It Belongs in a Museum!
This phase of the VO process is, I believe, like running from the boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark. You run. You run fast. The boulder moves behind you at a steady rate, and as long as you keep running, you are good. Sometimes you pick up a little speed, and you gain some ground on the boulder, and you think, "Hey, sweet, this is fine!"

And then you see a rock in the path. Today, the rock was our designer toolset crapping out because the sheer size of this game is doing things to the database that no database should have to put up with. So hey, no saving for an hour while everyone scrambles to put that out. (The tools guys were excellent. Again, this is not "Oh, sucky tools." This is tools built for text games that are now handling text and VO and cinematic animation instructions and all kinds of fun stuff.)

Or another rock, a critical "Hey, take a look at this," problem that eats a key couple of hours. And you stumble, and right yourself, and keep running.

And the boulder? The boulder does not slow down.

Someone asked me today if I'd listened to some of the stuff that's gone off to be recorded. I hadn't, because really, once it's off to VO, it is officially behind the boulder. I am not concerned with "behind the boulder". I am concerned with the boulder, and what it will do if I do not keep running at a speed equal to that of the boulder, on average. Later, when everything is recorded, at least first pass-wise, I will come back to the temple and look through the hallways and see what the boulder has left behind.

That all sounds negative. It's not. Somebody played a line I'd written today that had one of our most jaded and cynical people laughing hysterically. Another bit, which I wrote at least half on a dare from my wife, is actually getting into the game, and the people who find it are going to squee like nobody's business.

I think we're near the top of the hill, for reals this time. All but one of my big major plots are out of my hands, and all but two of the characters with whom I was lucky enough to have a hand. (One of the two is just getting a final editing pass. Getting the other is next week's big task, and wow, it's going to sting, but I had the one-sentence revelation that told me what I needed to do to make the character work.*

And there are some tiny small bits, the equivalents of the people arguing in ambients as you walk by or the tiny little roleplaying plots that break up the action here or there. But I've signed off on those, so they are mostly, as far as I am concerned, behind the boulder.

This is going to be a fantastic game. And with antibiotics kicking in and an actual weekend off last week, I'm actually feeling it again.

Until the next rock pops up in my way, anyway.

* Tangential, but I describe most of my character writing the way I describe my attempts to sing: I can't actually do it. I just impersonate people who can. I can only sort of carry a tune on my own, but I can nail the high notes in the Les Miz song "Bring Him Home" provided I'm doing my impersonation of Colm Wilkinson. With characters, I need an easy "Oh, it's like this." A broad stroke, an "Oh, it's Kaylee from Firefly" or "Denzel Washington in Training Day, as played by a small white woman." An impersonation. By the time I'm finished with the character, it's not an impersonation any longer, but the broad initial stroke gives me a set of parameters within which I can work and flesh out who this person is and what they would say or do in a given situation. It's what I do with most of my characters in my own writing, and it's worked well so far for me at BioWare.