Discussion

@[email protected] Thank you! All appears to be working .

Changed some config and would like a sanity check: if you see this would you mind liking or replying? If it's already been replied to, feel free to ignore

@[email protected] @[email protected] I had this about a year ago with a laptop and external monitor, lasted for a while and then stopped. I never turned any settings on or off that I can remember.

@[email protected] @[email protected] This has reminded me of a moment from a book I read about forty years ago where in the one scene the hero escapes being blown up by aliens with supierior tech who have learned to predict his AI pilot by attaching a ball of string to the controls and getting a cat to play with it, demonstrating cats are superior to AI. I remember nothing else about this book at all, but it seems the important lesson stuck.

Well, my latest "Making 2D Game Assets" course at ThinkersMeetup has just finished, which is sad. But the week before, on hearing that the final session was going to be on audio asset creation, Max Bumm decided to take all the visual art techniques from the first four sessions and make this cracking little animation to share. Max commented on a previous session that "Everyone who didn't sign up for this course is missing out on greatness!". He was right, but unfortunately I can't guarantee that Max will be there if you come to one of my courses in the future.

Thanks Max!

(For the purists among you, I've deliberately blown up the animation because most feeds do a terrible job of displaying pixel art - Max's #Krita original is pixel perfect and crisp) #GameDev #PixelArt #Animation

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

@VisualInk It's always a good day when I get to introduce more people to Sonic Pi. Thanks @[email protected] !

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