Dave Gilbert’s gamedev blog

Greetings from San Francisco. I arrived here Tuesday night beleagured and jetlagged but otherwise none the worse for wear. The nice folks at PlayFirst hooked me up with a room at the Westin St. Francis, in Union Square. Interestingly enough, it’s a block away from the hotel I usually stay in while at GDC so I know the area well.

The room is one of the nicest I’ve ever been in, with a gorgeous view of the city.

I wasn’t in much of a state to appreciate it though, since I had been travelling for 7 hours and was stupidly jetlagged. I crashed early, and woke up at around 4am. One perk to getting up early and being on the west coast is that I can see the sunrise.

I met up with my producer Jared around 9 who took me over to the Somatone office. Somatone is the audio house that is handling half of the voiceover recording. A studio in NYC is handling the rest.

For my little indie games, I usually handle voice acting by connecting a headset microphone to my laptop, giving the mic to an actor, and then handing the actor the script. My apartment is very quiet, and I’ve never had any major problems with the sound levels, but now that I’ve experienced a professional studio it’s hard to take my little ghetto setup seriously anymore.

Two actors came in yesterday, each performing two roles. It was nice to finally meet them. Several weeks ago, Somatone had sent me several dozen audition samples to listen to. They were all so good it was difficult choosing which actor to play which role (and to save money, we’d often give an actor two or even three roles depending on how versatile they were). Can’t say what the roles are yet, obviously, but here’s a pic of one of them in action:

JS Gilbert (yes, Gilbert) came in and totally owned the roles. He’s also a bit of a standup comedian so he improvised a lot, which had us all laughing.

Sarah Trancer has this really deep, slow and sultrey voice that suited one of the major characters perfectly. She also proved her versatility by doing another character with a completely different personality. More on that after the announcement.

Anyway, things are busy here but I’ll be sure to keep updating this site with news. Till next time,