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Step 5Breaking the Box
When you're working on a game, whether it's something that you're doing on your own, or whether you're working on a 200 person team, one of the biggest issues you will always face is how much stuff to put in the game.
The scope of the game always spirals out of control. "It's just one little thing," may be true - but a hundred "little things" can add up to make even the smallest game huge. Once you get into the details, there's always a big pile of stuff that seemed easier or smaller than it actually is.
For a small startup developer working on their first project, making sure the scope of the game was properly managed was a big, big deal. And looking at the list of audio we needed - varieties of sounds for every possible surface, music for every level - we were way past the amount of time that we had available. So we looked at the list of sounds, and sat there for a little while, wondering what to do.
We'd started development with this idea that we could take a game mechanic and make it less literal than the other people who were doing similar things, and that by doing so, we could make it better. As we sat there that day, that theme came back to us. Maybe we don't need to think about the sound in the obvious way. The other thing - the really obvious one that seems really stupid to have missed in retrospect - hit us in the face. ALL the audio should be vocal, not just parts of the music. All of the music. All of the sound effects. There was no need to "make" any of the sounds in the real world at all.
Wes was a beatboxer, after all - he had a lot of experience making interesting sounds with his voice. Instead of a "realistic" rolling sound, maybe instead, what about a mumbling sound? So we went from a simple, normal sounding "ball rolling on wood" sound to a weird little scat-like bassline. The bassline sped up depending on how fast your were going - a simple side-effect of just replacing the default sound with something more interesting without "fixing" the way the code played the rolling sound.
When your ball rolls faster, the rolling sound was pitch-shifted up, because that's how the sound behaves in the real world. With the vocal track modified in the same way, it had this really interesting effect - the music, was now interactive! The more the player tilted and the faster the ball went, the high-pitched and faster the music played. A sudden change in direction, and the audio would slow down, then speed back up.
A quick change to the code later, and we had the "gain" - the overall volume of the sound - linked to the speed as well. This gave the audio a really unusual effect - almost like you were messing around with a turntable while you were playing.
The video below shows the effect in action.
And yes - it sounds bad in many ways. We'll get to that. :)
From this point on, we weren't thinking about the soundtrack as a literal effect of the things that were happening in the game, but rather, that the audio was this dynamic soundscape that your actions in the game remixed in real time. The link between your actions and the audio became the foundation for the soundtrack, and guided the way we moved forward.
More, the "human-ness" of the vocal beatbox soundtrack provided a really pleasant complement to the super-digital retro style that we'd all grown to love for the visual aesthetic. Digital, or even normal instrumentation made the visuals look very... digital. The contrast and tension between the sound and the graphics provided a direction we were all really psyched about.
The box, at this point, had been broken open.
The scope of the game always spirals out of control. "It's just one little thing," may be true - but a hundred "little things" can add up to make even the smallest game huge. Once you get into the details, there's always a big pile of stuff that seemed easier or smaller than it actually is.
For a small startup developer working on their first project, making sure the scope of the game was properly managed was a big, big deal. And looking at the list of audio we needed - varieties of sounds for every possible surface, music for every level - we were way past the amount of time that we had available. So we looked at the list of sounds, and sat there for a little while, wondering what to do.
We'd started development with this idea that we could take a game mechanic and make it less literal than the other people who were doing similar things, and that by doing so, we could make it better. As we sat there that day, that theme came back to us. Maybe we don't need to think about the sound in the obvious way. The other thing - the really obvious one that seems really stupid to have missed in retrospect - hit us in the face. ALL the audio should be vocal, not just parts of the music. All of the music. All of the sound effects. There was no need to "make" any of the sounds in the real world at all.
Wes was a beatboxer, after all - he had a lot of experience making interesting sounds with his voice. Instead of a "realistic" rolling sound, maybe instead, what about a mumbling sound? So we went from a simple, normal sounding "ball rolling on wood" sound to a weird little scat-like bassline. The bassline sped up depending on how fast your were going - a simple side-effect of just replacing the default sound with something more interesting without "fixing" the way the code played the rolling sound.
When your ball rolls faster, the rolling sound was pitch-shifted up, because that's how the sound behaves in the real world. With the vocal track modified in the same way, it had this really interesting effect - the music, was now interactive! The more the player tilted and the faster the ball went, the high-pitched and faster the music played. A sudden change in direction, and the audio would slow down, then speed back up.
A quick change to the code later, and we had the "gain" - the overall volume of the sound - linked to the speed as well. This gave the audio a really unusual effect - almost like you were messing around with a turntable while you were playing.
The video below shows the effect in action.
And yes - it sounds bad in many ways. We'll get to that. :)
From this point on, we weren't thinking about the soundtrack as a literal effect of the things that were happening in the game, but rather, that the audio was this dynamic soundscape that your actions in the game remixed in real time. The link between your actions and the audio became the foundation for the soundtrack, and guided the way we moved forward.
More, the "human-ness" of the vocal beatbox soundtrack provided a really pleasant complement to the super-digital retro style that we'd all grown to love for the visual aesthetic. Digital, or even normal instrumentation made the visuals look very... digital. The contrast and tension between the sound and the graphics provided a direction we were all really psyched about.
The box, at this point, had been broken open.
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