Greetings programs.
Lost Harbinger here with another signal from the mists. It's been a busy couple of weeks here in the lighthouse, mostly focused on story and audio.
In game text is always a tricky problem to address. We know our fellow gamers, so we know how often people will just skip through walls of text, regardless of how much we, as the developers, want them to read the rich story we've written. So one of the things we've always wanted was voice acting for everything that we really wanted conveyed. But with an indie budget, that's not always realistic, so we've been coming up with creative ways to put a voice to everything we can.
Fortunately, one of our main characters we can use text-to-speech as they are, in fact, an artificial intelligence. The "Emotive Listening & Learning Pad", or Ellpad, is Last Chance Market's new shopping assistant, featuring the store's mascot, Ellie the Elk! Through the Ellpad, Ellie will be able to assist shoppers in finding items throughout the store. Ellie can also interact more directly with shoppers, giving them detailed information on the store's displays and might even give hints on how to survive find the best deals!
We've also been working hard on getting the sound design itself just right. Sound design is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects of a horror game, but we didn't want to limit ourselves to the usual drones and atmospheric sounds. Because what grocery store doesn't have music playing in the background? So we're very happily adding a variety of creative commons-friendly music to the store's PA system. Quite a bit of the music is from the amazing Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio, who we've been listening to on youtube for years now. If you haven't heard of him, he's got some amazing dark synth and cyberpunk mixes that make for great background listening, we highly recommend checking him out.
That's going to be it for now, just a quick update before returning to deciphering the code. Stay tuned for more signals from the fog.