How the Sausage is Made, Part 2
Thursday, October 19, 2017
Monday, October 16, 2017
Annotated Appendix: Finale
So here we are.
For the final episode, I actually had much grander plans for how the last few minutes would play: a montage of Richter Mode with the "thank you!" voice over. But, oddly, I had tons of time between the endings playing out and I Am The Wind's interminable running length. In an effort to keep this episode to a respectable running time, I thought the montage would be overkill, so I scrapped it in favor of tightening things up. See? You guys told me that you didn't like silence, so I kept it to a minimum.
It tugs at me, though, that the finale of the video series winds up with I Am the Wind, but it just doesn't make sense to elongate the episode. Sorry if you may have found it slightly anticlimactic, but I hope you understand the reasoning now. If anything, this is the only episode where I wished I had more to talk about. Maybe it was just the grieving process for it ending starting to take hold or something, but I really wracked my brain (and my notes) to include anything else I possibly could, but everything left was stuff obviously read in-game (like how large the dev team was, which is clearly indicated in the credits that you would be watching).
And there we have it. One major project in the books. To answer some questions that I've gotten about this all happened, here's...
How Some of the Sausage Was Made, Part 1
The voice recording was done with a Blue Snowball microphone. I have a friend that freelances as a voice actor and some other pals that podcast, and they unanimously recommended it to me for the quality it delivers at the price it sells for. It really did a hell of a job for a USB mic, and I can't say enough good things about it. I'm sure I could have done more research and found something better, but I'm not an audio engineer, so it was perfect for me.
I recorded all of the voice overs using Audacity, which is a freeware program that anybody can download and use. At first, I found it kind of obtuse, but since I wasn't really doing anything super fancy with it other than recording, editing, and then exporting into .mp3 format, it did the job. I would generally write a script first and then edit it a bit (not a lot, which is a flaw of mine that other editors probably hate about me) before launching into the recording, and then I would edit the recording immediately after. The recording process probably took a little over an hour per episode based on how many mistakes I made that needed to be corrected. I'm not a professional narrator or anything, but I've taken a handful of acting classes when I was in college (English majors could do that as electives, you see), and recalled some of the golden rules when I needed them most. The best, in this case was "slow down," because, like everyone else, the faster you do things the more likely they are to turn out rough, and this includes reading a script that you wrote yourself.
Generally, after editing the sound, I would walk my laptop over to my PlayStation 3 and jump right into the game footage capture, which was done using an Elgato Game Capture HD and Elgato's capture software. This was generously loaned to me by a friend, and not a moment too soon. At first, as I was trying to do this whole thing on a budget and decided to simply emulate everything. The problem is that I'm using a laptop that's a little more than three years old now, and wasn't even close to top of the line when I bought it. Though I was still using a disk to play Symphony using ePSXe, the frame rate would drop at very inconvenient times, and after doing a test run of the game, I just knew in my guts that it would be compromised if I did the final videos this way. Thanks to the good will of a good pal, the Symphony footage in the series was taken off of a PS3.
Everything else you see is emulated, though. Even though I own all of these game in one form or another (except one of them. No, I won't tell you which) (ok, it's Kid Dracula) (Kid Dracula sucks), I didn't have the Elgato handy during the early research period, and found it best to just download roms off of the internet. At first, though, I still didn't have a clear idea how to capture the footage. After a little research, I settled on FRAPS, which is a free software specifically for game capture, but a small fee gives you a few extra bells and whistles, as well as the removal of a FRAPS watermark on every video. It may sound kind of snobby, but having a billboard for computer programs all over most of my videos was not something I was happy about, so I spent the $37 on the full version of the program.
This is where things get stupid, though. When the laptop was new, it was loaded with the horrendous Windows 8 with the promise of a free update to 10 sooner than later. Since I never wanted to deal with 8, I never did a lot of experimenting with it, and when 10 finally came, I had no idea that the on board Xbox software had native video capturing, so most of the older games and side bits of Symphony were captured using that when I finally realized it was there. FRAPS was still useful, though, as some things didn't play nicely with the Xbox software, so the money was still well spent.
