Hi there! It's time for—you guessed it—yet another devlog for HIS LAST MACHINATION. We're closing in on the end of recording sessions and generally making really neat (if sometimes emotionally painful?) progress on the game! A lot of deeply silly nonsense also happened this week, some of which I'm more than happy to include here as well.

April 5th

• Part 2 of session coordination took place; two sessions were confirmed, with a third awaiting confirmation.
• Take selection and line exportation continued for Abram, with scenes 1.5 and 2.2 completed.
• Just for fun, I started a thread within our project management hub's audio and music channel titled "Mutterings Whilst Editing Dialogue" for all the moderately ridiculous things I say to myself/various waveforms/etc. whilst doing take selects, comping audio, or "washing" (cleaning and mixing) files.
• Slightly against my better judgment, I tested some of Abram's 2.2 dialogue in-engine alongside a special musical effect; it absolutely worked as intended, but I realized I was mildly setting myself up for future emotional damage on account of the upcoming second Pietro session.

(Sometimes, the only force to blame for project-related emotional damage is yourself. "I can't believe I've done this!")

April 6th

• In preparation for the session on the 7th, all flashback-Abram audio was split, exported, and plopped into a REAPER session (again, due to Pro Tools being "selfish"/refusing to share its audio with other apps unless a virtual audio cable is employed) so that Pietro's actor can work off of actual flashback-Abram.
• Additionally in the realm of Pietro session 2 prep, a metronome count-in was added to the start of the backing track for the sung vocal performance component (to ensure Pietro's actor has time/can set her own internal sense of tempo before the track begins in earnest).

April 7th

• The second session with Pietro's actor took place today; we started by capturing the song component, and then moved on to grabbing all of past-Pietro's dialogue (the flashbacks in scenes 1.5, 2.2, and 2.4A).
• Rose delivered music for use inside of Abram's cottage, which absolutely encapsulated the general mood/"vibe" of the place; personally, I feel very fortunate that Rose and I have similar harmonic and thematic leanings, because it means that even things he deposits as musical "sketches" tend to, for lack of a better descriptor, "scratch my brain a nice way."
• All remaining present-state Abram (up to the end of scene 2.2) was split today!
• This absurd meme was created following the realization that the flashback in 2.4 is essentially just a very sad version of the "Look at it; it's got anxiety" meme from c. 2015.

April 8th

• Code was added within the script to allow for initial testing of music within Abram's cottage.
• Initial tests for transitioning out of and back into music adjacent to the sequence with the special musical SFX were conducted; everything works as intended, albeit with brief "Wait, can I do this for a musical fade in Ren'Py, or is that one just for ambience?" shenanigans due to forgetting the precise syntax.

April 9th

• Take selection and line splitting for flashback-state Pietro concluded today, thus allowing for the first in-engine tests of the flashback sequences with both actors' audio in place.
• Amusingly, the initial test of the flashback in scene 2.4 involved Pietro accidentally becoming stuck to the ceiling, thus resulting in both Kylie and Jett laughing maniacally (and feeling moderately bad about Abram having a breakdown in tandem with "people losing it over Pietro being Velcro'd to the ceiling"). As it turned out, this was due to an easily-correctable positioning issue, but it was extremely funny.

• Rose delivered the initial version of another theme today; unfortunately, his FL Studio decided that it wanted to crash and corrupt his project file—thankfully, most of it could be reconstructed by hand, but it was still baffling.
• Today also marked the beginning of "washing" voice lines for the game; all of present-state Pietro's dialogue was cleaned and volume-balanced for internal consistency.

April 10th

• Rumi delivered an initial sneak peak for the UI design, which already looks fantastic; due to its existence, Kylie now also has enough data to begin tinkering with UI SFX design!
• The second and final session with Abram's actor took place today, allowing for us to cover scenes 2.3, 2.4A and 2.4B, 3.1, 3.3, and both Ending 1 and Ending 3.
• The vast majority of flashback-Pietro's dialogue was cleaned and mixed today, with only 2.4A left as outstanding for tomorrow.
• As of this evening (by US Pacific-timezone reckoning), the current status of all dialogue in the game looks like this. Per-scene line counts are displayed below, with green representing "recorded," orange representing "split and exported, not mixed," and blue representing "cleaned and mixed."

(Eventually, all of the nonzero line-count cells—outside of the Total Voiced column, anyway—will be blue.)

April 11th

• Cleaning and mixing on flashback-Pietro's dialogue concluded today, thus covering the outstanding materials from scene 2.4A.
• All of Abram's lines from yesterday's session were isolated (i.e. large chunks of dead space were removed), and take selection for scenes 2.3 and 3.3 were completed.
• The session prep file in REAPER for Valeria's actor was updated to include all of Abram's relevant 3.3 dialogue.

A Final Neat Observation (largely without a day placement)

There's a certain level of unintentional-but-extremely-cool synergy between our character artist (Lu) and the actors playing Abram and Pietro, which essentially has to do with characterization choices:

• A major visual characterization goal for both characters' flashback-state designs was "Ensure both of these characters still look solidly like adults, even though they're young."
• Similarly, both the actor for Pietro and the actor for Abram possess a sense of "Retain [x] traces of [character]'s eventual voiceprint so the age-states feel linked" in their characters' flashback-state performances. This synergy largely happened without any influence from me; it feels almost like when two people more or less created calculus at the same time.

Tomorrow will mark the day of the final recording session for HIS LAST MACHINATION, and I'm indescribably thankful to all our actors for their trust, vulnerability, sincerity, and overall enthusiasm to be involved with the project. I'd also be remiss to not give a special shoutout to both Kylie and Elina for waking up/staying awake at somewhat irregular times in order to sit in on sessions (both for audio sanity-checks and general moral support). In general, I'm thrilled with all the work this team has put forth thus far, and I'm so psyched for all that we'll be doing throughout the remainder of this month.