Game Journal #61 - Making the Opening, Part 1

Hey guys! Back again with another game update. Since the functionality of my game is pretty much done, I've started chipping away at creating all the assets. You saw that last time with my Joe 3D model (still haven't finished it btw lol.) What can I say? I'm doing everything for my game, so I bounce around a lot. It's great, because if I want to draw I can, if I don't I have a ton of other options like coding, 3D, making music, etc. It's really sweet! It's pretty much impossible for me to get burnout because I have so much variety.

That being said, I started working on the intro to my game. This will be the opening movie when you boot it up. Cool, huh? Why'd I start it? Just because I felt like animating again. So yeah. Speaking of that... well, I'll get into it, but a quick life update first.

Over the weekend, I lost my wallet. I never carry cash around so no harm done there, but I lost my driver's license, my school ids (rip) and my credit and debit cards. Plus, I'd had that wallet for over 10 years, and it's not manufactured anymore. I'm a bit sad about it. Anyway, I had to cancel all my cards, and I'm waiting for them in the mail. No harm done there for the most part... but then I needed to get gas for my car, and I had no way to pay it. There's a cardless ATM feature for the bank I use, but your card has to be activated to use it (and mine wasn't, since it's still in the mail!) I tried to go to the bank and withdraw money, but they needed a state issued ID, i.e. my driver's license WHICH I LOST WITH MY WALLET, so I was stuck. I had no idea what to do. But then, thankfully, after some research, I found out that Paypal can be used to not only pay for gas at some stations, but used as an ATM, too! So if I really needed cash, I could've gotten it from my bank through Paypal. Pretty neat, huh? Paypal really saved my can. Paypal nationalism!

Ok, back to my game. I started animating the opening last week. Since it'd been a while since I'd animated, I thought it'd be a good idea to update the program I was using (Krita.) BIG MISTAKE. If you want to animate with Krita, download version 4.3. DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, download anything with version 5 or higher. I downloaded it, started animating, and out of nowhere, crash. Ok, fine, it's a 4k document. Krita's crashed on me in the past. But then I opened it again, worked for about 10 minutes, crash. Ok, what? Opened again, 5 minutes later, crash. I was literally seething at this point because I'd lost about 15 frames that I'd drawn by that time. Looked up my issue, nothing online about it. So I downgraded back, and viola. No crashes whatsoever. I knew it wasn't the document's fault because I'd made much larger ones in the past and it was fine, so it must've been the newer version of Krita. Smh.

Getting past that, I got a general layout for what the opening will look like. But I still needed music for it, so I wrote that, too. I liked the result, but it felt like something was missing... usually, opening movies have vocals, right? I wanted mine to have them, too, but I can't sing. Haha. So I started looking into voice synthesizers. My first thought was Kasane Teto because she's free, but after looking into the terms of service, I discovered that you needed permission to use her voice commercially. So that was out. I kept looking for more options, and somehow stumbled across a youtube video about this program called Synthesizer V Studio. It was a free program, and you only had to pay for the voices that you wanted to use. Not only that, you could use the songs you made commercially! Eagerly, I downloaded it.

That video I saw was a showcase of the English voices available for the program. They all sounded nice, but one stood out to me in particular. Tsurumaki Maki!

Maki-chan!

As soon as I saw her, I knew that I wanted her to sing for my music. She's really cute! And if you can tell from her name, she's Japanese. So even though she has an English voicebank, she can also sing in Japanese, too. Of all the voices for the program, Maki is the only one who has Japanese and English, I think. The other English voices can also support Japanese and Chinese, but there isn't a specifically made language voicebank for them, if that makes sense. Because of that, I think that Maki sounds very natural in both languages.

I'm planning for my game to have a Japanese release eventually, so I wanted to make both an English and Japanese version of the intro theme. It was super easy! Synthesizer V is just like a DAW but with lyrics, I didn't even need to watch a tutorial to use it. Also, if you didn't know, I've studied Japanese on and off throughout the years, so I was able to write the lyrics for both versions. I was somewhat rusty since I haven't studied in a while, but I'd spent the last two weeks binging anime (haha) so that helped a lot. It also gave me a ton of ideas for my animation framing and music tone. Everything I do is educational!

The lyrics are a little different between the two. The English one is more about the prophecy that the story revolves around, and the Japanese one is more about the general plot of the game. Originally I wanted a one to one translation, but it was much too wordy when I translated it into Japanese. So I simplified it a lot. It still has a lot of information, though!

Here's the videos for both versions. I added the animation I've done so far in the middle of it. Which one do you like better? Personally, I think I'm leaning towards the Japanese one. Also, please tell me about the quality of the mixing. I had to render it so many times because I kept changing my mind about the audio levels. Sigh. English one is on the left.