Talking About Statistics

July 5, 2024

One of the major milestones for the Sleuthhounds: Cruise game is now complete. All of the game’s dialog is written. For a story-based adventure game, like Cruise, this is a significant achievement. It means that every interaction possible to take in the game has now been properly implemented.

To put it another way, the game is now done. Except for the animations. And the sound effects and music. Oh, and recording voice talent for all of that dialog. But other than that… ;)

Without preamble, here are some interesting stats about the dialog:

  • There are 22,146 total times where characters have a line of dialog.
  • Of those, there are 2,963 duplicate lines. These are lines where the same thing is said for different actions, such as “The door’s already unlocked.”
  • That leaves 19,183 lines that need an audio file to go with them.
  • Of those, 1,230 lines have already been recorded, leaving 17,953 more lines to record, clean, and integrate into the game.
  • By comparison, the largest previous game, Sleuthhounds: The Cursed Cannon, has a grand total of 2,349 lines of recorded dialog.

I was recently away on vacation for over a week. Prior to leaving, I had completed a first draft design for the new recording booth I want to construct. Now that I’m back, I want to review that draft one more time, with fresh eyes, to make sure I haven’t overlooked anything. From there, I’ll create a parts list, secure those supplies, and do the build.

At the same time, I’m doing an editing pass on all that dialog and breaking it up into individual recording scripts for the different characters in the game. Once I have those recording scripts and the audio booth is built, then it’s time to record in ernest.

BUT, I hear you say, the stats above show that there’s already over a thousand lines of dialog recorded. Yes, that’s true. I had previously started recording some of the dialog for the Pureluck Homes character, as that’s one I voice myself. However, as I started integrating the dialog for those recording sessions, I found I was running into places where I hadn’t finished writing the dialog yet, and so was leaving gaps for things that needed to be recorded. To help ensure all the dialog gets properly recorded, I decided to suspend recording any further dialog lines until all of the written lines were complete. Which they are now.

So, onward to the dialog recording!