Miscellanious Tasks
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The artifacts of this week have been plenty, some small and some big. Today I’m going to explain my thoughts behind creating these as well as the licensing research I have done for copyrighted material. Among the things I’ve done this week are the following:
Redesigning the GUI During the pre-beta playtest we got plenty of useful feedback and requests. One of the  menu caused graphical inconsistency within our project. This made me think a bit about how to improve it, and an awesome idea struck me. Rather than having a photo in the menu I could make use of the HUD. The in-game HUD is inspired entirely from a satellite camera to give the impression that the player is being monitored from afar. Because of that I could further put emphasis on that feeling by having the camera zoom in when you press start. The camera will be hovering above Stockholm and zoom in to Sergel’s square where the game is set. My plan was to use satellite images from google earth, but I soon realized that I might not have the legal rights to use it. Thankfully google also offers an extremely intuitive search engine (who would’ve known that?) which I used to find out if I could use the images. Turns out I’m not the first person to ask, because they had an entire page where they explain the legal rights I have and other conditions I have to follow if I use any picture from google earth. The only thing I had to was to provide a clear reference whenever the picture was in frame.
 Finding Music I consider this part one of the more difficult tasks I’ve had so far. The difficulty lies in finding out what music suits your game and from where you would get it. Either by having somebody in the team creating it themselves or by having contacts create one for you. But before deciding where I would get the music from I had to get inspiration, so I started off by searching the web for similar games. After looking around for a long time, not finding what I was looking for I was ready to give up. That’s when I saw the game “Frozen Synapse” the YouTube recommendations list. I knew that I’ve played this game before, so I decided to give it a shot. Turns out it was pretty much exactly what I was looking for. So much that I now want to use that exact music in the game. The only problem is that it is licensed under the game company “Mode7”. I sent them a mail explaining our project and asking if I’m allowed to use the music. I have not yet received an answer so I guess that it’s a huge no slapped in my face. I guess I’ll just have to keep looking
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