Behind The Scenes: "Isometric Dreams: The Chris Sawyer Story"

Timberwolf

• 2 min read

This is one of those ones where I feel everything came together just right; perhaps it's that my level of passion for this topic is high, but even a few weeks after recording it I still love the detail, the pop-up jokes that only dedicated spotters will get, and that I got to play and highlight a whole load of great games.

Notes

  • The dogs would not stop going crazy while I was recording this! When I edited the commentary track it was about 20 minutes long, with several stretches of me repeatedly saying the same sentence to an unwanted backdrop of them clattering up and down the stairs.
  • I do marvel at the way these videos will have me doing something I never expected - in this case, tracking down and getting running a functioning Memotech MTX emulator. It's no surprise that this is a bit of an obscure emulation niche.
  • The one thing I couldn't get running at all was Revenge of the Chamberoids, so both screens in this section are from the original Chamberoids game. A bit of a shame as Revenge is another isometric game, which looks very much like it was based on the Sepulcri Scelarati engine.
  • I had some very real frustration getting so close to running a perfect Level 2 in Qogo, only to be "got" by the ball right at the end!
  • I'm still half-expecting an angry comment from someone letting a joke go over their head and complaining about the "Bitmap" Brothers.
  • The Merry-Go-Round music is a bit of an in-joke for people who watched me place that ride in nearly all of my RCT2 Let's Play videos, until the merest hint of the music sent me into meltdown. There's actually a bit of useful trivia here, as I see people (inaccurately) post links to records saying "this is one of the RCT tunes" without realising the entire Merry-Go-Round soundtrack is lifted wholesale from a single LP.
  • One slight regret was not being able to get hold of an actual Playstation Transport Tycoon CD, and having to use a screenshot for this rather than real gameplay footage.
  • Whenever you see a screenshot of a game box, that's my own original copy bought back when they were new.
  • Last minute edit: I got all the way to uploading the video to YouTube before noticing I'd included a much later Amstrad CPC6128 Plus, not the mid-1980s model Chris Sawyer would have bought.

Technical Bits

Does anyone care about this sort of stuff?

  • Commentary is recorded using a Shure SM-58, running into a Focusrite Solo with a Triton FetHead to boost up the signal a bit. I have one of the Shure accessory pop filters (which makes a big difference!) and use the 'AIR' setting on the Focusrite.
  • Initial cleanup is done in Audacity, with a compressor, noise gate and limiter. Because this filter chain takes a few seconds of audio to stabilise there are always a few seconds of me singing, making silly noises or talking utter nonsense on the first few seconds of an audio track before I edit it.
  • I run the commentary through Izotope RX-8 before loading it into the timeline. It doesn't need much extra cleanup, although I usually do a little bit of click removal (both general clicks and mouth clicks), and run it through loudness control with the "Podcast Delivery" setting to get the levels really even.
  • Final assembly of the video was completed in KdenLive.