Lucky for me, though, I never throw anything out, and boxes full of old-ish stuff really helped me save a bunch of cash on this. A few years ago, a friend of mine gave me his old PlayStation 2 (I had traded up for a backward compatible PS3 when they were new. When it died a noble death, I was stuck with a mountain of unplayable PS2 games for years), but with a busted controller. I went ahead and hunted down an OEM PS2 controller, and just happened to have a USB adapter for it that I had bought on a work trip to Cincinnati when I wanted to play Final Fantasy VIII on my work laptop (maybe around 2008? I can't remember). As my wife and I are people with thousands of compact disks sitting digitized on a hard drive, we looked slightly ahead and bought a 1TB external drive to back everything up a few years ago, and this is where all of the captured video was stored.
All of the video editing was done using Sony Vegas Pro 11, which is now a pretty old version of the program. This was also gifted to me by the friend with the Elgato, and it took some work to get it to do what I envisioned with this series. The learning curve was steep, but not as bad as it would have been without YouTube and the ocean of tutorials on it. I've come to find later that while SVP may not be as ubiquitous in the editing community as the Adobe suite of products, it worked great. I've also found that it's very affordable for what it can do (at least, for what I used it for), so it gets the thumbs up from me.
Finally, yes, I was using the copy of Symphony that my parents gave me for Christmas just after my 18th birthday. It will never leave my possession if I'm still of sound mind.
Tomorrow, I'll post what is a photographic tour of how this all came together.
Thanks again for watching!
For the final episode, I actually had much grander plans for how the last few minutes would play: a montage of Richter Mode with the "thank you!" voice over. But, oddly, I had tons of time between the endings playing out and I Am The Wind's interminable running length. In an effort to keep this episode to a respectable running time, I thought the montage would be overkill, so I scrapped it in favor of tightening things up. See? You guys told me that you didn't like silence, so I kept it to a minimum.
It tugs at me, though, that the finale of the video series winds up with I Am the Wind, but it just doesn't make sense to elongate the episode. Sorry if you may have found it slightly anticlimactic, but I hope you understand the reasoning now. If anything, this is the only episode where I wished I had more to talk about. Maybe it was just the grieving process for it ending starting to take hold or something, but I really wracked my brain (and my notes) to include anything else I possibly could, but everything left was stuff obviously read in-game (like how large the dev team was, which is clearly indicated in the credits that you would be watching).
And there we have it. One major project in the books. To answer some questions that I've gotten about this all happened, here's...
How Some of the Sausage Was Made, Part 1
The voice recording was done with a Blue Snowball microphone. I have a friend that freelances as a voice actor and some other pals that podcast, and they unanimously recommended it to me for the quality it delivers at the price it sells for. It really did a hell of a job for a USB mic, and I can't say enough good things about it. I'm sure I could have done more research and found something better, but I'm not an audio engineer, so it was perfect for me.
I recorded all of the voice overs using Audacity, which is a freeware program that anybody can download and use. At first, I found it kind of obtuse, but since I wasn't really doing anything super fancy with it other than recording, editing, and then exporting into .mp3 format, it did the job. I would generally write a script first and then edit it a bit (not a lot, which is a flaw of mine that other editors probably hate about me) before launching into the recording, and then I would edit the recording immediately after. The recording process probably took a little over an hour per episode based on how many mistakes I made that needed to be corrected. I'm not a professional narrator or anything, but I've taken a handful of acting classes when I was in college (English majors could do that as electives, you see), and recalled some of the golden rules when I needed them most. The best, in this case was "slow down," because, like everyone else, the faster you do things the more likely they are to turn out rough, and this includes reading a script that you wrote yourself.
Generally, after editing the sound, I would walk my laptop over to my PlayStation 3 and jump right into the game footage capture, which was done using an Elgato Game Capture HD and Elgato's capture software. This was generously loaned to me by a friend, and not a moment too soon. At first, as I was trying to do this whole thing on a budget and decided to simply emulate everything. The problem is that I'm using a laptop that's a little more than three years old now, and wasn't even close to top of the line when I bought it. Though I was still using a disk to play Symphony using ePSXe, the frame rate would drop at very inconvenient times, and after doing a test run of the game, I just knew in my guts that it would be compromised if I did the final videos this way. Thanks to the good will of a good pal, the Symphony footage in the series was taken off of a PS3.
