Update #1 On Project Mole Munch
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This is the first post of at least six that will be regarding the project I am working on for the Introduction to Game Development course. The assignment is to develop a 2D space shooter game from an existing concept document. As part of this assignment I’ll write about specific artifacts from the development. For easy readability I’ll describe them from three questions; what?, how? and why? But first I’ll cover some of the basics of the concept document we chose, and the work in general. On this project I am working with five other guys, and we have, to some extent, divided the group into roles for every member: But seeing as this is a rather small project these roles fluctuate and is more a way for us to make sure that every aspect of the development is up to the standard we set. These roles were assigned to the person who are most comfortable with the specific area and since I have a background in music, both composition and production, I took the role of lead sound. Making me responsible for the music and sound effects used in the game. The Concept The game concept we chose was Mole Munch and it’s a top down, stealthy, cute game that can most easily described a kind of Whac-A-Mole. You play as a mole who’s job is to gather as many vegetables as possible from a human’s garden. To achieve this you have to utilize the ability to dig tunnels and avoid getting caught by the Gardener who patrols the garden. The art style is cartoony with bright, playful colors. A mock up was provided in the game concept: 
This a screenshot from the pre Alpha version. The reason I showed this is because it’s important for the description of the artifact I created. So now on to the first headline! The What? As the lead sound my responsibility is to make the music for the game and so I composed a draft of the theme song we will use in the game. The theme will keep being revised as soon as a I find the time and isn’t needed in the coding process. But this short loop is hopefully enough to give you an idea of what I´m aiming for in the final project. Here is the link to the song: https://soundcloud.com/jensberg-3/mole-munch-theme The How? I used FL Studio 11 as it is very easy to use when creating simple compositions where you don’t need to record from a live instrument. And since I at the moment don’t have access to a MIDI keyboard I just used the piano roll in FL Studio and a built in plugin. This plugin emulates the sound of a marimba and was perfect for what I was aiming for. 
This is a screenshot from the piano roll function in FL Studio 11. The green bits represents notes that can be dragged up or down to pitch and stretched to play longer notes. The lines in the grid represents beats. Here it’s played in common time. The Why? In my opinion music has become a huge deal in games and can absolutely make or break it. Nowadays AAA games hire renowned composers and orchestras for the game soundtrack. And there is a reason for that. The music has the ability to tie together the art style with the gameplay and give an enhanced experience to the player. But this doesn’t only apply for huge projects and should be considered for every genre and budget. For example, compare the style of music in fast paced games like racing, with slow paced exploration horror games. There is a science to music, where the horror genre uses a lot of disharmonious intervals to create tension with the listener. This has been known in the film industry for a long time and applies to games as well. Consider games like Farmville and Crash Bandicoot. Both have rather light hearted music where Farmville is a slower country, and Crash Bandicoot a more fast paced theme song to go with the action/adventure style. I aimed to find a mix between the two for Mole Munch. In the future revisions I’ll try to incorporate more of a spy/stealth themed melody since this is a big part of the game. For inspiration I listen to a lot of movies and TV-series and have found many similarities between theme songs in this genre. It’s heavily reliant on half notes and chromatic scales. This does create some disharmony but combined with the marimba sound it should work smoothly!  |
