Hello! Progress on HIS LAST MACHINATION reached the super neat milestone of receiving and implementing character sprite expressions, initial music files, the first voiceover sessions for the project, and first tests with dialogue implementation. Here's what this week looked like in detail:
March 29th
- Further session coordination and light rescheduling took place, with one actor's first session given a proposed reset for April 3rd.
- Digital subfolders were created for each actor in the RAW VO folder to most effectively organize everyone's session files. Our team's preferred workflow is for actors to start recording and keep their session running throughout, as this allows for easy harvesting of room tone and generally doesn't add any extra time to the editing process (as it's generally very easy to "read" an actor's waveforms, i.e. "This is [actor] speaking" vs "This is [character] speaking").
- The standard start-of-session wall of text was drafted for posting in the session voice channel chat on the 30th (pre-session usage illustrated below), featuring quick links to the dialogue spreadsheet and RAW VO directory, file specs, and naming conventions.

March 30th
- MAJOR MILESTONE: The first recording session for the project took place today!
- Today's session encapsulated all of present-state Pietro (total of 52 lines), with plans to record Pietro's flashback/past state and one other component in a second session.
- The idea is to place the second Pietro session after the session that captures all of Abram's flashback-state materials so that both actors get to read with each other (Abram's actor has a chance to read with present-state Pietro, and Pietro's actor gets to read with past-state Abram).
- A REAPER "session prep" project was made to contain character playback in other actors' sessions. Present-state Pietro lines adjacent to Valeria's lines of dialogue were imported and given region markers for ease of use in her actor's session. This also meant beginning the process of editing Pietro's dialogue actually involved going out of order to isolate just the lines adjacent to Valeria's dialogue.
- The bulk of actual take selects/dialogue editing for HLM is being done in Pro Tools, but the nature of Pro Tools as a DAW makes it somewhat "selfish" in terms of sharing audio—hence the use of REAPER in instances where we want actors to be able to play off of their castmates.
March 31st
- The session reset for April 3rd was confirmed, meaning that we now have a time for the first Abram session (ideally 1 of 1, but—realistically, given the need to provide context and desire to not hold folks for much longer than two hours at a time—likely 1 of 2).
- The process of selecting and exporting raw Pietro takes started in earnest today, beginning with session file cleanup (removal of dead space and harvesting of room tone from Pietro's actor's space, ensuring all scenes are organized properly, and grabbing silly bits for eventual utility).
- Take selects for Pietro in scenes 1-2 and 2-2 were completed.
- The files being exported at this stage in the workflow are split but not cleaned or mixed; additionally, they've been kept in .wav to better facilitate cleanup and mixing. Their eventual file designation will be .ogg due to its smaller size.
April 1st
- Character expressions were received from Lu today, providing the vast majority of coverage for sprite implementation in-engine!
- Pietro take selection took place for scene 3-3, Ending 1, Ending 2, and the start of E3.

(Valeria existing in four distinct sprite-states! Expression transitions can now be tested in-engine and retimed as desired through both preset and custom-made image "transforms.")
April 2nd
- Take selection for Ending 3 was finalized, and the REAPER session-prep buildout for Abram's actor's session began.
- Today marked the point at which all placeholder character sprites were replaced with their appropriate expression images.
- Functionally, implementing these sprites was as easy as replacing the duplicate "base sprites" with the proper expression art and ensuring all files were named properly.
- The first test of in-game voice files took place today; this required changing game the audio filename formatting in the game's Ren'Py files look for .wav-type files in the "voice" subdirectory instead of .ogg.
- One major goal for the visual behavior of the script as it functions in-game is for the timing of the text to more or less correlate with actor performances; to that end, retiming present-state Pietro's lines of dialogue to better align with his actor's choices was completed for scenes 1-2 and 2-2.

(All 52 present-state Pietro lines of dialogue named according to their declaration in the code.)
April 3rd
- Rose delivered an incredibly lovely music-box version of Pietro's vocal performance piece for use earlier in the game (with a certain avian automaton).
- The first session for Abram took place today!
- All of Abram's flashback-state materials were recorded, and the first 3 scenes for his present state also received coverage; functionally, this means that we covered about half of Abram's total line-count across all states in about an hour and a half (2-hour session, but factoring in the ~25min at the start of the meeting discussing logistics and narrative/characterization details).
- (I did, in fact, briefly cry. I expected that to happen later in the script. Oops.)
- Playback of present-state Pietro's audio in REAPER is functioning as intended, but was not used in this session.
- Our second and final Abram session has been very tentatively slated for sometime next week, depending on actor avail.

(The regions allow for easy navigation and playback of individual lines for present-state Pietro and Abram conversations. The prepped files for Valeria's actor belong to the red region; the prepped files for Abram's actor belong to the blue region. They match each character's spreadsheet color!)
April 4th
- The process of selecting takes from the first Abram session began today; this involved session cleanup comparable to what was done for present-state Pietro, and then also involved take selects, compilation, and rendering for scene 1-4.
- I recorded a "less scuffed" (i.e. "on my proper setup") reference tune for Pietro's actor.
- A backing track—not containing the final instrumentation, but arpeggiated bits in an accurate tempo—was received from Rose. Delivery of this file means that all audio deliverables required for past-state Pietro NOW EXIST, so a second and final session with his actor can now be scheduled.
That's it for this week! I'm genuinely very much looking forward to more incoming emotional damage!
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