Finding a suitable gameplay song
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My goal for this week was to find a suitable background song that would be played during gameplay. The game is considered to be a children’s game, since the target group are 7 to 8 year old’s. Therefore, it is important the song communicates the right feeling to the target group. By using the MDA framework; focusing on the aesthetic goal, it was easier to find a suitable song for the game. By using MDA, I could find songs with a specific mood or genre. The game is colorful, humorous and childish. Therefore, a heavy metal song would probably not obtain the aesthetic goal and thereby send a confusing and misleading sense to the target group. The group discussed the choice of music and we came to a conclusion. We wanted the song to be happy, upbeat and childish. This gave me a sense of what I could search for, creating limitations. I started my chase on Google, where I typed ”free music and sound effects” in the search monitor. Since we are all students and do not possess a bundle of money, we decided it was smart to focus on royalty free tracks. As a consequence to this search, it got numerous findings. 61 300 000 results to be exact. And it was easier said than done.
This was overwhelming. Nevertheless, I started to click on the options Google had given me. By scrolling and searching through several pages, listening to several tracks, I eventually found a page (https://www.audioblocks.com/) who contained a large amount of choices that could be suitable for our project. The page directed me to sign up and become a member of the page, to get authority to download 100 000 tracks. However, when I then accepted the Terms of Use and the Licensing Agreement and became a member, I got directed to another page telling me to pay a monthly or annual fee. If not, I was not able to download the tracks. How is that free? Very misleading. By this point I had probably been listening to 500 different songs. My head was full of different tracks, making me blind to what I considered to be good and bad. I looked into several other pages, in search of free tracks. However, I continued to stumble upon pages where I needed to pay money for using the music. I were almost determined to surrender and quit my task. By asking a friend who works in the game industry, he came up with the idea of looking into Youtube’s audio library (https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music).
I looked into the web page and was happily surprised. There were hundreds of free songs. I could find usable songs very easily, since the page provided me with tools that could narrow down the search results. I could chose genre and mood. An hour later I found several songs that would be suitable. The rest of the group listened to the songs I had found and we later came to a conclusion and choose one of them. This song corresponded to our aesthetic goal and demands. I have realised it is very difficult to find good sources where you can download free songs. By getting this enlightenment, we will try to find tracks and sounds from other sources in the future. Since we will need specific sounds for specific characters in the game (for example a bear growl or a bee buzz), it will be difficult to find those in the low amount of usable website’s. We have therefore decided to record our future sound effects. This can either end up very good or very badly. But that is for the future to decide. Fail fast and learn from your mistakes.  |
