Developer Commentary 1
Source: collected/034-developer-commentary-1.mp3
SHA-256: c2fabefe9180f3c2bce80e4b5a5954ab05d4c5ccb6c47d1f7a50dd881cd2f20b
Model: scribe_v2 | Transcribed: 2026-10-10T18:01:18.213312+00:00
Machine transcript — uncorrected. Speaker labels are local to this recording and do not identify people.

[00:00:00.980] Speaker 1: Hello. So I wanted to take some time to introduce myself, talk about what this podcast is about, and then with a little bit of time left, I'm going to talk about the most recent episode, "Planescarred" one and two. Okay, so hello. Uh, Collected Forge is a podcast where I get to take my writing and turn them into audio stories. So I'm learning the art of sound design, and this is a place for me to practice and share, and hopefully, uh, give you some entertaining stories along the way. So right now I'm in the process of publishing 12 stories, two

[00:00:35.620] Speaker 1: episodes each. This is a sorta- sort of shotgun approach. We're gonna see what sticks, what's exciting, what makes me excited, and then I'm gonna take two of those story worlds, maybe the same stories, and I'm going to go much deeper into them. Uh, about 12 to 13 episodes, so probably a full season, and those episodes will be more polished. Uh, so that's where I'm going with the podcast, right? Uh, I'm gonna slowly dive deeper, less of this sporadic new story every week thing. Um, I'm really just trying to figure things out right now. So a little bit about the

[00:01:10.260] Speaker 1: format. Uh, you're gonna keep getting two episodes per week. Uh, I have designated episodes that do not have any sound design, uh, as raw. That's what the word raw at the end means there. And when I get a chance, sometimes I will go back and remaster sections of the episodes, uh, with, uh, full sound design, uh, audio cleanup, music, stuff like that. And if I do that, I'll post it again. So that's what that format means. If you don't see raw next to it, that means I've done some amount of sound design. So that means there's atmosphere tracks, music,

[00:01:45.080] Speaker 1: Foley sound effects, there's spot effects, um, all that sort of stuff. Uh, and usually I don't get all the way through the full episode. I kind of just focus on certain pieces that are interesting to me or that I think, uh, will teach me something. So it's a little sporadic, uh, so bear with me. When we start getting into the full seasons, the episodes will be more and more polished as I not only get better and more efficient, but, you know, I s- I'm gonna spend a little bit more time, and the release schedule will slow down to one episode per week instead of two. So that's where we're going.

[00:02:20.280] Speaker 1: Uh, that's what it is currently. Uh, I have much bigger plans, and maybe I'll get into the master plan another time. But for now, it's just gonna be new stories every week, and we can treat them like short stories. Okay. So I think that's enough backstory. And so let's talk a little bit about "Planescarred" episode one and two. What I love so much about this story is really the world. Uh, I knew about the world and the magic system long before I knew about the characters, and that's really how I've been approaching, uh,

[00:02:55.220] Speaker 1: each of these stories really is I, I come up with the magic system. I come up with the rules of the universe beyond the magic system, uh, which is a super set, and then I think about, what kind of people would this create? What kind of cultures might you get out of this? And then you sorta zoom in from there. Okay, what kind of cultures might be in conflict? What would their problems be, uh, if they could have this? Like if you've got magic that can purify food [laughs] or make food appear, right, you have a very different kind of problem, uh, from people who can see the future

[00:03:30.180] Speaker 1: or who can go into the past. Uh, who knows, right? Uh, the magic systems have a profound effect on how the world works, just like how the rules of our world has a profound effect on how the world works. So once I know the magic system and then the world and I start to dial in on the setting and the time period, uh, that's when I start creating characters. Uh, so the characters in this story are at war, uh, and it's two different planes. And we haven't gotten into, you know, how many different planes there are, how you move

[00:04:05.160] Speaker 1: between them, uh, but most of that is already spelled out. This one was pretty well flashed out-- fleshed out, the world anyway. Uh, so we've got a delegation of magical people who are on the physical plane or the mundane plane, which is basically where we live, uh, and they have dwindling resources, and they've been cut off, and, oh, spoiler by the way, if you haven't [laughs] listened to this episode, you should, uh, you should, you should pause. But I don't think you should be surprised that there's conflict. Spoiler, there's conflict. Uh, you should pause this and go listen

