Adding music to the game
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In this blog I will post about progress I’ve made in the game Omibozu. I’m making the game together with the group Flytrap. The first thing I did for the game was to create the soundtracks. From what I’ve heard this is not a common approach, instead the soundtracks are usually created when the game is almost completed and when the aesthetics of the game is established. Because of this I had to get as much information about the game as possible in order to creating fitting soundtracks for the game. After reading the concept document of the game, I decided to have a minimalistic approach to the first soundtrack which will be played in the menu and the beginning of the game. This reflects the art style in the game. In other words, the soundtrack will contain fewer notes over a period of time than you would normally hear in a pop song, for example. The tempo should also be slow because we didn’t interpret Omibozu as a fast paced game. I decided to use piano and a violin virtual instrument for the soundtrack. I got the melody and the overall idea of the soundtrack in the middle of the night out of accident so I had to quickly get out of bed and record it. I added violin to the soundtrack on the day after. The song is in a major key which means that it tends to sound bright and more optimistic. If the key is in minor it will instead sound a bit darker. This is of course subjective and the feeling you get from the scales will probably vary between people. The major feeling of the soundtrack works well with the context the soundtrack is played in. It’s played in the menu screen and the harbor which both are safe places in the game. However, when the player leaves the harbor, another soundtrack will be played. That soundtrack will have a much darker and tense feeling. After I created the rough idea of the soundtrack I started polishing the sound by mixing and equalizing. Without the equalizing, the soundtrack got a lot muddier and the instruments started interfering with each other because they tried to cover the same register. The mixing is basically making everything work together in the soundtrack by adjusting the volumes for each channel in the soundtrack, for example. After the equalizing, the piano was playing more towards the lower register and the violin was instead playing the higher register. I’m not completely satisified with the result yet. I have some issues with the background noise pausing and I will also probably do some more mixing later.
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