Look, it’s not that I have an internal bias toward perky females, I really don’t. It just so happens that some of the most diligent actors – Viridiane, Anna Castiglioni – happen to voice them. Ronja Monto continues to churn out lines, songs, and all measure of goodness, and as such, Alassea may end up being more developed than a follower like Qa’Dojo (whom I actually planned on writing thousands of lines for).
This video contains a sample of a new song that Ronja wrote, composed, and sung. I had to paraphrase in the subtitles because the lyrics wouldn’t fit, and I didn’t want to butcher the music.
First I want to mention I added a new volunteers section to the sidebar for anyone who’s interested in helping out. Basically right now the main thing I am looking for is wiki contributors, but I’m not going to say no to any talent of any kind, whether you want to provide blog stories or fan art and the like. I’ve already added an author – which means I need to figure out how to place a byline. First world problems.
As far as new content, I’ve gotten a little quest fatigue so I’ve returned to adding follower commentary. This can take a while though, because it requires playing Skyrim again, forcing myself to dungeon crawl instead of say, hunting antelope, then writing the lines, then waiting for them to get voiced.
Another thing I want to go back and do is add more scene interaction between vanilla and mod NPCs. Who I do this for will depend on actor availability, as well as how natural I can make the vanilla tracks sound. Splicing up lines can take hours to get right.
Most of these scenes have to be reverse engineered. For example, today I was playing around with having Ysolda speak to Larkspur, the former bandit. Rather than construct the scene and hope there was audio to match it, I just looked for a line that mentioned bandits, and built the conversation from there. This is the track – spoken by Muiri – that forms the basis for the conversation:
Of course, while there’s plenty of meat in this track, in order to make it work for the scene, I had to splice it together with two separate tracks so that Ysolda is addressing Larkspur directly instead of talking about Alain Dufont. This is the end result:
The tone of all three tracks in this situation is similar enough that the sentence flows smoothly. You can’t just pick any track from a specific actor, as the emotion and voice can change depending on the NPC. For example, Elisif’s tracks can’t be used for Ysolda, and vice versa. Either way, now I can build Larkspur’s dialogue around this.
In any case, more conversations that don’t involve the player always helps the surrounding environment feel more alive, and including vanilla NPCs helps integrate the mod ones into the world. It’s just given all the variables, it isn’t the easiest thing to do.
There’s nothing more to tell, really, because everyone was drunk as donkeys and quote unquote unreliable witnesses, so if you try to pin the tail solely on me you really are blind, because seriously the whole affair was very, very French, C’est la Vie, and nothing more needs to be said that your eyes haven’t told you already. I mean, truth is, I wasn’t even supposed to be here, funny story, a friend of a friend says she saw a guy at the party that looks just like Torygg, and I’m like NO WAY you mean Homecoming King Torygg as in the star quarterback with the broad shoulders and deep blue eyes, and she’s like YES WAY that Torygg, it might even really be him although I would just die to meet him and he wouldn’t be caught dead with us so I guess that means we’re both fucking corpses, which would be kind of gross but also awesome because I’m really into zombie flicks and slash fiction. So anyways, we get to the party and there he is leaning over the kitchen counter like a tenth Divine and the fact that he’s alone makes him look just a little vulnerable even though you could chip a diamond on those abs, and I want to walk over to him and ask him to run a quarterback sneak into my panties when that slut Imperial from Markarth Hall struts over wearing the outfit she used to floss this morning and smelling like the crabs she undoubtedly has. This wasn’t something unexpected though, it’s like in all the movies where the girl has to slay the head cheerleader with monsters in her cooter, and so I sidle up to the both of them and try to make small talk about the new Lars Von Trier movie and the plight of the spotted owl but for some reason the conversation isn’t flowing right, so I glance over my shoulder and see my friend of a friend running her hand sideways against her throat as if she wants me to abort, but I’ve always been a stubborn child so I ignore her and continue to lose myself in the eyes of this flawless specimen of a human being who really does look just like Torygg, and pretty soon neither of us are saying anything at all, and there’s this moment of silence that’s just perfectly awkward, and that’s when the tramp says the words that are on both our minds, “What are you doing here?” and I say “I dunno, I don’t even like strip clubs” before snapping her top like a rubber band, and then at that point things get a little hazy, but what I do remember is that when it’s all over and the slut is drowning in a sea of her own blood and excessive make-up, the DJ plays what will someday be our song and we slow dance and he says to me “Where have you been all my life” and I say “Not here” because truth be told I was never supposed to be at this party, which is another way of saying there was nothing about this act that was premeditated, it just sort of happened Officer, I swear.
