Devlog 4 - Julian Devlog

Hi, It's Julian I'm writing this to basically summarize my ideas and what I've wanted for this game. One of the first ideas I had was for a soundscape to alert the player to what kinds of things they need to be paying attention to (their social media account, plants, the ship's systems, etc.). I wanted to have each Poi have their own sound effect that would harmonize poorly the more that were playing, to stimulate mental stress. However, I feel like this idea is going to fall through due to the fact that right now we're considering having the player interact with only one screen. All I know about that right now is that you're supposed to be following trends and acting appropriately. I don't know how the player would confront a lose condition besides "trends going too fast." So, I got thinking again. I saw on the planning board that the team had put an alien streamer onto the main HUD of the game. From here I immediately know that I had the tools to pull off something really cool; that being that I have a bunch of plugins that I can use to mess with the sound of a person's voice and make it sounds alien. At first the plan was to look for out of copyright jazz records and put them through a bunch of pitch bending filters. However, after the team looked at it they said that maybe we could go in a different but similar direction. The team also mentioned animal crossing and that I should go for a similar sounding talking sound but with the same filter on. I ended up going on YouTube and downloaded a sample of some animal crossing characters speaking and applied the same filter. it had no effect because I believe it's looking for actual vocals to distort so it effectively did nothing. Then I decided to add a really fast vibrato filter, and it worked pretty well! Then I ended up messing with the curvature of the sine wave that dictated the pitch of the vibrato, and I ended up with a pretty neat sound effect. After that, I slowed down the animal crossing recording and then put it back through the vibrato and I'm really happy with what I was able to produce. If ripping the sound effects straight from the game is a problem, I don't think this is a concern because I could very easily recreate the animal crossing voice by reciting Japanese syllables and speeding them up a ton.