In my last post I made a summary of updates that Blameless had undergone over summer. The one significant part missing was the voice over. My initial plan to record it with students at the University of Sheffield was changed due to my recent discovery of a service called Fiverr. With Fiverr anybody can sell/buy services; dubbing and impression being one of them. This greatly reduced the cost of the voice over imposed on me while at the same time ensured high quality of the recordings.
I received the last batch of the voice over revisions in late November. So over December and subsequently the Christmas holidays, I took the time to place the voice over in the gameplay and the cutscenes; synchronizing it, tweaking the sound and volumes, and updating the subtitles. As of this moment, the voice over is fully complete.
Aside from the voice over, there were also a number of small tweaks, bug fixes, performance optimisations, additions and changes since last summer that may be visually barely noticeable in the actual game, but have a great impact on the gameplay experience as a whole.
Development concept of hand bulb lamp
Currently I am still bug hunting and I am pleased to have only found a very small number of them yet. I have therefore finally got to the state where Blameless is ready for the initial v1.0 release. This will be realised within the next week for Windows. The Mac version has been having compatibility issues lately that I have not been able to identify and resolve yet.
Tweaking of volume, reverb and final mixing of voice over recordings. Each voice over line has a separate audio file whose name corresponds to the subtitle key. In the gameplay, the sound and the subtitle text are matched by the name-key tuple.
