My brothers-in-law recently published our audio adventure game called RYFT. This was a labor of love over many years trying to find time between having jobs, losing jobs, having kids, and trying not to lose those!
Ryft is a voice-controlled, audio adventure/puzzle game harkening back to classic journeys like Monkey Island where you explore a world and solve puzzles using clever manipulations of characters, the environment, and your inventory. It has a fully voiced cast and sound designed cutscenes.
We like to think it’s a unique experience as there aren’t many (any?) audio-only games that aren’t primarily on rails with multiple-choice options. Combine that with being able to play entirely by voice and it really bumps up the accessibility factor as well. We are interested in making the game as accessible as we can to vision-impaired players and reached out to numerous communities to solicit and incorporate their feedback. We just see too few quality options in this space and saw an easy opportunity to make this experience great for that community.
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We started seriously talking about it Christmas time 2016. I think that's when I built the first basic demo (no story, no engine, just voice recognition and getting a response). We started building the engine and editor that, Spring 2017. — Alex
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Justin and Alex wrote the script and designed the puzzles. Justin stepped up to be our Narrator, delivering hours of sessions recorded from his home office over the years. He also organized the recording sessions and talent for our fully-voiced cast who recorded lines in their homes as well. And somehow, despite being a new dad twice over, also found time to write and recorded the opening and closing music cues.
Alex and Ben built the app and a script editor from scratch which did some fancy things like automatically generating populated Reaper sessions to speed up recording and asset management.
I edited and mastered the recorded dialog, music, and provided sound design for cutscenes. Their cousin Sophie designed the UI. Throw in a few more relations as voice talent and it was a real family affair!
iOS, Android 13+
**Justin Lerman** - Writing, Narration, Recording
Alex Lerman - Programming, Writing, Web
Ben Christel - Additional Programming
Sophie Golomb - UI, Graphics, Web
Jesse Rope - Sound Design, Mastering
Here’s a look and listen to the opening cutscene. Working on an audio-only scene took me back to my college projects dabbling in radio plays, it would be fun to pick those back up again.
As mentioned above, the Alex created an Editor → Reaper pipeline which populated sessions with an ADR-like line display feature to speed up recording and asset export naming and path management. The project is small by many standards, but it was still over $2000$ bounces and thanks to developing this pipeline I never had to think about file management. 🙌
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We generated the audio filenames and their paths automatically in the Editor. We then spit that out into a CSV divided by characters (narrator, butler, etc.). Then in Reaper we had 2 major things:
- Our own Python script that Reaper ran that loaded the CSV, iterated through and took the paths/filenames and automatically labeled Regions with those names, giving enough space for good spacing and multiple takes (number of characters in the line divided by 6, plus a minute buffer). We also assigned empty Items to each Region with the content of the line in the Item Notes.
- The second part used an existing extension called "Notes Reader" by HeDa which would display the Item Notes as the recording happened so that the voice actor could read the lines as they went.
When everything was recorded, you could just export using the $region wildcard as the filename and it would output everything as desired!. — Alex
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Since we recorded remotely, we sent instructions to the voice talent for setting up their Reaper environment.
Each actor would record their lines according to the displayed Item Notes.