Fun Fact Friday!! - #5

Enjoy learning about what is under the hood of Dominatrix Simulator!

Let us know what you think and what questions you would like to see answered!

Fun Fact:

There are 12 steps to getting voice lines into the game.

1. Ink Script Lines are Written - The flow is checked and game is tested with subtitles only to make sure the scene plays well.

2. Dialogue Lines Get Tagged in Ink - We have an automated tool that finds any new lines and adds an Ink script tag (e.g. #45). This assigns a unique number to each line of dialogue per scene which determines the eventual folder and name of the VO (voice over) file.

3. Tagged Lines Get Exported into a Script - When Devilish Domina is ready to record, she uses another tool to export all the unrecorded lines into a readable voice over script. This includes the character name and emotion and is exported in-order they appear in the ink script for best continuity. 

4. VO Lines Get Recorded - We use Adobe Audition and an Audio Technica AT2020 USB mic to record the lines and a little sound booth made up blankets hanging from the rafters. (We hope to eventually have an actual recording booth to work out of.) We make a file for each scene.

5. Recordings Get a Clean Up Pass - We remove the background noise, level the audio, and sometimes we need to do a pass on 's' sounds to make them less sharp.

6. Recordings are Marked and Exported - Each line of dialog must be marked up in Audition and labeled with the proper line number and exported into Unity.

7. LipSync Pro Files are Created - We have a tool in Unity that uses LipSync Pro's auto-lipsync pass plus the lines of the ink script to determine what phonemes (lip shapes that make sounds) should be played as characters say their lines

8. LipSync Quirks are Clean Up - Lines don't always sync up as expected, expecially for lines with non-verbal sounds like moans. These need to be cleaned up by hand so they show the proper phonemes.

9. VO and LipSync Lines are Added to the Build - Now that the VO files and their matching LipSync lines are in Unity, they are checked in and added to the project so they can be further tested, go into stand-alone test scenes, and finally appear in the next release build.

10. Line Subtitles are Auto-Translated - We export all the new lines into a Google Sheet that has a script that allows us to update all the lines in the game and auto-translate any new lines into the various languages we try and support. This is Google Translate, though, and often these translations are pretty hit-or-miss since it doesn't really have any context for the individual lines.

11. Line Subtitless are Hand-Translated - For a few languages, we have some amazing volunteers who will hand-translate some of the lines for us and make the game much more legible for those languages. (We can't thank you enough! 🙏)

12. Translated Lines are Added to Build - We then download the updated line database from the Google Sheet into the build.