A glimpse at my StarCraft 2 project. (tiny update 3/4/09)

[Marco]

Greetings friends - a small holiday update.  A couple of songs from Joel, as well as a progress update.  Thanks to all the little details we've been receiving about StarCraft II, and with confidence that we will be seeing the game within 1 year, I finally feel the time is right to begin scripting the episodes.  I've finalized all my concepts - the story is completed.  I've created a complex world with its own set of rules and politics.  Gone are the generic flamboyant over-dramatic villains of my last generation of work.  They are instead replaced by real people.  Finding the real villains will be a tough affair for the protagonists.  Each path opens up a new box of questions, lies, and misinformation.  Solving the mysteries of this world, figuring out the true intentions of certain characters, that will be the fun of the story for the audience.  There will be no character backstories to read on a web site, or no backstory with information about the story.  Everything must be figured out from within.  Character development is my top priority, even before the story.  There are virtually no irrelevant characters in the storyline.  While there are certainly generic soldiers and such, any named character will definitely have a big part to play in everything that happens.

Episodes 1 and 2 have been scripted this week.  When I say episode, I do in fact mean a single small batch of maps, similar to the old Celestial Irruption releases.  Episode  one for instance, uses 3 different maps to tell the story.  Episode two uses two maps.  Multiple maps usually means gameplay in only a single map, while the others are used for cutscenes.

Because of the time resources involved in creating terrain, many maps will be reused often.  Key locations will be seen many times, while other less important locations may only be seen once or twice.  Time is a valuable commodity when creating something like this, and so the less often I am stuck terraining entire maps, the more often I can be doing other more important things.  The goal here is to make the audience feel more intimate with the settings and surroundings. 

Once episodes start being released, there will be no progress updates.  There will be no threads like this on forums, or no updates like this on my web site.  Since my web site will not be publicly advertised (by which I mean advertised to community news sites) until the episodes start releasing, you probably won't ever see progress updates ever.  Although somewhat fun, I've cut out that level of interaction with the audience.  I feel it sort of takes something away from the magic of the creation for them to be part of every step of its development.  While I certainly appreciate the feedback of my peers here, I feel like things sometimes get a little too technical for the general audience, and most just want to play the maps and thats it.  Even now, in the time it took me to post this update, I definitely feel it probably would have been time better spent elsewhere.  No matter though.  I simply see it as a tradition of the old community.  We have always been proud of our campaign creations.  I also look forward to taking a more humble and silent approach to the whole concept where my interaction with the community is at a minimum to preserve the integrity and surprise of the story I have worked so hard on.

http://www.celestialreverie.com/joel005.mp3 - Important Mission Ambience - A critical situation is occuring, use your wits to stay alive and keep a sharp eye out for strategic opportunities you can exploit.


http://www.celestialreverie.com/joel006.mp3 - Move Countermove - When the rival of one of our protagonists moves against him, it will take everything Issac has to keep a determined foe at bay.

[Aekenon]

I can certainly appreciate that.  And you're right -- the more we find out when we actually play it, the more exciting it will be to explore the world you've conjured up for us.  I'm looking forward to it.

Also, Joel's work continues to impress.  Well done!

[Lavarinth]

Great update, Desler, very uplifting.

[Whiplash!]

nice high quality music u got there ;P

[Maglok]

I must say I am impressed with the music. Are those SAM horns I am hearing? Sweet. !

[JoelS]

Thanks for the compliments!  I'm glad you guys are enjoying the music. It has been fun to explore all the different musical directions Desler has planned for this campaign.

@Maglok - the brass are SampleModeling's The Trumpet in the lead and WIVI for everything else.  There are probably some staccatos from Symphobia in there, too, so you're at least a bit right : )

[Maglok]

Symphobia? Nice. I listened to the demo's. Is it as easy to use as they say though is the question.

It sounds real good anyways.

[JimmyJames]

Definitely much improved music, Joel, since the old days. I've taken a listen to all of them and just found one problem off the top of my head - the trumpets in 005 Important Mission Ambience have the trumpets shrieking a bit too loud when it gets to the high notes, especially in the middle of the song when they get louder. Otherwise the music is great and sticks to the Starcraft environment well with its synthesized timbre.

I'm playing the music off my Apple laptop, so that could also be a reason for the unwanted shrieking effect.

[Aegis]

Been a while since I've seen anything from either you or Joel in a long, long time.  Definitely love the site.  I just don't know if I'll have as much time playing like I used to.

[JoelS]

@Maglok - Symphobia is indeed pretty easy to use.  All the sections have a great sound without much tweaking at all.    It's big and epic, but I think it works best when other libraries are around to provide the detail while Symphobia gives the power and oomph.    The orchestral effects it includes are very useful and there are a wide variety included.  I think it will be the backbone of my sound for dramatic action music and any horror / suspense tracks for some time.

@JimmyJames - Thanks!  I'm glad you liked the tracks.  The trumpet issue may indeed fall on your laptop speakers.  I've found that trumpets can sound strident and tough-to-listen-to on speakers that lack good bass presence.  The bass balances out the sound and tames the higher frequencies.  It's noticeable on my secondary computer here, which has speakers with less bass than the ones I compose on.  It can be tricky to mix music in that regard since you never really know what kind of speakers the end user is going to be listening on.