Everything else you see is emulated, though. Even though I own all of these game in one form or another (except one of them. No, I won't tell you which) (ok, it's Kid Dracula) (Kid Dracula sucks), I didn't have the Elgato handy during the early research period, and found it best to just download roms off of the internet. At first, though, I still didn't have a clear idea how to capture the footage. After a little research, I settled on FRAPS, which is a free software specifically for game capture, but a small fee gives you a few extra bells and whistles, as well as the removal of a FRAPS watermark on every video. It may sound kind of snobby, but having a billboard for computer programs all over most of my videos was not something I was happy about, so I spent the $37 on the full version of the program.
This is where things get stupid, though. When the laptop was new, it was loaded with the horrendous Windows 8 with the promise of a free update to 10 sooner than later. Since I never wanted to deal with 8, I never did a lot of experimenting with it, and when 10 finally came, I had no idea that the on board Xbox software had native video capturing, so most of the older games and side bits of Symphony were captured using that when I finally realized it was there. FRAPS was still useful, though, as some things didn't play nicely with the Xbox software, so the money was still well spent.
Lucky for me, though, I never throw anything out, and boxes full of old-ish stuff really helped me save a bunch of cash on this. A few years ago, a friend of mine gave me his old PlayStation 2 (I had traded up for a backward compatible PS3 when they were new. When it died a noble death, I was stuck with a mountain of unplayable PS2 games for years), but with a busted controller. I went ahead and hunted down an OEM PS2 controller, and just happened to have a USB adapter for it that I had bought on a work trip to Cincinnati when I wanted to play Final Fantasy VIII on my work laptop (maybe around 2008? I can't remember). As my wife and I are people with thousands of compact disks sitting digitized on a hard drive, we looked slightly ahead and bought a 1TB external drive to back everything up a few years ago, and this is where all of the captured video was stored.
All of the video editing was done using Sony Vegas Pro 11, which is now a pretty old version of the program. This was also gifted to me by the friend with the Elgato, and it took some work to get it to do what I envisioned with this series. The learning curve was steep, but not as bad as it would have been without YouTube and the ocean of tutorials on it. I've come to find later that while SVP may not be as ubiquitous in the editing community as the Adobe suite of products, it worked great. I've also found that it's very affordable for what it can do (at least, for what I used it for), so it gets the thumbs up from me.
Finally, yes, I was using the copy of Symphony that my parents gave me for Christmas just after my 18th birthday. It will never leave my possession if I'm still of sound mind.
Tomorrow, I'll post what is a photographic tour of how this all came together.
Thanks again for watching!
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
Annotated Appendix: The Cave and Floating Catacombs
Close to the end, now. We're almost there!
Unlike this Appendix entry, I thought this episode would be a challenge to make, but it came out pretty quickly. EXCEPT when I did a test run of the areas and saved the game without recording anything. Yes, boneheaded move, and yes, it happened before. I had a backup run at what I thought was the same spot, but found that I needed to bum rush a good chunk of the game to get back to the point of recording. So, if any of you detect something off about the weapon loadout, HP count, and conspicuously absent number of relics that briefly appear on the list, this is why. A little bit of sausage-making for you. I was even still equipped with the Spike Breaker armor, which you can clearly see when I fly through the specific room in the FC, much to my own surprise (and delight because I would have probably been killed).
Something I forgot to mention: Most Symphony players know this pretty well, but I neglected to point out that by skipping the Death scene and hanging on to the Alucard Shield, the game is shattered the moment you find the Shield Rod. I didn't mention it in the last video, and I didn't bring it up in this one. There. Mea culpa.
