Prototyping the sounds of Bandolier River
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The last group assignment for the course introduction to game design and analysis entailed creating a concept for a 2D-shooter for PC. The students were randomly split into 16 groups with 6 members each. My group consisted of 2 would be programmers and 4 fledgling artists. I demanded being QA since having previously worked with TQM, Kaizen and Six Sigma I am religiously devoted to the concept of quality management. The sound designer role was thrust upon me since I was the one musician in the group, and indeed one of very few musicians in the whole school. In the end I also turned out to be Concept writer, secretary, character designer and pitch presenter so I hadn’t as much time for the music and FX as I would have liked. But it was all just theory and it’s understandable that the music took a back seat to other proceedings. Since the game was merely a concept with a paper prototype it would have been easy to just write something about how the sounds and music of the game were intended to compliment the gameplay. However I felt that due to our group being one of the few with access to professional recording equipment and a music producer we would have been remiss in our duties not to go a few steps beyond that. The linked soundtrack is a rough mix of a quick concept that took about 2 hours to finish. My sources of inspiration were mainly Rossini’s ‘William Tell’ and ‘Wagner’s Ride of The Valkyries’. I’m pleased with the theme and would consider reusing it if I got involved in a project where this kind of music fit into the aesthetics. The instruments are all dry and then treated collectively with a IR-1 Convolving Reverb. Ideally I’d split the different sections of the Chamber Orchestra into several groups with slightly different Reverb characteristics to simulate the recording space. The main work to be done however, is of course to edit the tempo, velocity and pitch characteristics of the instruments to make it sound more ”real”. At the moment it’s all very stiff and devoid of that human touch. The compression of the file is much to hard which leads to some distortion, I usually make electronic pop music and here I kind of defaulted to really heavy settings on the multiband compressor. When making music with classical instruments the tracks shouldn’t really be this squashed but instead be allowed to breathe. Postat i:5SD018, Game Design and Analysis – an Introduction Tagged: 5SD018  |
