Music and wrapping up the art

Hello everyone, today I don't have much to show you visually. I will however present to you, a demo of my music for the game. The music is here below. Note that this is not the complete version.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1t7yy6unmt63wj0/Jazzysilence.mp3

It's a jazzy tune for the game when you're sneaking about. It was really hard to find good samples for the saxophone and the drums. Most of the drums and sax sounds are either really expensive or just generally hard to find. I used FL studio for this so I needed to have something that was compatible with it. A lot of my time for the music went to researching. I've never done any jazzy music before so I spent countless hours just listening and trying to replicate it on my piano.

I'm kinda satisfied with it. It's not perfect but nothing is so I should be satisfied with what I've achieved. When working on games in small teams with next to no experience you need to have a broad range of skills. This is not the case when in big companies, they want specialists and people who have honed their skills in one area very much.

Next week I will work on everything that's left on the game since last week is the last week of development.
The project is coming to an end and the most important stuff has already been done. There's a lot of small jobs that's left now so I don't really have anything big and new that I want to show. Next week I'll talk about the project overall and how it's been. For example about my new experiences in game development. Thanks for reading

//Valdemar

Soon BETA!

Our game is soon entering the beta phase. This means that all of the core mechanics of the game should be here and working. We should also begin implementing the less important features of the game now. I've test played our game and I must say that i'm quite satisfied. The only thing that is missing is to refine the stealth system and finish up our backlog. I am very impressed with the rest of my team. It's very fun to work with people that have many different talents.

This week I've been working on the music for the game and some other stuff. I'm having trouble with the music mostly because I can be very picky. The music is jazz styled so it's very hard to recreate with free samples. I will instead of the music show you this glowing effect I made in photoshop. There's no real reason for choosing the color blue, I just thought it looked cool.

This is a piece of evidence in our game. The game is about collecting all pieces of evidence on a floor and go down to the next floor while avoiding enemies. When you have collected all evidence in the game we want the player to know what is happening. This will also be explained in a tutorial in the beginning of the game. This glow effect is to signal the player that you have collected all the evidence and can proceed to the next floor.

This is how the evidence icon looks without the glow. If you paid attention in the tutorial of the game you will know what to do when you have all evidence even without this glowing effect. We want you to feel stressed when you have everything on the floor. This glow helps represent the fact that you must get out of there, there is nothing left for you here once you've collected the evidence. This glow is not something grand and important but I still think it looks nice and does its job.

That is all for this week. I've been very busy because of other courses i'm taking but I think our game is coming on nicely. I almost forgot to mention the playtesting. This monday we had playtesting with the other groups. It was very fun to test everyones games and get feedback on our own. It's definitely on of the best ways of improving and balancing a game. Thanks for reading.

Music in progress

This blog post will be about my music in the making. I am currently working on some jazzy, bebop music for the game project. I will not post any example in this post but I will however post later this weekend the complete version. I chose jazzy bebop cause I want it to feel old fashioned and classy. It will bring much to the game I believe. Some of the best music I've listened to is from video games. I've always been inspired by many good soundtracks from games. Some of my favourite music in video games is Banjo Kazooie, World of Warcraft, Zelda and Grim Fandango. I like Zelda and Banjo Kazooie because of their playfulness and unique tunes. I love World of Warcraft and other Blizzard music for it's epicness and well orchestrated sounds. Grim Fandango is one of my biggest inspirations for this project, it's jazzy feel fits what I'm looking for.

I'm not only listening to video game music, when trying to replicate a sound you have to research as much as possible. I've listened many hours to jazz and bebop music lately. I've also drawn inspiration from Cowboy Bebop's soundtrack. To make something you first need to understand it, only then can you correctly replicate it and creating something you can call your own.

I'm teasing a bit by not showing the music, but it's not done yet. I will make a post later showing my results. Thanks for reading!