End Result And What I’ve Learned From This Project
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In this project I worked on both coding and sound design which I found really rewarding because it gave me more experience in both of the fields. So what was the end result of the game? The end result became a shoot em up game with an art style inspired by the ancient Chinese and Japanese art style. This art style gave the game washed out colors, the saturation is almost completely gone. One of the soundtracks when the boss is summoned and some of the sound effects was inspired by the Japanese drumming style “Taiko” which sounds really powerful.  I’ve definitely learned a lot of things about arranging music for games. It was a fun challenge to arrange soundtrack that needs to fit in with the aesthetics of a game. It could sound a bit restricting but it really isn’t, the possibilities when it comes to arranging are still endless. I learned that there is a Japanese drumming style called Taiko. There’s a soundtrack in the game that is played during the phase where the player escapes from the boss Umibōzu, I was greatly influenced by Taiko when I created that soundtrack. The other soundtracks of the game was more influenced by the art style of the game. I wanted it to sound minimalistic. For the harbor soundtrack which is also the menu soundtrack, I decided to go for something calm because I wanted to build a contrast with the soundtrack that is played when the player is further out in the ocean. The soundtrack for the deep waters has a lot of squeaking violin sounds which I recorded from a friend playing violin. I added reverb and delay on top of that and got something that sounded pretty unsettling and to my surprise it fit very well with the ocean theme. I’ve also learned that using reverb and delay is also a good way of creating a feeling of loneliness. Those two effects tries to simulate in what context the sounds are created in. By using reverb and delay you can easily make the player feel like their located in a big empty place. When it comes to coding I learned a good technique on creating a spawn controller which spawns entities randomly based on a spawn probability for each entity. This is really good for balancing the game and making sure the player doesn’t get too much of an entity. However, you’re never sure when it comes to probability. It’s also possible to change the value of the field during runtime. For example, when the player reaches an area which you want to have more enemies. Then it’s easy to just create a trigger collider which increases the enemy spawn probabilities when the player collider triggers the trigger collider. 
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