performance (i.e. you can find the sheet music or a chord sheet) as well as using the random elements available to create ambient music or even background noise. You can use it in the browser, or download it and install it on your computer (browser support is fairly new, and I know it wasn't working properly for one of you - the download may work better). sonic-pi.net/index.html

Wing - Dopamine

Apart from Foley work (see below!) I briefly mentioned how flexible the human voice can be at creating sound effects just on its own. Wing takes this to world class levels, creating videos like this using only his voice, microphone positioning, and some reverb (the only effect allowed in the competitions he enters) youtube.com/watch?v=qlrpeYdm...

If you're interested in finding out more, Wing has released a deep dive 40 minute technical break down of how to sound engineer a beatboxing album... or more realistically as a starter, Beatbox International are a YouTube channel who include some beginners tutorials on learning how to make different sounds.

The Magic of Making Sound

This video gives a whole bunch of examples of Foley work. It does assume a certain amount of equipment you won't have available, but the basics are always the same: make sure you can see the video you want to match the sounds to, record the sounds, normalize to your desired volume, and remove noise. youtube.com/watch?v=UO3N_PRI... #GameDev #VisualNovel #SoundDesign

If insanity "is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" but the extraordinary is often "just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect"...

...it strikes me that maybe the world needs more insane people with good intentions.

(this thought partly inspired by the talk Don't take the Black Pill from @[email protected] )

Whee! Tomorrow I get to edit an hour long video of me talking! What fun!

(yes, yes, this is sarcasm. I've yet to meet any one who enjoys editing videos of themselves...)

I'm currently running online sessions on how to create your own 2D art assets for teens, and leading to the following exchange:

Student: "Everyone who didn't sign up for this course is missing out on greatness!"

Me: looks silently at the greatness

Ouch. Wondering if it's a good idea to get the flu vaccine with #ChronicFatigue and the current medical guidance seems to be "normally a good idea 'coz if you catch flu with chronic fatigue it's much more likely to kill you - but there's a none zero chance it will cause a huge relapse in all your symptoms. Have fun!"

This is far too much fun. Mission Impossible on a traditional Chinese guzheng. No gimmicks or randomness, just a straight up cover, but it sounds fantastic.

youtube.com/watch?v=aTX8S2gi...

Another fun session teaching Ink yesterday, having a look at the two mirrored twins of short cut syntax: threads (for reusing the same choices in lots of places) and gathers (for quickly adding choices that will only ever be used in one place). One of the students is looking to build a basketball based visual novel and found it really helpful to have the two ways of thinking about the parts of his game; the mechanics of playing basketball will be built of lots of threads, with options coming and going depending on the state of the game, while conversations and dialogue will be built with gathers allowing for lots of specific context and helping the dialogue not sound repetitive. And we expanded out the LIST driven example from last week to start using some of the things we'd learned. #VisualNovel #GameDev #InteractiveFiction

@[email protected] My Italian wife is sometimes told she speaks very posh English because she naturally defaults to the words with Latin rather than Germanic roots - which is still a class ihdicator in the UK even if the Royals have been more German than French for quite a long time now.

Through a chain of events that all make sense individually, my son (just gone to uni) has this week been given exercises by one professor on how to write if statements in Python and asked by an other to translate postgraduate research prototyped in Matlab into native code with GPU compute support. This amuses me greatly.

@[email protected] How about "have seen many programming languages and found Ruby not to be a good fit for my brain/specific flavour of neurodivergence?"

Although even there, the problem isn't Ruby as such; I hit a brick wall on Rails being very opinionated and convention driven and I didn't agree with the opinions or like the conventions. There's very few languages I would say are "bad", and I'll avoid mentioning any by name to avoid stirring any pots.

@[email protected] My wife of 20+ years occasionally makes the statement "You're the one who's here" which depending on context, timing, and tone, can be absolutely amazing to hear or the harshest damning with the faintest praise.

@[email protected] I'm going back and forth on the fact my current profile lists that I'm a Christian. Not because I'm ashamed of Christ, or even being a Christian, but there are sure some other people using the term who I would prefer not to be associated with.

And there are a few Christian teachers out there who actually read the old testiment as the book it is rather than something to mine for pre-existing ideas, but they are rarer than I'd like. If anyone reading here is interested, Tim Mackie studied the bible as a scholar first and then when he became a pastor he started giving a series of talks he's now grouped under the heading "[Exploring my Strange Bible](https://bibleproject.com/podcasts/shows/exploring-my-strange-bible/)" because he realized most of the people in the churches he was teaching at had no idea just how different the bible was from what they thought. It is not a modern Western book written by or for a Western culture, and in fact (as you're no doubt aware), it isn't really a "book" at all.

@[email protected] Indeed. "I'm sorry to be pedantic, but your entire world view is an abomination based on centuries of lies and when talking about your chosen topic you didn't mention my unrelated favourite conspiracy theory once meaning your opinion is invalid."

Did you know you can publish your #VisualNovel from VisualInk to be played on Itch, allowing you to build a community or submit it to a game jam? No? That's probably because until now you couldn't.

But now you can. We have instructions and everything. #GameDev #InteractiveFiction #GameJam

@[email protected] My aunt used to work in the secretarial pool of a lawyer's office (back when that was a thing) and apparently on one occasion typed out entire dictated letter and took it to the lawyer to sign before noticing she'd started touch typing with her fingers on the wrong home keys.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Yes! The number of interview panels I've sat on where interviewers tried to find "the signal" to compare the remaining candidates when in reality our process just couldn't distinguish any further.

That's what I loved about this manager's approach. He liked to comment that if he told a prospective hire they'd be working with the "best of the best" he was revealing himself a lier and encouraging the arrogant to apply. While if he told them he would move heaven and earth to ensure they never had to work with an arsehole, it was something he could genuinely aim for with the tools available.

Of course, we did still want to assess competence/aptitude, and I don't really feel we did any better at that than anyone else. Nice team to work with though!

@[email protected] @[email protected] I spoke to one manager who (with rare insight and humility in my experience) pointed out that if he couldn't be 100% confident in the accuracy of his interview process - which he was not - it was much more important for him to focus on "not hiring someone bad" than "not missing the best possible person". After all - hiring someone bad is an immediate negative impact, hiring someone who wasn't "the best" was at worst a small opportunity loss.

Having come to that conclusion, he then thought about what made a hire "bad" and immediately prioritised personality over technical skill, with the only immediate way to fail the interview process being to reveal yourself as an arsehole to the interviewers. You still might not get the job enough other candidates appeared to have better technical skills, but no amount of apparently technical skill would get you through if you (for example) answered questions a female interviewer asked you by speaking exclusively to their male colleage.

Apart from the fact I agreed with his priorities, it did give me pause for thought on a lot of the ideas around "objective hiring" (and I've worked in local government, so I've seen... things... done in an attempt to make hiring objective). Apart from the fact we're terrible at assessing competence, in many cases it feels like it shouldn't even be the most important factor.

This week in our #VisualNovel course we looked at using LISTs in #Ink to keep track of what is going on in our game.

If you're curious, you can both playthrough and view the Ink script for the example we were working through, using lists to keep track of things like which spells the player has available and which party members they have with them. #InteractiveFiction #GameDev

I have just sent out a Google Form to ask people about when they'd like training on how to use Google Forms. I would say this is Meta Google training, but that would probably involve far too many lawyers.