Creating the Pre Alpha Demo Track for Dragon’s Song
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Last week was the Pre-Alpha milestone which carried with it a slew of problems for our team of freshly baked game designers. Creating the beat meter engine that would allow our game’s core mechanic to function has proven to be a herculean task for or programmers and the week also carried with it the deadline for our Game Design document which took some 35 hours of my time to write (More on that subject at a later date). But even if our pre alpha wasn’t gonna be playable we still wanted to get some sounds in there as we knew our group would be one of the few with implemented sounds and FX at the feedback seminar. I spent a night putting together this slice of the different sound layers of the multiplier meter playing in unison. Now as I’ve discussed before our game adds layers of a mix based on player performance, drums will be playing solo at the beginning of a level and then bass, arpeggios and various other layers will be incorporated when the player pushes the multiplier gauge into a new score bracket. This track serves as a showcase for the different layers, incorporating them into a very basic arrangement. I was once again very conscious not to do anything too complicated. The different layers must all be distinguishable to feel like evolutions upon the track. The mix also needed to be raw and pretty unaffected by FX as in the final product the game engine will add and subtract layers. To this end I produced the mix much like I would have a live track, keeping the sounds raw and using the synthesizers built in filters and FX to make them stand out. Every layer of the mix is sent through a stereo bus where they’re treated with some sidechaining. This is an essential technique in modern dance music and indeed pop music production in general. The method can be used for several purposes but the most noticeable is to create ”ducking” in the mix. This is when the compressor is cued to trigger on signals produced by one source to affect another. In this instance I use the bass drum to trigger the compression in varying amounts on all other tracks in order to get a ‘bouncing’ feeling and also to key every element of the track to the beat. The track is fairly monotonous which is a trait necessitated by the production schedule of the game. The main idea behind Dragon’s Song is that playing it will make the player feel as if she’s contributing to the music due to the FX of the weapons syncing up with the soundtrack in a meaningful way when the enemies are hit at the correct moment. A soundtrack using a wider palette of notes would have meant creating an engine that could recognize where the music was tonally at and then producing the correct weapon’s discharge by picking a sound FX matching the harmony. This is defintely technology that our team would have pursued had we been producing this game as a commercial project, but for a vertical slice proving that the concept works and is indeed ”fun” to play this is a style that fits within the tight time frames afforded by the course. Postat i:5SD033, Introduction to Game Development Tagged: 5SD033, Introduction to Game Development  |
