Another month has gone by, and though a short vacation, a nasty little cold, and a number of other minor distractions got in my way, I still managed to make a little bit of progress.
First, and most importantly, I put quite a few hours into writing the music for the first boss of the game. I may have gone a little bit overboard on this one: The concept I wanted to pursue was a track with multiple phases that mapped to different parts of the boss encounter, bouncing back and forth between them until finally reaching a conclusion. I’m not sure if I can possibly create a boss encounter that stays interesting long enough to accompany this track, coming in at almost 9 minutes long, but it will be fun to try once the rest of the chapter is complete.
https://soundcloud.com/problem-machine/a-ring-around
The phases of the track are:
0:00-1:47 Intro
1:47-4:13 The Chest
4:13-6:16 The Mask
6:16-7:49 The Heart
7:49-8:40 Conclusion
This one honestly ended up getting quite a bit out of hand, and I spent quite a bit more time than I’d originally expected to on it, but I’m quite pleased with how it turned out. I also just enjoyed doing music work again! I’m going to carry on with composing the soundtrack even though I’ve effectively completed all the tracks for the first chapter of the game now, which is the part of the game I’m focused on finishing. The reasons why I’m going to continue doing music work, despite otherwise attempting to contain my efforts to this first chapter, are several-fold: first because, as mentioned, I like making music and I want to do more of it, second because if I can’t make this game in a timely fashion I can damn sure make its soundtrack, which is a discrete sub-creation that I can be proud of in its own right, and third because I find music so compelling that I think just having the soundtrack to the game will motivate me more to finish the rest of it. There’s also a fourth, more pragmatic reason: Inspired by UNDERTALE’s soundtrack, I’m really trying to integrate motifs from different characters and locations into tracks with a narrative connection to those characters and locations. It’s going to be really hard to do that until I know what those motifs, for later parts of the game, actually are! I’m not really going to be able to consider chapter 1’s soundtrack complete until I’ve written the rest of the soundtrack and know better what my overall thematic tools and goals are.
Anyway! Aside from music, I’ve been working on a few things. I’ve been feeling my way around programming the main narrative component of the game, the storyteller. This is going to be something pretty similar to what Supergiant does in their games with an ongoing narration element, except I would like to integrate these narrator lines a little bit more closely with the music, syncing the lines up with particular parts of the track and so forth. Additionally, I want to have text appear in the world synced with the audio, so it’s a bit like playing a storybook. Figuring out how I’m going to pragmatically handle the synchronization of these elements and making them play nice with a player who may or may not be interested in the narrative taking place is going to be a challenge, but I’m getting close to having a simple version ready to test so that I can iterate on it.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about what the interface of the game is going to look like. There are really only two elements that need to be displayed under normal circumstances: The player’s current health, and how many sparks you’ve collected, which also maps to your max health. I could just have a red bar along one side of the screen, but that felt inelegant. A sphere that fills and empties like the health meter in Diablo might have been a bit more thematic, since there’s some sun/moon symbolism I’m playing with in the game, but it felt like a circle would take up a lot of screen real estate for how much info it would impart and probably wouldn’t look very good. What I’ve come up with instead is an idea that’s… actually a little bit difficult to express here. It’s basically a life bar along the left side of the screen, except it looks like an engraved stone tablet. Only a small part of the tablet is visible early on, but as you gain more power the tablet expands and you can see more of it, and the engravings on it. I can actually directly tie the health meter into the narrative of the game in what I think is a pretty interesting way. However, because you don’t gain power at a constant rate, but instead end up collecting more and more as you defeat more powerful opponents, I’m going to have to figure out a curve that reveals the tablet at a rate that’s satisfying over the course of the game. I have a logarithmic function in mind that may work well, but it will have to be tested. I’ll also need to figure out how to have the tablet build up in such a way that it feels satisfying, and ensure that no matter what its interim shape is it still gives satisfactory feedback as a health meter. This will all take a bit of experimentation, but it’s an idea I’m excited about.
Finally, I’ve been working on the game’s first animation. I mean, I’ve already built several animations, but this is the first one that will play in the game: The player character awakening, standing up, and taking her weapon at the very beginning of the game. I started creating this animation, and then had to start over after working on it for a few hours because my first take on it sucked. I think my second take on it has potential, though it’s still very rough the motion feels good to me.
The actual removing-sword part of the animation still needs to happen, and of course all of the detail and the tween frames need to be added, but I think I’m on the right track this time.
So, the plan for August is to finish working on these things, write the music for the first area of chapter 2 (I’ve already started), create more main-character animations, and maybe get some basic sound design in. Of course something else may capture my fancy and I’ll end up working on that, but as long as I stick to my big task list I think I can maintain forward progress.