I hope you guys will enjoy the rest of the music in the campaign, as there is a -lot- of it, with a varied mix of styles.  Having read the scripts Desler's working on, I can safely say that you'll have a good time with the characters and situations too!  Now if only there was a game engine ready to put them in...

[Marco]

Not a large update, just a couple things.  14 of the scripts have been written.  I estimate another 3-4 episodes remain before season 1 is complete.  After that, it'll be on to script revisions, where I hand the script off to someone else in an attempt to make improvements.  I honestly don't know who to give that task to (I didn't have anyone here in mind FYI, was thinking of going to a creative writing community for assistance). 

There is a lot of comedy and banter in this script.  The characters sometimes grate on each others nerves.  Other times there are genuine moments of camaraderie.  Comedy drives the dialogue, as the main characters are all friends or colleagues.  The story moves forward in a serious and sometimes dramatic fashion, although I think what everyone will love about this series is the dialogue.  This series focuses primarily on two characters, unlike my other campaigns which were kind of just all over the place in terms of the primary focus.  The two main characters, Issac and Annis, are voiced by myself and a long time friend, someone I knew growing up.  The person voicing Annis is also doing vocals for two songs which are being written for season one.  One of these songs is already nearing completion, as we're just waiting on some studio quality recordings to finish it up.

http://www.celestialreverie.com/convo-sample.mp3

That's a small sample of a conversation between Issac and Annis, set against some background music composed by Joel which is another composition for the series.  They have the kind of relationship that you'd expect from two people who known each other for so long.  A familiarity that is so comfortable that they pretty much can talk about anything.  In the series, they're always ragging on each other while at the same time supporting each other.  Building their relationship up was my primary focus in the first season, as in the campaign, they both take on critical roles in the story.  Issac himself has an extremely complicated past which ties in strongly with the story, while Annis is iniitially pulled along for the ride, eventually finding her own reasons that lead her to become an important figure in the plot.  Just about every episode will focus on these two, with only 1 or 2 episodes per season breaking away to show something happening elsewhere.  Character driven stories are only fun if you like the characters, so I'm doing my best to make these two a fun pair to follow.

[Maglok]

The music is quite loud compared to the voices themselves. Of course it's nice music, but I can't really judge the voices.

[Magic]

I agree with what Maglok said. Also, are you using music for conversations or is this part of a general soundtrack for each part of a level? The music doesn't seem like background dialog music to me - Deus Ex springs to mind in this regard. Whenever JC entered a conversation the previous music would fadeout and pause while some other music played.

After that, it'll be on to script revisions, where I hand the script off to someone else in an attempt to make improvements.

If this was 9 years ago, I'd suggest Xavier or Zeus Legion. I'm not sure who is around that could help these days though.

Character driven stories are only fun if you like the characters, so I'm doing my best to make these two a fun pair to follow.

Good move. For a recent example, DOW2 has some awesome banter between the space marines between missions. Cyrus is experienced, Avitus is cold and tempermental, Thaddeus is rash and at times naive. They come out with some cool conversations, questioning their status as warrior's in the grim darkness of the WH40K universe and all.

[mAc Chaos]

Re, the voices: they were too apathetic, and monotone.  It sounded like someone... reading off a script.   Also, the script itself... that's not how people actually talk.  It sounds like a bunch of big words got shoehorned in there just for the hell of it.  Good start though.

[Marco]

The music was added in to sort of give me an idea of what it'd be like during the campaign.  The music you hear in the scene is flight music.  Ultimately, SC2 will likely handle music and vocals on seperate volume sliders, so this will be adjustable to your liking.  A lot of conversations happen while the two are on their way to a destination of some sort, thats specifically where that music piece would fit in.  There are other conversation pieces composed for this, others which are much lighter.

Stylistically, the dialogue doesn't play out in traditional fashion.  I'd say it'd be on par with a anime series moreso then a western world movie or television show - therefore you'll ultimately end up with some dialogue that you could easily point out that 'people dont talk like that in real life'.  I decided on this style long ago, and its the primary reason there are two songs with vocals being made for the first season.  In traditional anime, you'd get a vocalized introduction and credits song.  I tried this a bit during EDAST when I didn't really know what I was doing, and its a style I always wanted to explore.  In the end, its really going to be similar to an anime series, which is in fact my intended purpose.

I can't comment much on Mac's critique of the acting quality.  I'm definitely bias when it comes to evaluating it as I'm obviously familiar enough with my own voice as well as the voice of my friend.  In my mind however, I will say that I honestly feel the voices fit the characters.  There is definitely a significant difference from the traditional military voices you'd expect to hear or the redneck voices in SCs repertoire.  Although for the feel I'm going for, again that 'anime' style feel, I know that the voices fit the style.

It's kind of an unusual choice, and I'm not sure how well it'll go over.  But it is the story I want to tell in the style I want to tell it, so I'll keep pushing forward with my choices and hopefully there will be a few out there who will appreciate the style.