Ok, let's talk about the Galamoth fight for a bit. Someone called out in the comments that I did it in a "broken" manner by showing off the use of the Beryl Circlet, the teleport strikes, and the Alucard Shield/ Rod combo all in succession. I suppose that this is a fair point, but I don't think that there's a "right" way of handling this battle as Galamoth is a pretty hard boss and has a stupid amount of hit points. Sure, I suppose you can attack him little and then turn into Mist to avoid the lightning attacks, as was mentioned in the video, but we don't have time to do it that way with his HP count slowly whittling away. Honestly, I thought just going to town on him with the Beryl Circlet equipped would have been enough, but the clock was ticking so I threw in both other methods to get things over with instead of showing side videos of me just steamrolling him, which was the original plan. Incidentally, the first time I killed Galamoth 20 years ago was with teleport strikes and the Osafune Katana. I had the timing down to frames of animation, and in the right mode, could kill him without losing a single point of damage. But that was a long time ago. I never even heard of the Shield Rod combo until I was in my third year of college almost 3 years later, and didn't know about the hidden room with the Beryl Circlet until probably close to the same time. See? Without ubiquitous internet, we just had to fend for ourselves.
Of course, there are also videos floating around YouTube that prove that he can be hit stunned by getting to the ledge behind him and smacking him in the face. I have never tested this myself, but if I can get to it in the next few days, this might be thrown into the final video.
Here's something: Upon re-watching it, I'm also noticing that a speech impediment has formed when I speak quickly. It's weird because I'm a guy that used to basically talk for a living, and I do so relatively fast. I like getting in front of people and rambling, and had a pretty articulate delivery. As I've gotten a little older, though, I'm noticing that I'm starting to stumble with that delivery and mumble a little bit, and these videos have really confirmed this. Probably more than you wanted to know, but these Appendices are just as much for me as they are for you.
So one more to go. Just to temper your expectations now, the next episode should be on the shorter side from the where I'm sitting at the moment. I know that we're at the end, but obviously, there aren't any more new environments to deal with, so there's certainly less to show. That won't mean that it's only going to be the final boss fight and that's it, though, so please look forward to it.
Thanks again for watching.
Unlike this Appendix entry, I thought this episode would be a challenge to make, but it came out pretty quickly. EXCEPT when I did a test run of the areas and saved the game without recording anything. Yes, boneheaded move, and yes, it happened before. I had a backup run at what I thought was the same spot, but found that I needed to bum rush a good chunk of the game to get back to the point of recording. So, if any of you detect something off about the weapon loadout, HP count, and conspicuously absent number of relics that briefly appear on the list, this is why. A little bit of sausage-making for you. I was even still equipped with the Spike Breaker armor, which you can clearly see when I fly through the specific room in the FC, much to my own surprise (and delight because I would have probably been killed).
Something I forgot to mention: Most Symphony players know this pretty well, but I neglected to point out that by skipping the Death scene and hanging on to the Alucard Shield, the game is shattered the moment you find the Shield Rod. I didn't mention it in the last video, and I didn't bring it up in this one. There. Mea culpa.
Ok, let's talk about the Galamoth fight for a bit. Someone called out in the comments that I did it in a "broken" manner by showing off the use of the Beryl Circlet, the teleport strikes, and the Alucard Shield/ Rod combo all in succession. I suppose that this is a fair point, but I don't think that there's a "right" way of handling this battle as Galamoth is a pretty hard boss and has a stupid amount of hit points. Sure, I suppose you can attack him little and then turn into Mist to avoid the lightning attacks, as was mentioned in the video, but we don't have time to do it that way with his HP count slowly whittling away. Honestly, I thought just going to town on him with the Beryl Circlet equipped would have been enough, but the clock was ticking so I threw in both other methods to get things over with instead of showing side videos of me just steamrolling him, which was the original plan. Incidentally, the first time I killed Galamoth 20 years ago was with teleport strikes and the Osafune Katana. I had the timing down to frames of animation, and in the right mode, could kill him without losing a single point of damage. But that was a long time ago. I never even heard of the Shield Rod combo until I was in my third year of college almost 3 years later, and didn't know about the hidden room with the Beryl Circlet until probably close to the same time. See? Without ubiquitous internet, we just had to fend for ourselves.
Of course, there are also videos floating around YouTube that prove that he can be hit stunned by getting to the ledge behind him and smacking him in the face. I have never tested this myself, but if I can get to it in the next few days, this might be thrown into the final video.
Here's something: Upon re-watching it, I'm also noticing that a speech impediment has formed when I speak quickly. It's weird because I'm a guy that used to basically talk for a living, and I do so relatively fast. I like getting in front of people and rambling, and had a pretty articulate delivery. As I've gotten a little older, though, I'm noticing that I'm starting to stumble with that delivery and mumble a little bit, and these videos have really confirmed this. Probably more than you wanted to know, but these Appendices are just as much for me as they are for you.
