Senior Year

[EwanG]

Appreciate all the reviews so far, and look forward to those to come.

Have a favor to ask, though. I notice that Wikipedia has a full category for Visual Novels, and I'd love to see even a short article about Senior Year in there. Writing it myself presents a problem because I've never done an article from scratch on Wikipedia - and because it feels a bit like advertising. So I'm wondering if one of y'all would be so kind...

Feel free to use any of the graphics from the bklovr website or your own captures if you do so. And please share the Wikipedia link here if you enter it.

Thanks,
Ewan

[Mirielle]

Okay. Review time.

So far I've played through all but Carla's although I got halfway through that before deciding I wasn't serious about her... and decided to go with Linda's path. I know, I know, horribly biased but I wanted to see how my voice sounded.

Which was terrible and you could tell that I was still suffering from a cold.

Ahem, I pretty much got through nearly all the paths within 1 and a half hours to 2 hours, so it was reasonably long, but everything seemed to move a little too quickly and didn't really allow for much pure romance?

I mean, within the first 10 or so minutes you're having sex with a character? And you've only known them for...a few days? Maybe it's just me thinking that...

Anyway, since I'm not much of an expert when it comes to technical features, I'll comment on the voice work. In alphabetical order.

Annette - Azure had nice clear recordings and she had a lot of emotion in her lines. The accent was also a nice touch and it really brought out her character for me. I think that based on performance and quality alone, hers was one of the best. (Plus I'm a fan.)

Becky - Hmm...I wasn't all too fond of Becky's voice in the beginning but it kinda grew on me? I had imagined Becky to have a higher and perkier voice which wasn't quite captured in papillion's performance, however she did display a new side to Becky which is commendable. One thing I should nitpick at was her recording quality, which needs to be cleaned up because it had a sort of buzzing/hollow quality. But overall, good work.

Carla - This was the first time I have ever heard Taco's voice! I was pleasantly surprised. While the accent was sometimes off, it was pretty convincing and didn't detract from her clear voice and tone. So I liked the voice quite alot.

Julie - Chesire has a wonderful voice, but the quality brought the experience down for me. I think she needs to find someway to eliminate the staticy background noise in order for her great vocals to come through. And while her accent was a little iffy at the beginning, it became more solid towards the end.

Linda - Let's skip me.

Anyway, this was very enjoyable and a nice, light sort of VN. The music choices were nice, except for that sort of windpipe track in Linda's...
The backgrounds looked great and so did the character designs. Although I think a greater range of character poses and facial expressions would've been better?

Overall, it was a fun, light and enjoyable VN! Congratulations on making the first ever fully voiced OEL Visual Novel!

[papillon]

I have a *terrible* microphone, which I explained when I started all this, and was quite willing to be replaced if someone else were available. I've never been involved in voice acting projects - should I ever do this again I will probably wait to get better equipment.

For future projects it might be nice to give out more of the script than just the sections with lines for each person to speak, or slightly fuller explanations of the characters. I remember being surprised a couple of times at the ways Becky was described in lines I didn't know about.

It's fun - but definitely a little surprising in how fast everyone moves!

[PyTom]

I'm wondering... with what settings were the voice files compressed? Is the reason the game moved so quickly the need to reduce the size of the game?

I'm just curious here, and I'm wondering if we could shrink it down some.

[monele]

Which was terrible and you could tell that I was still suffering from a cold.

Ohh, so it *was* a cold ^^;... Well I hope to hear you with the clear voice sometimes ^^

Aah, so papillion = papillon?? Quite a surprise

[EwanG]

This is long. I apologize in advance. But I'm getting the feeling there are some things I SHOULD address that I hadn't planned to earlier.

First, and please reply via PM or email not to this thread so you can be brutally honest if necessary, I'd like to ask if folks think I should even go forward with my plans for Camp Handiba after having seen Senior Year. I'm trying to take the point of view that all the discussion about this release is a compliment to how much interest y'all have in what was produced, and what I may produce next. But I figure I should make sure I'm not looking at this with rosy glasses welded to my head

In terms of the voices - I have to take full responsibility for the quality of what came out in the final product. For Linda's voice, I honestly thought the slight cold that Mirielle had made her southern accent sound better. And in fact, she's the only one who has complained about that coming through in her voice - so I suspect that's some overly self-conscious criticism. The only other comment about Linda's voice I've received is that one other person thought she sounded "too old" for her role. Given that Linda is supposed to be 21 to 22, and Mirielle is 16(?) I kind of took that with a grain of salt.

On the other voices, I had to make decisions based on how soon I wanted to release the game, and how much I felt comfortable asking from folks who were already putting a lot of effort in. I certainly could have asked folks to do retakes or tried to recast. However, since one of the goals of this game was to see if I could even do this, being my first ever VN, I was more interested in getting something out there than in necessarily making it as polished as it possibly could have been.

