Dragon Song – Gauge Meter
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This week I want to talk about the “gauge meter“ that will play a big part in controlling how the game will sound in relation too how good the player perform during the game. The music that plays during the level consists of different layers. The first layer is only the core beat while the second layer is a bass track. When the player achieve a certain goal (we have not yet decided exactly which goal that is but right now it is bound to reaching a score) the player will hear another layer of the music. With the game we want to make the player feel like he or she is a partly responsible for playing he music. When the player shoots and when the bullet collides with an enemy different sound will play, and if the player does this while keeping the beats per minute of 128 the music should sound better then if the player only play the game like a regular space shooter. This is combined with the gauge meter that adds layers to the music to make it sound better and finally playing a complete track for the player. It is important for the game to always keep the music in synch with the game play, and that the different layers are in synch with each other. Too make sure this happened I set all of the layers to play at the same time when the Game State is activated, and then I set every layer but the first one to volume 0. Too try if this way of doing it would work I put in three different music tracks and played all of them at the same time in the Game State enter, and put all of them to volume 0. Then I set three buttons, the same we use to change lanes with the player character, to set one of the tracks to 100 and the other two to volume 0. It worked, but I could not check if the sounds were in synch as they were three completely different tracks. When I received the actual layers of sound from the sound producer I changed the placeholder music with the new content. Now I could try if the layer were in synch with each other when actually implemented in our engine. From what I could tell it sounded like they were in synch and sounded good when played at the same time, but I have to show it for the sound producer and see if he agrees.
Concept for how the meter could look.
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