So one more to go. Just to temper your expectations now, the next episode should be on the shorter side from the where I'm sitting at the moment. I know that we're at the end, but obviously, there aren't any more new environments to deal with, so there's certainly less to show. That won't mean that it's only going to be the final boss fight and that's it, though, so please look forward to it.
Thanks again for watching.
Tuesday, October 3, 2017
Annotated Appendix: The Reverse Caverns
Yes, indeed, this is the episode I dreaded making most.
As you'll see in this week's video, there just isn't that much to say about the Reverse (Reverce?) Caverns, and the slow travel and tedious mapping makes for a real slog. Since I've been cobbling together two or three sections of the Inverted Castle, each new episode has been about 20-25 minutes long, and that's kind of lengthy. Knowing that it would take me at least that long to get through this area, though, meant for this section to have it's own unique show, and one that you may find ...uh... kind of boring.
But stick around to the end! All of the really interesting bits are packed into the back half, including two things that I probably should have mentioned: the fact that by skipping the Death encounter at the beginning of the game means that you can essentially break it the moment you acquire the Shield Rod (since you already have the Alucard Shield), and that the wooden bridge that covers the entrance to the Cave magically reappeared at the end of the episode. Thankfully, by leaving the screen and coming back it once again evaporated, but this is a glitch that I had never seen before, and in no way can I recreate it. Since there are several sources on the internet where Iga claims the game is practically held together by Scotch tape and hope, I'm not super shocked to see something like this, but I probably should have busted out the microphone and called it out. Aaaah well.
The good news is that, surprise, this video showed up only a little more than a week or so since the last one. Let's call that a nice side effect of just not having that much going on in this one, but that might be a little reprieve compared to the next two, which should be packed. And yes, there will be two more. I've just decided before writing this that finishing the game in the next episode might be a little too much, and I can use the final battle with Dracula and the credits sequence as a sort of final appendix for stuff that didn't fit anywhere else, like the multiple endings. I know I've said this plenty of times, but I'm writing this on October 3rd, and though there's no specific date that we can refer back to as the actual release of the game in the US, we're in the advent of its 20th anniversary, and that's the end goal. Keep my rickety old laptop and I in your thoughts over the next few weeks.
Thanks again for watching, and enjoy the new video (please).
As you'll see in this week's video, there just isn't that much to say about the Reverse (Reverce?) Caverns, and the slow travel and tedious mapping makes for a real slog. Since I've been cobbling together two or three sections of the Inverted Castle, each new episode has been about 20-25 minutes long, and that's kind of lengthy. Knowing that it would take me at least that long to get through this area, though, meant for this section to have it's own unique show, and one that you may find ...uh... kind of boring.
But stick around to the end! All of the really interesting bits are packed into the back half, including two things that I probably should have mentioned: the fact that by skipping the Death encounter at the beginning of the game means that you can essentially break it the moment you acquire the Shield Rod (since you already have the Alucard Shield), and that the wooden bridge that covers the entrance to the Cave magically reappeared at the end of the episode. Thankfully, by leaving the screen and coming back it once again evaporated, but this is a glitch that I had never seen before, and in no way can I recreate it. Since there are several sources on the internet where Iga claims the game is practically held together by Scotch tape and hope, I'm not super shocked to see something like this, but I probably should have busted out the microphone and called it out. Aaaah well.
The good news is that, surprise, this video showed up only a little more than a week or so since the last one. Let's call that a nice side effect of just not having that much going on in this one, but that might be a little reprieve compared to the next two, which should be packed. And yes, there will be two more. I've just decided before writing this that finishing the game in the next episode might be a little too much, and I can use the final battle with Dracula and the credits sequence as a sort of final appendix for stuff that didn't fit anywhere else, like the multiple endings. I know I've said this plenty of times, but I'm writing this on October 3rd, and though there's no specific date that we can refer back to as the actual release of the game in the US, we're in the advent of its 20th anniversary, and that's the end goal. Keep my rickety old laptop and I in your thoughts over the next few weeks.
Thanks again for watching, and enjoy the new video (please).
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