Marie recommended this book to me and so i read and annotated parts of it. It really did help for if my game is chosen and i work on it, how i can consider improving the sound design. Even if I don’t work on my game, I think it will definitely be useful in other games down the line.
I’d like to finish reading this when I have the chance, especially if my game is chosen
I wasn’t sure what to do for my game yet so my Miro board was a bit unsure, but it was actually quite good for generating ideas. For example, visualising fireflies as the noises and a synth to mix sounds.
As I wasnt sure what the exact actions were going to be in m game, I found it hard to settle on a game loop.
I’m still not sure what noises the Noiselets might be, I think it would be interesting to have music go missing and to have the Soundpainter reassemble it but I had to think of something small to fit within the scope of the project.
Instead I settled on this as my game loop:
Even if the Noiselets change to be sections of music, this game loop still works, with maybe an addition of ‘rearranging music’ inbetween ‘Put Noiselets in spray can’ and ‘Spray Noiselets back into their rightful place’
As I couldn’t find a way to code a prototype for my game in a way where it would present the idea for my game well, Jordan suggested i do an in person prototype and so I set one up. Mark was the player, and he was blindfolded with a scarf. Lisa was holding the noise he was trying to collect and Jess’ phone was the object he was trying to connect it to. In my game, you would use a sonar button to locate the object, but for this prototype, Jess just played her playlist so that there was a constant noise for Mark to track down. This worked well as despite the obstacles, Mark could feel his way around which would still be implemented in my game in the form of haptic feedback, and he could connect the ‘Noiselet’ (Lisa’s phone) back to the object (Jess’ phone)
I also tried this again with the majority of the class in one of Jordan’s sessions, though i got no recording of it. We placed a couple of beanbags and chairs around the room and Lisa had a blindfold on this time. I put my phone on a random table playing some music. Lisa had the task of finding Raf’s phone, which made a ding sound effect, but everyone else in the class was using their phone to play a differing sound effect to try and confuse Lisa. This proved to be a lot harder as she had to feel around the space and tune her ears for one specific noise, but she still managed to collect the ‘Noislet’ back to the object.
Ricky spoke about working in a studio and how his studio creates games and comes up with ideas.
He described how his studio had a very anti-crunch workflow, and how roles are shared. It seemed like a much more productive way of working instead of forcing ideas and progress to be made when other ideas that could come to the team later and that would be better could be missed due to rushing.
He also touched on pitching and how we should think of a game in a series of moments and make sure to describe those moments, especially the most interesting ones, quickly.
I think to improve i need to add more of my prototype within the presentation or maybe add an animation of what i want it to look like as the prototype doesn’t explain that very well. I also should add the inspiration I took from other games
Honestly the data for the blind accessible games doesn’t show a huge market, but it is likely because they were made by small independent studio with not much promotion, however the people who did play them seemed to really enjoy them on the majority and praised them heavily in reviews.
6 Questions:
Pitch Deck vs GDD
A vertical slice is a short demo of polished gameplay. This is good for investors
Elevator pitch – First slice of pitch -> two sentence explanation
Narrative beats – Players want an interesting story but don’t want to listen to an interesting story, they want to interact
For our task, we were given a well known game and told to make a game loop for it. Mason and I were given Snake:
The rest of the class then had to guess what game we were given and they guessed correctly. Sophie pointed out that we hadn’t stated how big the area of the game was and therefore if there is a win state, if your character fills the whole map. In the google play version of the game, if your snake fills the whole screen you get a winning sound effect
Other than having no visuals, I really struggled to settle on a story or mechanics for my game and so i dedicated some time to considering this. I knew I would need some way to explain the lack of visuals in the universe of the game. I had considered having the world be originally blind, and that sound was their way of navigating around, and then when the sound detaches from the objects, no one in the world can find their way around anymore. This makes it your job, as the local musician to reattach sounds back to their rightful place. I liked this idea but i felt like the puzzle element would be too easy. I then considered a mechanic similar to the mechanic of Choicer Voicer, where you are given a sound effect and have to replicate it, but instead of using a microphone, you have a selection of sounds and you have to layer them in the right way to replicate the full soundscape. I liked this idea but found it difficult to write a story around it or a reason why you as the character are doing it. It felt more like a fun minigame then a full game.
I then considered wandering around and just attaching sounds to particular objects and to bring the 3D platformer mechanic back into it with a reliance on narrative but as I really wasn’t set on a narrative and didn’t know how to make the narrative more than just a fetch quest i decided that this idea wasn’t going to work either
I reconsidered the idea of attaching sounds to objects and how important it was. It would be a novel mechanic but i didn’t know if it was necessarily a fun mechanic. I decided catching sounds would be more interesting as then you would have to follow the sound, just like in the fetch mini game in the demo of ‘Lost and Hound’. Also after playing the blind mode version of ‘The Last Of Us’ I found that the most fun Lisa and I had was trying to find where things were with sound, like trying to find the people we needed to shoot and managing to shoot them (very rarely) was so rewarding. I thought if i could capture that feeling and add it as the main goal of my game, it could be a simple but fun idea.
Also after mulling this idea over, I thought that it would be a lot easier to build up the difficulty (adding sounds that layer over the sound you are trying to find, making the sounds harder to get to) and i thought there could be the equivalent of a boss fight with a cloud of sounds to unpick with your net. Confusingly i have a very strong visual idea for how this game looks in my head and i’m hoping with some research into sound design, i can transfer the scene in my head into other peoples heads when they are playing through my game