Elder Game: Howl Sound Effect

This Blog Post was part of the Elder Game blog. It was posted by Citan on January 8, 2012.

Previous Post: Elder Game: Features In, Features Out

Next Post: Elder Game: Complexity and Group Combat

Additional Blog entries can be found on the Developers page or in Category:Game Blogs

Quick question: does anybody know where I can buy a wolf-howl sound effect that can be used in commercial applications? There are some on soundrangers.com and I’ll use those if need be, but the clean ones (with no background noise) are 7 seconds long… which is a whole lotta howling when you’re sitting there as a werewolf. The shorter ones have too much background noise to work.

—

Development notes:

I finished the pre-alpha checklist for werewolves tonight. But I’m tempted to keep working on them. I’m thinking of adding a tracking/hunting skill that works kind of like cartography in AC2 (which is a kissing cousin of archaelogy in WoW). But that’s not on my pre-alpha checklist, so I’m managing to resist implementing it for now… I have more basic stuff to do! Like, say, making the mini-map work right, or letting you trade inventory items, or adding more than one character art set, or…

But I’d also really like to get werewolves more fleshed out. They’re one of four or five “big choices” available to players. These are things like becoming a paladin, selling your soul to a demon, becoming a vampire, etc. Big decisions, not the sort of thing that you turn off when you don’t want it. These permanent, game-changing decisions help you identify and bond with your character.

For these to work, each of them is going to need some unique systems that make them play differently. And werewolves aren’t quite in the right ballpark yet. Until I feel like it’s there, I feel kind of lost… like I don’t understand what I’m really making here. So I’m warring with the desire to keep prototyping, versus the desire to flesh out the general game mechanics so that you guys can get in here and poke around.

It’s tough. I really don’t want people to see it in a shoddy state — first impressions are important! I’m not expecting it to be any good at first… but it needs to be just good enough that you can intuitively understand that “some day this will be a real MMO.” I’m almost there, it just needs a bit more polish and a week more of bug fixing. But I might also be “almost there” with werewolves’ game mechanics… so close… maybe just this one more little bit! Or maybe a few more iterations…

And this is why so many game companies just steal other games’ mechanics. Inventing new stuff is incredibly time consuming, and you never really know when you’re done until you get there.