In terms of flow. I would remind folks that the protagonist has known Linda and Carla for nearly four years at this point. So having them be a little fast on the gun was sort of a "it's taken you long enough, bud" sort of reaction. For the others, it might be a little odd to have folks only date for a couple weeks before getting into bed, or it might not. I obviously COULD have put more into those story lines. In fact Julie's part was originally twice as long as it currently is. Again, I made a decision that I wanted to make it easier on the voice cast, AND that I was trying to get something out there.

Would I do things differently now based on what I've learned from this project? Yes! That's part of the reason I did this. To figure out how the parts go together, to see how different things work, and to see what I can do myself and what I have to ask others to do even if it means it takes longer.

On the technical side - Most of the files I received were Mono, 44KhZ MP3 or WAV files. I wanted to stick with a single format, and so the WAV files were reencoded as MP3 using Audacity and the LAME codec.

My specific process was to pull all of the files for a particular actor in, run Normalize with the default settings, run Compression (which doesn't make the files smaller, but makes them more consistent in terms of where the sound levels are), and then export as MP3. I would then go back and do individual tweaks if something was particularly noisy, or occasionally to change the tempo of a line if someone was a bit fast or slow compared to what I thought sounded right.

I hope this helps folks understand the decisions I made, and I hope this helps other folks who might be writing their stories to guide them when facing these same issues. If nothing else, I can honestly say I've been enjoying talking and in some cases working with the folks on here, and it's been a real pleasure to do so.

FWIW,
Ewan

[DaFool]

If its any consolation, this project convinced me of the viability and feasibility of voiced games.

Mind you, I only have a stereo sound card, so maybe I was not too keen on spotting audio defects.

[mikey]

First, and please reply via PM or email not to this thread so you can be brutally honest if necessary, I'd like to ask if folks think I should even go forward with my plans for Camp Handiba after having seen Senior Year.

Okay, this isn't really PM material, but, honestly, brutally... this isn't the right way of thinking. You had the great honor of working with FIVE different people, they did it for your game, in their spare time - what else can you possibly want? So the sound quality is different, big deal. I think it's nice to explain WHY this and that turned out like it did, but at least for these forums, we understand. I don't see a reason to justify the choices you've made with this VN (flirty, condensed relation development) beyond a simple explanation - I myself have made many many tradeoffs in many areas with my games, and in the end, I for instance never saw any reason to bash Glumanda (Secretay Of Death artist) for her drawing skills and let her redraw things until it was "reasonably" fine. Ambition should come from the artist herself, and it's actually also my job to tone that ambition down if needs to be, so that the project can be completed (like not going for the coloring and making everything BW). Besides, recasting would be really insulting, I wouldn't really do it unless the person specifically asks for it AND I know him personally.

So I don't know why you should question Camp Handiba's development - this VN was really great and despite not liking flirty games, I actually played some of the paths twice - because I enjoy playing fanmade OEL games. And the voices make it a more personal effort, and you can see it from the game.

Yes, the people over at visualnews will definitely see this differently. But that's the nature of the community - in essence what the vast majority of us here do is freeware game development. And it takes a special kind of player to appreciate such games (unless they are "pro quality", which most of them aren't). Just go to your favorite freeware game site and download an average game - it will probably be some arcade-ish thing with badly drawn sprites - of course you can tear that game apart in your review, because it doesn't really stack up to anything and tries to be like the commercial shooters, but that's missing the point. It IS valid criticism, but it's still missing the point.

I can honestly say I've been enjoying talking and in some cases working with the folks on here, and it's been a real pleasure to do so.

And, completing a game together, this is more than enough, I'd say. Of course, don't take this as me wanting to say "everything is fine as long as you like what you do" - but partially this is actually true. It's always a balance between ambition and getting things done and SY proved you can see things through, people's times and efforts aren't wasted... and actually, welcome to the game-maker's club!

[PyTom]

Hm... I think I'd take a lessons learned approach to this, rather than trying to be so critical that I never make a game again.

I think that it's important that the game be made on its own, without voice acting, and only then should you add VAing to it. It seemed to me that the voice acting was present early (during the first beta), and once it exists it limits the changes you can make to the game. On handiaba, I'd suggest making (and perhaps even releasing) the game without voice support, and only then going back and adding it... without worrying too much about game size.

I just did some experiments... I took one of the mp3 files, and recompressed it as ogg vorbis with quality 1. The result was a file that was 1/3rd the size, and I couldn't tell the difference. (Note: my ears aren't that great.)

There are quite a few good things about SY--- The basic structure of the game, including the walk scene, was quite well done.

I liked the way Annette was a hidden character, but one with foreshadowing in the other arcs. (And I liked her arc in general.) She also was the most forward of the characters, so her arc felt fairly right to me.

In fact, I liked most of the characters... I think I would have liked it if we could have gotten to know them a bit better.

[papillon]

papillion = papillon??

y'know, the funny thing is, my REAL name is constantly getting spelled or pronounced wrong - I honestly am from the South and I heard a lot of 'Georgiana' from strangers because of it - so what do I do, I go and pick a French nickname that is extremely commonly typoed


Oh yes, and for SY - I'm in the Annette camp too.


