First week of game development

Our first week of game design was mostly scrum documentation and going over our design document. We took some time to re-define the game we had chosen to develop – Dangerous Dander. After some thought we had a pretty clear idea of what we wanted to change and what we wanted to keep. Our vision was keeping the original game’s aesthetic goals and going for a different approach in setting, of course there were some details in mechanics we decided to alter but I won’t go into detail. Our last project was Bloody Badgers, a game in which I was involved with graphics, both concept and in game features such as level design. Although I thought that was a hoot, there was always a part of me wanting to write a soundtrack and with our current project I finally got the chance to do so. I got right to it and started carrying my guitar with me to school instead of my paper and pencils. I’ve had quite a lot of time fiddling with my guitar and recording various riffs and songs both in studios and at home over the years but very few of them were pieces that had any sort of deadline tied to them and none of them was to be used in serious work, I don’t have any trouble with producing a song for that purpouse, in fact i think it’s more fun that way, but my inspiration however is the one who decides to leave me in my hour of need. Most of my riffs come to me in middle of class or 3:am at night, therefore its extremely important for me to always have a way to get those ideas to paper. Luckily there are many ways for me to do that. Writing a song to a game is in many ways like developing a game, there are a lot of things you need to think about, the most important one being to make sure that the song support your aesthetic goals, For example you might not want to write reggae to a hack’n’slash game and you might not want to write hip hop to a horror game like Silent Hill.  My task this past week has been to write a song in three parts, one for each state of our ”PumpedMeter” – High, Medium and Low. I’ve decided to go with somewhat of a ”punkish” sound with hints of heavy guitars and drums. It is not going to be a masterpiece and I’ve decided to try and keep things simple, I’ve laid down bass tracks using a DropTune pedal and I’ve decided to go with midi-generated drums.