Early Idea Resources

This might be interesting to implement reactive elements in the game based on the player’s microphone, such as speaking to open something. It would depend on the VR students making it work though.

Also brings up the ethical issue of having a microphone on the player and letting them know (even if sound isn’t being ‘recorded’)

Lucas Pope’s Development Log for Return of the Obra Dinn

Lucas Pope is one of my favourite solo game developers, as he is good at the general art and sound direction, as well as actually good ‘gameplay design’. He is best known for the games Papers Please and the Return of the Obra Dinn.

The fact that he freely distributed his process is one of the reasons that the indie game design scene is good in my view. It is also interesting as in Pope’s case he usually works on his own so has to learn new skills and manage time himself. Because of this, there is often quite a DIY approach with some bodge-y solutions.

“Throughout the years of working on this project, I’ve really enjoyed bouncing around between engineering and creative tasks. Enjoyed maybe a little too much. More than once I’d move forward on something, put it aside to work on something else, and return to the earlier task having completely forgotten the tools/pipeline/systems/everything. 

For these last two months I decided the best way to get this shit done was to focus on one thing at a time. One month of music only, one month of audio only. That ended up being a big efficiency win – I was way more productive in each case. I don’t think this would’ve worked that well earlier, before the game was totally nailed down. But still I regret not setting aside more ultra-focus time sooner.”

Has lots of interesting behind-the-scenes stuff here including the sound section: