EPTPart 2
Part 3
Hey guys.
I'm sorry I don't have access to the music file from here where I'm writing the blog post.
So I'll just give you a video our graphist made when he made the skeleton concept art.
http://skaiway.tumblr.com/post/22258556989/i-dug-my-own-grave-now-its-time-for-yours
Next blog post I will post a little bit about the level editor and the cool feature our game support in the level format.
Anyway onward with the topic of today!
Today I want to go quickly through the design of our sound system.
Last week, we had a sunday meeting with the team and finally had a look at the sounds.
We made a list of the core sounds we would use in our game and it looked something like this:
Skeleton walk %
Skeleton notices player %
Light Eater notices light %
Light Eater consumes light %
Chain dragging
IronBall dragging %
Item pickup %
Item release
Step sound %
Door sound %
Lights up
UI Button Sound
Game Over Sound
Level Completed Sound
Credits music
Additional variation of main music for different worlds
% = are sounds that are now mostly done.
Our sounds are now divided in three categories:
-Single shot sound. When a condition is meet play th sound once. (like a Button is pressed or the lighteater notice a light)
-Loop the sound (Dragging on the floor a chain or an ironball)
-Play a sound repeatedly with an interval. (Footsteps).
The footsteps were the tricky ones, we have few options. Play a sound, wait a certains time depending on the character speed before playing the second one. Or have a part of silence in the sound file and loop it, change the looped sound if the speed change (having like 2-3 sounds for different speed).
We decided to go for a simpler solution, play the sound when the distance from the last sound reach a threshold. The only downside with this is that if the player moves without going far enough, no sounds are played.
Now remains the questions of which sounds should be played. We can play sounds with volume but in practice, some phones don't support that feature yet perfectly and you end up with sound glitches.
3D sound is another way, on the phone's mono speaker, this means that the sound will be played quieter as it is further from the listener's position. (Should the listener be the player's avatar or the camera position?)
3D sounds didn't seems to pose performance issues but saddly it isn't adjusting dynamically when the object moves, it only adjust to the positions when the sound starts. So it isn't useful for looping sounds.
This is all a bit open still and probably we are going to and up with a mix of tradeoff.
3D sound is cool as is working straight away with xbox and windows builds.
The music is played through the multimedia API, this makes it easy to just play a mp3. Our musician is gifted and made a cool ambient demotrack, with guitars... Reminding little bit of diablo but not too much. Really perfectly fitting what we already had at that point. I hope he has time to make more variations we can use in different level sets.
The API is limited and you can only just play the song, you can't do smooth transition or even seamless looping, so the songs have fade in/fade outs and that will do just fine.
Thanks for following this serie
Little disclaimer: This blog is Teamliquid exclusive and I just want to share the fun we had in this project. It will be cooler to follow with you guys if we succeed or suffer epic failure
!
