The audio used on OGS is not particularly good, I’d like to make it a lot better. There are two sets of audio and I’d like to revamp them both. The first set being the voice(s) used for clock countdown, and the second being sound effects used, such as stone placement and game transitions (ie game start/end).
For the voices I’d like to start supporting multiple languages, so I’ll be preparing a script for each voice actor to read off and then turn into sound bites for use on the site. What I need help with is making sure I have itemized all of the phrases we’ll need since going back after the fact and getting additional phrases in the same voice would be a notable pain.
The most obvious phrases are all of the numbers zero through sixty so we can count both up and down up for any period time up to a minute.
Do we want/need any other spoken phrases, such as “overtime”, or “5 periods” or anything like that, or should we just stick to numbers?
I’m thinking of including several other phrases in the script that might be useful, even though we might opt for sound effects or silence over voices for some or all of them. These include:
Game paused
Game resumed
Undo requested
Undo granted
Your move
Disconnected
Reconnected
Your opponent has disconnected
Your opponent has reconnected
Time / Timeout
Press the submit button to play the stone
Byoyomi now starts
n Byoyomi left
Last Byoyomi
Possibly rules / short audio intro
Coordinates
Any requests for anything not on the list?
For sound effects
New stone placement sounds with several samples of placing a stone in a vertex with no neighbors, one neighbor, two neighbors, etc.
Stone thwack for limited use thwacks during a game
Taking stone out of bowl, possibly used after a stone has been placed (like your opponent just reached for their next stone).
Grabbing several stones, perhaps placing them on the board, for a nigiri sound as a possible start game sound effect.
Stone rustling in bowls, perhaps for game start or end effect.
Putting captured stones in the lid
Stone sliding
Placement in different parts of board
Quite possibly a nuclear tesuji as an optional resignation effect.
Anyone have any other ideas?
I’m going to be recording these myself, so if there are any folks out there with sound effect recording experience and have any tips or tricks you would like to share, I would love to hear them! I’ll be going through a bit of effort to create a sound isolated environment and will try and figure out the best equipment to buy/rent to get high quality recordings of these things - again if you have experience with this and have some input on the matter, let me know! Like with the voices, it’s better to record too much and not use some of the samples, than too little as it would be a pain to get everything setup again to do proper recordings of something we missed. So if you have any good ideas for things to record or how to record them, throw them out there
Possible addition. Some sort of sound or voice prompt in between placing a stone and clicking ‘submit’? Probably with a delay.
I usually play live with ‘One-click to move’ but if circumstances (eg. an unfamiliar device) prompt me to use the ‘submit button’ option then it is very easy to place a stone and forget to submit.
[edit] OP appears to have been edited to include this (or I missed it).
A lot of advice depends on your budget and if you plan on continuing making recordings. You may want to check with your local media center, film group or local recording studios to get quotes for help. This will generally run cheaper than buying all the audio gear you need and soundproofing etc. Tell them you’d like to make some “Foley Effects” for your website. A really nice stereo pair of high quality microphones will run from $400 to $2000+ (and those are just the microphones!) - for that money you could buy a couple hours of studio time and have an audio engineer who has tons of recording experience help you out.
Is it possible to have different sound profiles to select from?
Also, is it possible to upload sound effects we’ve made using Audacity for this project?
It’s certainly a possibility, if there’s good reason to have different profiles it shouldn’t be hard to implement.
Custom sounds is a possibility too if there’s enough interest (or were you thinking of contributions for the official sound set? Which is also a possibility so long as they fit in nicely to the rest of a set)
I think avoiding clutter is a good goal to aim for, but as you say… better to have the sound and not need it than to need it one day and not have it… so I guess record all the things, but carefully decide what to introduce
Personally I would find all this chatter annoying and distracting so I hope it will also be possible to turn the audio off. Even more annoying, I think. is if the voice is like the ones on GPS’s. I do however think the undo request on OGS is not very effective so perhaps in this case it might work but for the rest - a no from me! Being able to talk with audio with your opponent could be a good addition - particularly for reviews or if someone who is a regular opponent for a bit of in game banter.
Yep you’ll certainly be able to turn off voices and effects separately. As for undo requests it’s on the agenda to make that more visual too, such as changing the color of the last stone and making it marked with a question mark, something like that.
That is great and good idea about making the undo request more noticeable - I like the ideas you have shared. OGS is the best platform for games in my opinion great there are ongoing improvements!
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Miscellaneous notes from someone who has done some audio and music recording as a hobby:
Real studio time is way overkill for what you need here. A suprising number of professional, officially released recordings have been made in hotel closets stuffed with pillows, including audiobooks and hit pop songs.
If you really want a professional involved, you could hire a recording engineer with a portable setup, so you get the benefit of high-end gear without needing to book the actual studio time, which can run into hundreds of dollars per hour – and it is guaranteed to take longer than you think!
You can get a good deal if you have a connection with an audio engineering student, if you live in a city with a college program of the sort. I had a few songs recorded by a friend, who used one of them for her graduation portfolio, and was happy to let me do anything I wanted with the masters free of charge.
It is also definitely possible to DIY with a simple Zoom recorder. It would take you a bit of time to learn the basic principles and workflow of audio recording. But I absolutely think it’s possible to get good results like this. I took an elective in university on sound production and we were making decent quality interview recordings within the first couple of weeks.
Firstly, welcome to the community! Thanks for stopping by <3
This sounds like a great suggestion I’m sure anoek is interested in saving both time and money
this should scale (roughly) with size of group too (1 stone, 2, 3, 5, 10, 20, etc.)
Yep fair enough, I’ll look into hiring a recording engineer too, I didn’t really think to think of that as a thing but it certainly makes a lot of sense. I’m not convinced it is strictly necessary to hire someone, but at the same time I do want these to sound just about as good as they can, so it might be a good thing to do to hire someone who does it for a living!