[00:04:40.120] Speaker 1: to it first. So they're stranded, uh, and they have to make friends quickly in order to survive. They've basically been left out to dry, and I won't go too into detail on what's going wrong, but suffice to say, many things are going wrong, uh, uh, all over the place. Uh, and they may have to save the people that they were more or less sent here to fight. So that's the story. Uh, what really drew me to this story, uh, is the magic systems. Uh, sometimes it plays a central focus, uh, sometimes it doesn't. Uh, in this

[00:05:15.100] Speaker 1: one, it was fairly important for the magical people, uh, for obvious reasons. Uh, the one that was most exciting to me, uh, is the School of Villomancy, the ability to have magical diseases that you can derive from the environment, and you can shape and tailor the effects that it has on people. Uh, it's just really cool. Uh, it's-- it has a lot of room [laughs] for use and I guess abuse, uh, and I very quickly turned it into a weapon. Uh, so it has--

[00:05:50.120] Speaker 1: not only is it an interesting plot device and the main character's stash of magical diseases is now stolen and somewhere [laughs] in the hands of a nefarious group of actors- Uh, so it is not only a plot device, but it's just a really cool school of magic, and we'll get to explore a little bit more about what it can do and what its limits are. Uh, but I just thought it was interesting 'cause I, I had never seen a magic school quite like this. You know, there's lots of gross magic, [laughs] like body magic, transformation stuff. Um, there's lots of gross

[00:06:25.052] Speaker 1: schools of magic, uh, in stories. Uh, but this wasn't, in, isn't just gross. It's gross in a very weird and not obviously useful way. Like, what, what are you gonna do with magical diseases? How, [laughs] how useful could this really be? Uh, and what makes a disease magical instead of just mundane? Uh, and the answer is it has lots of very interesting effects that, you know, don't really seem to make a lot of sense. But, uh, as an author, I write for, at least in part, what is cool and interesting to read. Uh,

[00:07:00.152] Speaker 1: I try to make it coherent within the rules of the w- the world that it's in, and that's really the rule of thumb. It's not, does it make sense, but does it make sense in their world? So I just have to construct the rules of the universe and keep them consistent, and that's really what readers are looking for when you're looking for logic. Uh, it just, it has to be internally consistent, not necessarily [laughs] consistent with our world. Uh, that's one of the rules that I try to follow with magic systems. I don't always succeed. Uh, you gotta follow the rule of cool sometimes, uh,

[00:07:35.512] Speaker 1: and I think that that's perfectly fine. So yeah, that's the story. It's the School of Villomancy. There are eight schools of magic. I'm sure we'll get around to all of them. Uh, we briefly saw a few others. I think Mother Lissandra was, uh, using Gristview, the, basically the ability to spray magical concrete. Uh, it's really not more com- complicated than that. Uh, but yeah, we'll explore the world a little bit more, uh, and the cultures and the clash between them, uh, and what makes the physical plane physical, what makes the magical plane magical. What are the other planes? How do you get there?

[00:08:11.391] Speaker 1: So I'll explore all that. Uh, it's a pretty cool setting. It's one that I've thought about for a long time. So yeah, that's Planesguard. Next week, we are also going to be revisiting an older story of mine. Uh, it's a character from a book I wrote. Um, this is basically the backstory to his story. Uh, and it is in a place called Everhouse. So we'll get to that next week. I'm excited to write that one. It's definitely lower magic. The setting is a little more wild. Um, but there's definitely less magic.

