Here is some wonderful art from Evil Seedlet. You can find her Tumblr page here and her Youtube page there—->CLICK THIS NOW. I am sure, given her name, that if you visit her page and plant her in your head that no good will come from it, only evil, but why in Oblivion would you want to be good you Mary Sue. In fact, I give all law-abiders full permission to be evil for the rest of the year, which I’m sure overrules the Constitution of both the United States and your country of residence.
In any event, this picture features her character Ra’ziik with Rumarin and Olette. It’s kind of adorable. Hopefully we will see more art from her in the future, as there is plenty of space both on the blog and my back for me to tattoo them.
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.
