A Beginner's Guide to Let's Play Authoring Version Beta 2 By Sky Render So you want to write an LP? Great! It can be a pretty daunting task, to say the least, but fortunately there are ways to make your job much easier! This guide is designed with that in mind, and explains some of the more useful tricks and techniques you can employ to make your job easier when writing an LP. Tools for the Job =-=-= Writing an LP is far easier when you have effective tools at your disposal and know how to use them. To that end, here are a few recommendations for the sort of software and hardware you can use to make LPing easier. Emulation software: pretty self-explanatory nowadays, but emulators let you play games that your current hardware can't handle natively. This is pretty much required for any game made for DOS that lacks a Windows port, and certainly helps for console games when you lack the necessary hardware to record from the original systems. Some popular emulators include DOSBox (DOS), ZSNES (SNES), Visual Boy Advance (GBA), FCEUX (NES), and PCSX (PS1). Recording software: some programs have built-in video and screenshot tools, but a lot of them don't. For that, it's useful to have specialized recording software (especially for video). For recording video, a good program choice is CamStudio, which allows capturing of video and audio right off of your screen. Irfanview can act as a screenshot tool for games and emulators that lack this feature. For capturing a feed off of a video capture hardware device, VirtualDub is a good free option. If you want to record audio of some sort separate from the game proper (such as a commentary track), Audacity is a powerful free tool to do so with. Editing software: There's a few classes of editing software out there, but they're all useful. For text files, a general-purpose editor like Win32Pad is a good choice. For audio editing, once again Audacity is a great choice. Video editing is not quite as clean-cut, as there aren't any truly stellar free video editing programs out there, but VirtualDub is probably the closest to a decent free one out there. For image modification, Irfanview is a wonderful program, and for image editing, GIMP is reasonably functional (although not entirely intuitive at times). Recording hardware: There are ways to capture an audio/video feed from a home console straight to your PC. This involves use of a USB capture device, which accepts audio- and video-in for standard TV cables and outputs the stream to your computer. Such devices can usually be found on sites like Amazon and Newegg for $20 to $50. As mentioned above, VirtualDub tends to be a good option for recording off of them. You can find the software tools mentioned above at the following locations: DOSBox: http://www.dosbox.com/ ZSNES: http://www.zsnes.com/ VBA: http://vba.ngemu.com/ FCEUX: http://fceux.com/ PCSX: http://www.pcsx.net/ Win32Pad: http://www.gena01.com/win32pad/ Irfanview: http://www.irfanview.com/ GIMP: http://www.gimp.org/ VirtualDub: http://www.virtualdub.org/ Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ CamStudio: http://camstudio.org/ Making Preparations =-=-= A lot of the work on an LP can be done before you make a single update. Even though you do need to actually play the game to get footage or screenshots, much of the extra content that you know you're going to use can be gathered ahead of time. Before you start your LP, decide what extras you're going to add in. Some popular things to include in LPs are: * Links to music tracks (official and fan-made both) * Critical data like enemy lists for RPGs * Links to mythological or other references you know about * Links to mechanics guides * Official and fan-made artwork * Anecdotes about your own previous experiences with a game * Scripted scenes you know you want to include (this is very common with a narrative-style LP in particular) You don't have to gather all of this, of course; it's up to you how much you want to include in your LP. Find and store resources of this sort you want to use somewhere you can easily find them, so you can just add links to them in your LP on the fly instead of having to hunt them down when you actually do your updates. Formatting Tricks and Tips =-=-= There are a few things you can do to make your life easier when preparing updates for posting. One of the best things you can do is to keep a script file where you write your updates before you post them. Simply have a plain text file which you write your updates in first, and do all of your writing and BBCode there. It also helps to pay attention to how many images you've used in a given block, and space out your update post blocks for easy reference when you post your update. Current forum image limit at Talking Time is 20 images per post. This rule is as true in LPing as it is in gaming: save early, save often! Make sure you've saved your changes to your LP (script and images both) on your end before you go posting it, and also keep this backup of it on your hard drive just in case something goes wrong! While writing your script, it's a good idea to have the directory with your screenshots or videos open beside your text file. This way you can check to make sure that you've kept the numbering and naming of your image links appropriate. For a video LP, you can do an unrecorded "test run" of your script to make sure it times up properly (if you're not ad-libbing it, of course!). Take full advantage of copy/paste for image links. In most cases you can just update the number on an image link for each new image in your update. It's a good idea to double-size any screenshot smaller than 320x240. As well, you can get more images per page by stitching several images together. Irfanview has options for both of these. For long screens full of dialogue, it's usually best to summarize most of the dialogue instead of try to screencap every single screen of text. This means more work on your end, of course, but it's easier on your readers' bandwidths (and thus your image host's bandwidth by extension). To make your life easier, see if you can find and download a script file for your game so you don't have to hand-type out the dialgoue you're summarizing. Take advantage of formatting tags! Effective use of bold, italics, strikeout, underline, and color can help you make key points in your LP stand out. Of course, you should use these features in moderation too so they don't become annoying. Updating Techniques =-=-= Updating your LP is of course determined by your own preferences. But one thing will help regardless of your update style, and that is to pick an update schedule and do your best to stick to it. Pick an update rate that works for you, and don't worry if you have to adjust it later. As noted before, having a script file helps immensely with your updates. Instead of having to type your updates out as you post them, you'll be able to get all of any given update posted quickly and efficiently with little additional work. It's a good idea to proofread your update before, during, and after you post it. This will both help the quality of your update and help you catch easily missed mistakes that might slip by you during the writing process. Overcoming Technical Issues =-=-= Some technical issues that come up in LPing are very common, and can be overcome with fairly universal techniques. Progressive desynchronized audio: This comes up a lot when recording footage: the audio starts out properly synchronized, but by the end of the video is no longer in sync with the video. There are several solutions, but the simplest is this: in VirtualDub, set audio to full processing mode, use advanced filtering, and set up the following audio filter: input -> time stretch -> output. Set the video mode to direct stream copy, and then save the file. 9 times out of 10, this will fix the desync issue. Uniform desynchronized audio: Sometimes recording software doesn't properly flag where audio and video sync up, resulting in the video being consistently desynchronized for the entire length. This is easily fixed for when the audio is playing too early: extract the audio track, figure out the desync length, and then add silence equal to that length to the start of the audio file and reinsert by doing a direct stream copy of the video and import the audio from the modified file in VirtualDub. If the desync is in the other direction (ie. the audio plays after the point in the video it should), instead delete that much audio at the start of the video. Large image file sizes: If your images seem to take up too much space on your hard drive, there are a few things you can do to make them smaller. Converting the image to PNG format can help, as can reducing the color depth to 256 colors. The latter isn't recommended for high-color images, but it works very well for most older titles. If the image is just too big in PNG no matter what you do, consider converting it to a JPEG with reasonable compression. Contributors =-=-= These are the people who helped make this guide what it is today. * Grendlen - Provided many of the software program links. * Aeonus - Provided the progressive audio desynchronization solution.