Hi, my name is Lucretia Greville(24408581) and I am a student going to UL. This blog is meant to act as my dev diary for my group's project as part of our CS4043 game design module. The project so far is a 2D roguelike turn based game that takes place in the ocean, I nominated myself as the as the sound designer as well as composer along with Mykhailo who will also be composing the music. I'm somewhat familiar with GarageBand on IOS so I will likely end up using that for the some of game's music and sound effects. Below are a few demo tracks I made to try and capture the feeling the game is going for, to try and sound sombre, depressing and also fit the sci-fi marine setting. They're really experimental as I'm still learning how to use GarageBand and nowhere good enough to be in the game but making them has been great experience. The first demo may be used for the titlescreen, it has the feel of an old gameboy game starting music to me.
The second demo is meant to be much more oppressive sounding than the first and may be used in a scene where we enter the final zone of the game.
Hi, we've started to get a gist for what the vibe the game is going for is like which really helps when it comes to sound design. We have a general sense for the plot that it takes place under the ocean in a cyberpunk future and the main character is sent down into the ocean to defeat a previously created robot that gained a will of its own(The storywriter Caoimhe could exaplain it much better). We've decide on using Godot as the game engine and our programming team has started coding some of the elements in the game. Our artwork team has started making designs for the enenmies and main characters. I've made a demo for music that may play during a possible upgrade portion of the game or where the player makes some choice over elements of their character's abilities.
Then I was able to finalise the demo into a state where I'm happy enough to call it basically finished unless I go back and refine it a bit more.
I've also made started making another possible title screen music unless we can find somewhere else it works better. These are the opening notes of it.
Lastly I've started to work on sound design of some enemy sounds that a robotic enemy might make during a battle. My hope is that I'll be given a list of sound effects I need to make from the artwork or other teams.
Hi, its been a slower week in terms of development but our team is still making progress. Mykhailo has been making some really good music for the game using FL Studio, and our programming team has started coding some of the game systems. The art team has been making some rough drafts for enemies and some level design ideas. I currently don't have much to work with until we have actual designs made for the game yet, but when some designs are finalised for enemies and levels I can use those for inspiration. I've made another song demo that is in a state where I think its in a good state and basically finished unless I go back and refine it like the other demo.
While I'm waiting for sound effects to make I tried making footstep sound effects for an enemy you may fight during the facility section of the game.
Hi, its been a much more productive week for the project. We have path tracing (without enemies getting stuck on walls) and we've done a lot of work in the combat system. In the last week I was able to make two new songs for the game that are in the same state as the other two I've made, my current plan is to make maybe one more song demo until we need music for specific moments and then spend next week refining and tightening up all the music I've made so far until they're all in a finalised state. I've also become way more comfortable with garageband and I've found a bunch of editing tools it has that has made making music much easier than it was at first. This first demo I feel like could be another theme used while exploring but feels a bit more upbeat than the other demos I've made so we may use it in the first area of the game as the plan seems to be for the game to take on a more dark tone the further the player progresses.
I'm really happy with how this second demo came out, it hits the oceanic feel I've been trying to go for with my other demos in a way I really like. The same with the other demo I made it seems a bit upbeat so it may be used earlier on in the game.
Hi, I was able to get a bit done this week. I revised 3 of the current demos I made into final demos which with approval from my team I think I can add directly to to the game assets on github. An issue I realised this week with how I have been saving sound files is that I have been converting my files from wav to mp3 as I listen to the demos on my phone and my phone is weird about playing wav files, but when I was playing the demos on my dev diary to see what to revise I found out they sound much different to me than the original wav files. So from now I'll be saving them on my diary as wav, I knew there was a loss of data in the conversation but I had no idea it was that big. I also made 2 more demos, for most of my demos I've kept them pretty basic just using scales and some editing to keep them easy on the ear to listen to, the idea is that if they're on loop while you play the game I don't want the player to become annoyed by the music, and for the first demo I did just that again but with a more action feel to it.
As opposed to that I tried to make something thats more complex that could be used at a story section of the game. Its not done yet but I thought I should include the beginning part of it in this weeks entry.
These are the rest of the revised demos, I only tweaked them a little bit to sound better and there's a chance they'll just sound identical from the last version to people.
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