[00:08:46.532] Speaker 1: Uh, but there's always some. There's always some. So yeah, that'll be The Lightslinger, I think is what the name of the book or story will be. Uh, yeah, and I think that about does it. I'll try to publish episodes where I talk about the stories and really what I think makes a good story. Uh, it's really a theory, right, a work in progress, and what I'm learning about sound design and, uh, the struggles I had in creating the episodes and, you know, stuff like that. Uh, so speaking of which, moving on to the sound design of Planesguard. Um,

[00:09:25.172] Speaker 1: you know, there was a lot of outdoor scenes. Uh, so I spent a lot of time going through, uh, sound effects for, you know, people in crowds. But you know what's difficult is when your time period doesn't have cars or trucks or planes and somebody flies a plane overhead on your sound effects. [laughs] Like, okay. Uh, it's actually exceptionally difficult to get, um, the right time periods for atmospheres, and there's a lot of times where I try to cover it up or [laughs] hide the fact that there's a car driving by, cut it off in editing. Um, so that's

[00:10:00.132] Speaker 1: always an interesting challenge. Uh, uh, I got to do sound design for a fryer. Uh, that ended up being... That scene ended up being a little longer than intended, [laughs] the Fry Anything stand. Uh, but it was funny, so, uh, hopefully that was appreciated. I, I poured a lot of love into that scene specifically for sound design. Um, yeah. Uh, I think on this episode I really spent a long... I spread my sound design evenly, whereas in some past episodes, I've really focused on just a few minutes, and then

[00:10:35.072] Speaker 1: most of the rest of the episode is basically dead air, uh, other than my voice. But on this one, I really did spread it out fairly evenly. Uh, I wish I could have spent a little more time on the action scenes at the end, but action scenes take a lot of time to do sound design for. It's the kind of thing you just, you don't notice until you're actually in there making it. Every little scuff of the foot, uh, move it, movement of clothing, grabbing clothing, uh, footsteps, uh, bouncing off walls, and that's just the sounds of movement. That's not even the sounds of, you know, all the

[00:11:09.832] Speaker 1: magic that is happening or gunfire or everybody else who's moving around and saying things and they grunt and go, "Ugh," when they get hit. So it's got a very high density of sound, so it takes an enormous amount of effort to do an action scene. Uh, but they are very exciting, and I will say that the sounds really add a lot of depth and immersion to an action scene. There's something that you get with sound that you just can't get with words. I can say, "She swung her head back and hit him in the face," and you can imagine that, but when you hear...

[00:11:43.172] Speaker 1: [whooshing] [imitates punching] [laughs] "Ugh," it's just so much more descriptive of what happened, right? I don't have to say, "And then his bones broke," when I can just make the sound of crunching. [laughs] And you know exactly how bad the hit was, right? I don't need to dive into whether it was a glancing blow or not. You hear that, the huge crunch. Like, oh man, that was a big hit. Um, so I find that it, it's really, it really adds another channel of information to action scenes that is really hard to get in another format.

[00:12:18.332] Speaker 1: Uh, so that's cool, uh, but it is time-consuming. Um, what else would I like to say about this episode? Uh, I enjoyed it. Uh, I wrote it in basically one, maybe two long sessions. Uh, it was, it was fun to write. It's got a lot of humor in it. Uh, I think that I reflexively put a lot of humor in my stories. I like dark grittiness every now and then, um, but I like lightheartedness too. Uh, and I think I... There's a mix of that in this story. There's a lot of, uh, gross-out moments.

[00:12:53.432] Speaker 1: Sorry to give you two stories like that in a row. [laughs] I promise that is not usually how I write. It just so happens that, uh, both of these stories have magic systems that are, eh, a little bit nasty. Um, but yeah, uh, I enjoyed writing it. Uh, it was really cool. Uh, it's sort of a urban setting. Uh, next, next week's setting will be interior. [laughs] 100% interior. Uh, I'm really excited about the next one. It's one of my

[00:13:28.332] Speaker 1: favorite settings. Uh, you'll, you'll recognize, uh, what novels it's inspired by, uh, if you listen to it. But, uh, I think that's it for me. I'm not gonna keep droning on, but this was my first developer commentary. As always, I want your feedback. The reason I'm even releasing this podcast at all is because I want feedback. Uh, I believe that you need to share things in order to get better. And yeah, so here's to getting better and thanks for listening. See you next week