A little bit of everything

While we are off to a good start this semester it feels like we are back at the beginning. Taking a step back to look at our game so we can iterate and make things even better. The idea for right now is that in our game we would try out a bunch of different themes and styles for our game and figure out which works best. The way our game works with the minigames being so closely designed with the art, we found that the sound is the same way. I can't really know exactly what to make for the levels until they are made and I can actually put the audio into the game. In the meantime I am finding more source material to take for inspiration and am just playing around with Fruity Loops.

At this point it is nice because I have really picked up a lot of skills in Fruity Loops. The other nice part is because of my class last semester I am much better at editing clips for us to use to make these tracks for the game. Hopefully this will all end up becoming some really good music for our game. As I said before right now I am just kind of making a little bit of everything to fit a bunch of different themes that our team may go for. Due to the extensiveness of the games soundtrack (From all the minigames) we want to get a headstart on the load of work that will be ahead of us.

As of now it takes about three days of work to just make one track that is worth playing for people. Now I am just playing around and still learning but I definitely need to prepare myself for what is to come in the future when we move further into the semester. I will definitely want to share my workload with my Sound Director, should the work become too much. I still can't be 100% sure on what to expect workload wise. Off to a great start though and hopefully my team stays as productive as it has been thus far!

Just a few Sounds

We are off to a good start with our game. Ideas have been flowing from everyone and we have a lead on a direction we would like to follow, theme-wise. For myself I need to continue to research the use of my new audio tools and practice making some tracks. These tracks will be somewhat of a proof of concept kind of thing. I will create some different audio clips or one larger track that demonstrates what the music will sound like and that it can be done in the program we are using.

I also came up with the idea that we could play recorded voice acted lines through the phone at certain moments in the game. We would have only a few phones or maybe even just one in the game play a line at a time; this would increase bonding between friends and strangers and would also keep us from playing the same audio a million times through many devices. We will be testing this with many different phones, from cheap to expensive in order to test the abilities of the phones speaker.

As a group we are meeting in order to connect the design, sound and art with the main game mechanics and each other. This will create a cohesive theme even if one isn't presented visually it will still be represented in some other way. The point of this week is to prove all of this and give ourselves a reason to move forward and progress into greenlight.

The start of a process!

So this first week we were put together in our new groups and filled in on what the game was about. My team is great and I have been made the sound designer; it seems as though they liked the audio I created for my last game and recruited me for that reason. I have a sound director who has been giving me the ideas and suggestions that he has to influence some of my work for the game. So far we have had one official meeting to discuss things about the game and we are trying to settle on an overall theme for the game. We need to make this important step because the design, audio and art are so tightly linked in a game like this.

For my portion when it comes to audio I have been collecting samples of music that has a similar style to what we could possibly use for our many themes. Along with this I have begun talking to someone who was actually interested in playing some samples for me to use and create a track from. This would be very cool because we would have some extremely original music from a real musician. At that point I can use my production skills to enhance and improve upon the music and add some of my own touches to create a really good soundtrack.

This first week went by fast and I hope we figure out a theme to do and I will start creating some sample tracks for our game.


Aaron