Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

Building Game Worlds
128
U L T I M A T E G A M E D E S I G N
may only have access to them for 30 minutes or an hour despite the fact that you were
told you would have two hours. Planning is critical. You must often revise and assess
recording priorities in an instant.
Based on your story specifics, as suggested earlier, dialog must already have been
written before it’s time to record it for the game. From a content perspective, you
know the game inside and out as well or better than anyone. You know when, why,
and where the characters will be required to say things in the game. It’s up to you to
try to get the “right” game-relevant performance out of a very tired (and guaranteed
to be cranky) actor who may not like games, may not understand why exactly they
are doing this, and may have never even played a game.
It’s not always the case, though. You might get lucky and get an excited actor, or
an actor who has fantastic ideas about delivering the game lines. Always have a build
of the game in the recording studio with you to show the “context” for the line or dialog
you are asking for. Bring along with you as much visual reference material as is
possible and available. You will refer to every bit of it.
Quite rapidly, under these conditions, you will get better at learning how to coax a
performance out of the actors. Sometimes you’ll have help from an audio director or
from some other party working with the actor or studio. At other times, you won’t
get much help at all. I’ve found that voice actors from casting agencies are wonderful.
They work very hard to give you the best that they can, based on everything you’ve
shown them about the character and context for delivery of a line in your game.
SUMMARY OF DESIGNER’S WORK TOOLS
In the following summary list, I’ve assembled for you some of my suggestions on the
important game design software tools we’ve discussed up to this point. These suggestions
can be used across many game genres. Keep in mind that the application of
these tools varies widely as you move around the industry from developer to developer,
but in some form or another, everyone seems to use the following:
� A 3-D package (such as Maya, 3ds max, Lightwave, Mirai)
� Microsoft Visio (for flowcharting, screen logic, and topographic mapping)
� Photoshop (for basic texturing and various other applications)
� An HTML editor (for building your design and production documents)
� A BSP editor (stand-alone editors like the Unreal or Radiant series)
� Scripting language (Python, Visual Basic, proprietary)