Studio Ganzheit

I’ve been organizing the ambient audio and music while refining and fixing events along the way. The reality side stays dry, mostly environmental sound, with music coming in only occasionally. The threshold side runs music throughout. Taking things that only existed as isolated features, consolidating them and building atmosphere out of them — the results come back in proportion to the time I put in, so it’s rewarding and genuinely fun. My stamina is the problem. Right now all I can think about is hoping players like it.

Building bosses and polishing marketplace animations into events seem like similar work, but events are much less stressful, maybe because the outcome is fixed. In some ways I think they’re more fun too.

The surface-level story stays simple enough not to get in the way of exploration, but for players who read the text through Attune and pick up the chat logs, the much larger story underneath should come through. There are probably more players who just want to enjoy the exploration. Players generally seem to lose patience once dialogue runs past two lines, so I’m cutting down heavily on voiced lines that have to be skipped.

I keep saying it’s almost done and more work keeps appearing, bit by bit. Still, it’s converging on the goal rather than diverging, so I think it’ll be finished within the month. Then testing and voice recording.

Separate from finishing the game, I’m just grateful to my wife, who supports this whole adventure completely.