Designer Blog #5

(note: images shown are the documents that are discussed in this blog. They can also be seen at the top as a scroll wheel )

Hello!

And welcome back to Perry’s Pies! This is Designer Blog #5 for Perry’s Pies. Perry’s Pies is an action horror game where the player has to use various deterrents and attractions to outsmart and outrun Perry while trying to find the keys hidden around the floors in order to escape. In this blog, I will be discussing the work I’ve done during Sprint 5 and the design choices I made along the way. As stated previously, my name is Abbey and I am the Lead Designer. Brad Farris is my producer for the game. If you would like more information on what amazing and cool things the rest of my team was working on, head on over to his blog titled, “Producer Devlog 5”.  If you would like to play our most recent build, it will be at the bottom of this page! : D

During this sprint, there was a lot of fun and exciting progress made. One of the biggest tasks that I was able to complete was prepping and recording the lines for the voice acting of Perry and Jessie! Recording the voice acting lines was one of my main goals for this sprint, so it ended up being a big part of my focus and time. This was really cool and a new experience for me because I have never worked on games that had voice acting before nor never worked specifically on voice acting. In order to make it all happen, I prepped a voice acting document for the voice actors. I wasn’t quite sure how to efficiently make a voice acting document for the actors, so I had to do some research. I took the time to do some extra research because I wanted to make sure I was clearly communicating what I was wanting Perry and Jessie to sound like. I also wanted to see how studios did voice acting professionally, so that way I knew how to approach and handle this type of stuff in the future. 

For Perry, I wanted him to sound like a middle aged man. Due to Perry being middle aged himself, this required an actor who could do a very mature and grown voice. I wanted this because it matched what Perry’s model looks like and also matched what I was envisioning his age range to be when I first thought of him. I also wanted Perry to sound a little bit like Frankenstein and have a zombie-esque sound due to how Perry is zombie-looking and how it would very much fit his rotting aesthetic. When it came to Jessie and how they sounded, I wanted them to sound like they were late middle school or early high school. Since Jessie is so young, this required a younger sounding actor. In the acting document, I included these descriptions along with references that the actors could use to help them embody what Perry and Jessie sounded like. I also had included all the scripts that were needed for Perry and Jessie for recording as well. 

Once that document was done, I gave it to my actors so they could look it over and practice for a couple of days before they were recorded. While they were doing that, I had to coordinate with my sound artist on where we should record the lines and what equipment we were able to acquire. We, at first, tried reserving a studio at our school, but once we saw how far out the booking was, we had to adjust to it. Our solution to not being able to book was to find a room with the least amount of reverb and echoing. We were lucky enough to find a room where there wasn’t so much echoing and not a lot of background AC noise. This is where we ended up recording lines for Perry and Jessie. Once recording was done and the actors were able to run various versions of recording, my sound artist took the recordings to polish them up and edit them to sound even closer to what I was envisioning. 

After the voice acting was done, I switched my focus to making a credits document with everyone who has worked on the game and what department they were in. I chose to work on this after recording the acting for a couple of different reasons. I wanted to make sure that everyone who worked on the game was not getting missed. I also worked on this because I knew the team was getting close to wrapping up the project soon and I knew that this was something that needed to be done at some point. It was also something that I could finish very fast, as well. Since voice acting and credits were done, I made sure to add those to the GDD, in order to make sure the GDD stays up to date with all the elements we have for Perry’s  Pies.

 Once I did that, I moved on to making a document for my 2D artist that had all the UI assets and what they do, so that way they are able to start putting together the controls page. On the controls page, I wanted the player to be able to clearly read not just the controls, but be able to read briefly on attractions, deterrents, and Nemostar the hint skeleton (in case they can’t find the keys). I wanted the attractions and deterrents on the controls UI because I wanted to be able to introduce to the player and make them aware that there are attractions and deterrents, since those are key factors of the game. I also wanted them there so that when the player looks up the controls, they can also have a spot where they can remind themselves what the items do. In this document, I also wrote out the explanations for the attractions and deterrents, so that way my artist could immediately add it to the UI without having to guess what they were supposed to put there. 

After completing the controls document, I went on to make the narrative text for Nemostar. I did this because not only Nemostar would be giving hints, they would also be giving some backstory as to why Perry is the way he is and be giving the lore behind the game. I also made this document because my programmers needed it for when they started programming Nemostar for the hints, they can also add his lore parts too and be more efficient. While making the lore wasn’t too difficult because I already knew the whole backstory of it all, I did struggle a little bit with making sure I wasn’t repeating myself on some of the notes and struggled with making it clear to the reader. In order to combat the repetitiveness and to make sure  the player was able to understand the lore, I had some people who didn’t know much about the game read the lore notes I had made. After getting feedback, I would then go and change what needed to be changed and ask them once again how it would sound now. In a way, I was “playtesting” my notes and making sure they were able to be followed smoothly. Speaking of playtesting, while I was doing the voice acting, credits document, controls document, etc I was also running external playtests for the levels that were completed. These external playtests gave us some really good feedback on the levels. A lot of the feedback that was given were luckily not huge changes but little changes that were very quick and easy to do. 

In  Sprint 6, my focus will mainly be playtesting everything that has recently been added to the game from Sprint 5, along with prepping the itch page for Perry’s Pies complete release in the coming December.