The audio used on OGS is not particularly good, I’d like to make it a lot better. There are two sets of audio and I’d like to revamp them both. The first set being the voice(s) used for clock countdown, and the second being sound effects used, such as stone placement and game transitions (ie game start/end).

For the voices I’d like to start supporting multiple languages, so I’ll be preparing a script for each voice actor to read off and then turn into sound bites for use on the site. What I need help with is making sure I have itemized all of the phrases we’ll need since going back after the fact and getting additional phrases in the same voice would be a notable pain.

The most obvious phrases are all of the numbers zero through sixty so we can count both up and down up for any period time up to a minute.

Do we want/need any other spoken phrases, such as “overtime”, or “5 periods” or anything like that, or should we just stick to numbers?

I’m thinking of including several other phrases in the script that might be useful, even though we might opt for sound effects or silence over voices for some or all of them. These include:

Game paused

Game resumed

Undo requested

Undo granted

Your move

Disconnected

Reconnected

Your opponent has disconnected

Your opponent has reconnected

Time / Timeout

Press the submit button to play the stone

Byoyomi now starts

n Byoyomi left

Last Byoyomi

Possibly rules / short audio intro

Coordinates

Any requests for anything not on the list?

For sound effects

New stone placement sounds with several samples of placing a stone in a vertex with no neighbors, one neighbor, two neighbors, etc.

Stone thwack for limited use thwacks during a game

Taking stone out of bowl, possibly used after a stone has been placed (like your opponent just reached for their next stone).

Grabbing several stones, perhaps placing them on the board, for a nigiri sound as a possible start game sound effect.

Stone rustling in bowls, perhaps for game start or end effect.

Putting captured stones in the lid

Stone sliding

Placement in different parts of board

Quite possibly a nuclear tesuji as an optional resignation effect.

Anyone have any other ideas?

I’m going to be recording these myself, so if there are any folks out there with sound effect recording experience and have any tips or tricks you would like to share, I would love to hear them! I’ll be going through a bit of effort to create a sound isolated environment and will try and figure out the best equipment to buy/rent to get high quality recordings of these things - again if you have experience with this and have some input on the matter, let me know! Like with the voices, it’s better to record too much and not use some of the samples, than too little as it would be a pain to get everything setup again to do proper recordings of something we missed. So if you have any good ideas for things to record or how to record them, throw them out there