My only worry with Camp Handiba is that the vague plans sometimes described are SO ambitious that I'm afraid you'll find yourself either not finishing or cutting back and cutting back and cutting back until you have a skeleton that you're not really happy with. A small and perfectly-formed section of the whole may be better than a framework full of holes. Since you're *not* doing commercial games there's no need to have a huge all-at-once release with everything complete...

Has anyone tried releasing games with just one path first and then slowly adding in paths in new releases as if they were side-stories? That would also help with the 'will anyone want to play this for 40 hours' worry - if individual stories are added at different dates then it wouldn't feel daunting, and being sort of like an ongoing series could help build up interest from people always looking forward to the next installment...

[DaFool]

My only worry with Camp Handiba is that the vague plans sometimes described are SO ambitious that I'm afraid you'll find yourself either not finishing or cutting back and cutting back and cutting back until you have a skeleton that you're not really happy with. A small and perfectly-formed section of the whole may be better than a framework full of holes. Since you're *not* doing commercial games there's no need to have a huge all-at-once release with everything complete...

Has anyone tried releasing games with just one path first and then slowly adding in paths in new releases as if they were side-stories? That would also help with the 'will anyone want to play this for 40 hours' worry - if individual stories are added at different dates then it wouldn't feel daunting, and being sort of like an ongoing series could help build up interest from people always looking forward to the next installment...

Sorry to say but this is also a problematic approach, just look at Controlled Chaos. I excitedly followed each chapter installment until recently...now I'm like, "uh, just finish it already".

I like EwanG's strategy of staking out the turf (resources) before pulling it all together. It was contrary to the common knowledge of writing everything first before artwork, etc. and yet it still worked.

If ever there will be a problem with Camp Handiba, just need to wait a few more months and the Superdoll engine will be finished, as well as a background constructor tool. These projects were specifically made for epic-scope games (namely, the two projects I am working on).

[papillon]

I admit I *haven't* played Controlled Chaos - but that's precisely because I got the impression it was being released in 'chapters', which is different from what I'm proposing. Chapters implies that the story isn't finished and you're always being left hanging, whereas releasing with one major branch complete from beginning to end and then having side-story releases that add a new branch also complete from beginning to end means that there's always a complete game experience available.

I don't know if it's actually a good idea or not, but I don't think it's the same as what's been done before.


But sure, if the art-generation projects actually work out, that will be a big change in how large-scale game development can work.

[EwanG]

We should probably really be discussing this in the Camp Handiba Development Thread...

But since we're here anyway... Handiba as I currently have it planned would not be easily setup for a single path with other paths added later. I could replan it to suit that, but I think it would be to the detriment of the story.

Essentially, at this point, what I have is something that borrows a bit from Ever 17 in terms of how the game/story is "solved". You will need to play from each of the protagonists viewpoints (the sister and the brother) at least once. Depending on how you play them, you may need to play each more than once. After you've played both of those viewpoints, you open the final storyline, which is the handicapped sister's viewpoint. That is the one that helps you to understand the complete story.

One change I know I'm going to make is in the character names. Because of the anime style of art, I had been going with Japanese names. But the setting of the camp is in Northern California, and much of the mythology behind what is happening is based on Native American beliefs - particularly about the Fourth World and the Fifth World. So I might as well use American names as well.

I agree with one earlier poster about what this will mean about the sheer size of the game. With luck, it will fit on a single CD. That may mean I have no choice but to charge a minimal fee to ship a physical package for folks who can't handle that large a DL, and certainly what that will mean in terms of DL bandwidth may also require some kind of Digital Delivery mechanism.

In any event, I'm glad Senior Year is getting exposure and I hope that folks are at least enjoying it enough to feel it was worth the time to DL.

[F.I.A]

It takes me 2 whole days just to download this due to my connection problem, and now I have played through it.

Firstly, congratulations on your first project. And also congratulations on able to get another feature out of currently available games - that is voice-acting.

The gameplay is rather easy and straightforward. A good thing, since I do not need to tear my hair over finding totally hidden scenario or character.

The voice-actors did a fine job with such limited tool at disposal. Unfortunately, sometimes those side noises can be rather distracting.

Not to sound bad, but poor Julie has to sound like a "droid" with those buzzes

Lastly, it is a nice work(And you beat me in getting out a game first). We will surely look forward to Camp Handiba. Good luck.

[Azure]

Still working out my tech problems, but on the subject of voice acting don't ever be afraid to ask for retakes. As long as your requests are reasonable most experienced Vas will do it. We rely on th story teller for direction, and to tell us when our voices don't work well. Polishing is a really important thing ^^
Also I can safely add regarding other views ignore anyone who trashes your work then says " but I do hate dubs" or compares you with a parody dub 9/10 they are thinking of their reaction to the gags rather than acting. It usually means they set out to hate it, or set crazy high standards. I dount we could afford Megumi Hashabara. That said it's allways good to strive for the highest quality you can!