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I was planning on making a news post today, but I just got some last minute news that’s changed the tone of everything. A few months back, some fans contacted me about the possibility of making a Freeman’s Mind announcer pack for the game DOTA 2. As I’ve still been scrambling for ways to earn a sustainable income, I thought this sounded like a pretty good idea, as Valve has an infrastructure set up for it to get into the Steam store and I can think up with many, many lines for the game in the same style of Freeman’s Mind. I’ve been working on this off and on for the past few months, making a serious push towards it in the past week or two (this is why the latest Freeman’s Mind has been delayed). What I originally was going to post today was to say I was DONE with the first wave of recording for this, all the lines had been edited, and I was going to submit it to Valve this week.
The bad news is I just today decided to check Valve’s instructions for the voice pack and they’ve added a LOT of additional instructions and lines that previously were never specified. Their information on this when I first started was awfully spotty, it seems they’ve approximately quintupled the information provided on what they’re looking for since when I first started. This means I’m a lot farther off from being completed than I previously thought and my pack is no longer ready to be submitted. The announcer pack I was planning to submit is currently 634 lines (with 2,074 shortlisted takes I rejected, and 30 sessions worth of recordings), with an ungodly number of hours I’ve put into doing audio editing on this. I covered all the lines available to announcers (as of a couple months ago), with MANY alternate lines in the Freeman’s Mind style of things. Finding out I have a LOT more work ahead of me before this will be complete is a big blow to morale.
At this point I’m not sure what to do, so I’d appreciate feedback from people on this. Is this announcer pack something you’ll be interested in and willing to help vote on if I can get it submitted? Right now I’m considering finishing off the additional mandatory lines, then saving the new “optional” ones as a promise to add if this gets accepted into the Steam store. If I could get this in the Steam store, I wouldn’t think twice about adding thousands of additional lines, but I don’t want to pour weeks more work into this if there’s a good chance it will just get rejected anyway. If you have any advice along these lines, please let me know.
In the meantime, I’ll be resuming the next Freeman’s Mind and hope to have it up in about a week. More news coming late July and August!
ADHD version: Ross has been working on a Freeman’s Mind announcer pack for DOTA 2, but it’s hit a snag! Vote on the poll! New Freeman’s Mind episode in about a week!
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