I’ve found that I need to strike a balance between being specific with sounds but also generic enough to satisfy a wide audience. Early on in my concept, I decided that it would be best to include our users too, which is why we built in a personal recording option as well as the feature to upload unlimited personal sounds.

As for my creative expression, I started with the idea of a character party. I wanted character voices for fighter types, magic users, healers, good and evil in both male and female personalities to offer the most flexibility to a gaming group. I contracted with the Voice Sphere, a group of voice actors to record the scripts I wrote and gave them instruction for how I thought the character would convey the script. These were for Phrases, Spell Actions (the verbal components for spells) as well as Emotes that I could use for Weapon Actions and Weapon Hits.

About three years ago, I started creating a dictionary for three magical languages I call Delvin. I loosely based these languages on the places I’ve lived in my life- Maori, the native tongue to the inhabitants of New Zealand as I was an exchange student there in high school; Ancient Greek as I lived there for a semester in college and took Biblical Greek as part of my Religious Studies degree and Japanese because I worked there teaching English for three years after graduating college. A great example is the word, “me” in Japanese is watashiwa and in Arcane Delvin, it is mitashi.

The sounds in our app are like a puzzle that can be mixed and matched and are categorized as Action, Hit, Miss, Critical, Fumble, Phrases and Foley. If a user wants to use the auto-dice rolling feature, they can create a scenario with an action sound and the die roll will determine whether a hit, miss, critical hit or fumble sound is played. All the sounds are assigned by the user. Like a good GM, I never wanted to give our users just one path to express their character’s actions.