Lucky Luc
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 1215
Registered: 08-19-2012
IP: Logged
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Re: Look! Links! (+3)
Hey! I watched the first three videos of your audio tutorials. It feels very well structured and you definitely manage to convey a lot of information in a nicely condensed manner without going on many irrelevant tangents, which I very much appreciate.
However, while I'm personally a big fan of understanding the basics of things, I think your structure might be a little too centered around technicalities for the general audience. If someone is making their first game and they want to know a quick way to make a sound effect, they don't really want (and also don't really need) to hear an exhaustive explanation of sample rates and bit depths first. Don't get me wrong, these are definitely important topics and I like that you cover them, but I think they would be more appropriate at a later spot in your tutorial. You don't teach physics by introducing elementary particles and interactions. You start teaching physics by letting go of a ball and seeing it fall down to earth.
If you prefer this kind of bottom-up structure, which I think is completely fair, and want to continue doing it like this in the future, I would suggest to maybe add an introductory video to your courses that goes over when you will teach what and what points are good points of entry. I know this is additional work, but I think it could be helpful for people who just want to learn how to quickly make a sound effect without learning all about audio fundamentals.
You are very clearly knowledgeable about the topics to discuss, but I would still advise having a second person read over your script to double-check a few things. Some of the things you said seemed a little off to me, or at least a little weirdly phrased. For example, saying that the sample rate tells you how many square waves are used to approximate your signal sounds sort of like you're doing a Fourier-like process where you decompose an audio signal into square waves with different amplitudes and frequencies and reconstruct it by adding them back together. As far as I'm aware, that's not how uncompressed audio data usually works, though. To my understanding, the analog signal is sampled at different points in time and the relative current value of that signal is stored as a value between -1 and 1, which seems like a much more simple approach. Also, I think your use of the word "volume" to describe the value of the audio signal is a little dodgy. Saying that the current value of a signal is equal to its volume at that point would mean that a simple note would constantly oscillate between positive and negative volumes (what even are negative volumes?), which just doesn't fit to how we experience volume in real life.
Apart from a knowledgeable person reading over your script, it can also be very useful to have an amateur read over it, especially if they are not afraid to ask "stupid" questions. After all, your course is aimed at amateurs. And an unfortunate fact is that there are some things that are completely clear to you that a newbie has never thought about before, and that it's very hard to catch all of those things if you have too much knowledge about a topic. As an example from your course, you start it by telling some facts about audio output devices and in the next lesson, you talk a lot about how digital audio signals look like. However, you don't mention how those two things are connected. And while this might be completely clear to you and me, someone who has no prior knowledge about audio might not make the connection. It doesn't even have to be a lengthy explanation about the physical processes that take place within your speakers, but just say something like "this signal is sent to your speakers or headphones, which then convert it into physical sound waves that you can hear."
As for your presentation style, I very much appreciate that you speak slowly and clearly. I thought some of the pauses within a sentence felt a bit long and awkward. If you struggle a bit with reading from a script, that's totally fine, but maybe some audio editing would help to make the flow feel more natural. I know that this is quite a lot of work and if you want to keep your current style, that's also fine.
I hope this doesn't come off as too negative. Making an exhaustive online tutorial series about game design is certainly a huge project that requires a lot of dedication and effort, and I think you are doing very well overall. Please try to see this as motivation to keep working and improving and not as discouragement.
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