-WIP-
This past sprint was our last production phase of the game, so we made sure to finish our last audio pieces to focus on implementation and polishing in the upcoming sprint. Here is all I accomplished these past two weeks.
Audio Development (7 Hours)
I was tasked with creating ambience tracks, creating an intro music track, creating an stinger when entering battle, and reiterating the crew death sound effects. I had already created an ambience track during the summer, so I simply updated it and added effects for two of my ambience tracks. For the third, I wanted a much lower humming sound to make it sound darker, so I took a sub-bass and distorted it until I liked the sound. Something I wanted to do is add random, un-obtrusive ambience stingers that would play during the ambience, kind of like Minecraft cave sounds, so I made a couple of low-end harsh sounds. These may or may not be in the final game, it depends on how it sounds when we ultimately implement them.
The intro music track was not too hard to make, although it still took around 4 hours. I was aiming to make a calm yet lonely track, inspired by FTL’s intro music. I played a series of odd chords that slowly descend, backed only by a few quiet synth pads and some light crackling to give the feeling of loneliness. Overall, it turned out nice, and I think it serves its purpose well.
Communication (5 Hours)
I attended both studio-wide meetings this sprint. For the first meeting, I discussed the issue of music implementation with the audio team. Our plan was to have a build and battle variant of each song similar to FTL, each variant being rather similar to each other. However, with the addition of a narrative, there is now an issue of what audio to play in the cutscenes between the build and battle phase, not to mention that other audio members had developed music that did not fit cleanly into the build vs battle structure. Our solution was to play the same track during build phases – a diegetic track that would get distorted later in the game, play ambiences during cutscenes, and play battle music during the battle phases. We discussed this with the rest of the team at another meeting last Monday, where we decided which tracks would get played where – the ambience tracks would be the ones I had made the week previous and I would also adapt my concept piece into an intro music track.
In our most recent meeting, we went to one of the audio studios here at the University of Michigan to record some voice acting. It was my first time at a real audio studio, and it kind of surreal to see the real life equivalents of my tools in FL Studio. We spent about an hour getting everything set up, and then I helped record some voice acting for another hour.
Summary
In total I spend around 3 hours developing ambience tracks and SFX, 4 hours developing an intro track, and 5 hours in meetings. You can find some samples of the audio I made below.
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