3D Computer Graphics – Blog Post Week 06 – Part 2

Assignment 2 Update:

In his post i will showcase my work on assignment 2 and also provide some information on the character i was asked to model in our 3:rd assignment.
Here is an update on my work on my assignment 2 object.

Above is the final knife with a specular, diffuse and normal map applied to it.
I have also uploaded my finished maps as they are seen in Photoshop.

Assignment 3 – Part 1.

In this part of the post I will talk a bit about the character and concept that was assigned to me. For this assignment I was given a character by Ludwig Lindstål.

In this part of the assignment we were supposed to assign each other characters to model. I got assigned the Pokémon “Squirtle”.  I was not given any background information about this character and therefore cannot describe its background very well. I was instructed to try and make him look fairly young and that was basically all the instructions I got.

About the character.

Squirtle lives in the fictional world of Pokémon.

Squirtle is a small, light-blue Pokémon with an appearance similar to that of a turtle. Like turtles, Squirtle has a brown shell that covers its body with holes that allow its limbs, tail, and head to be exposed. Unlike a turtle, Squirtle is ordinarily bipedal. He lives in the Pokémon universe where he roams the lands wild with his kin. If he is captured by a trainer he can be trained to be a very powerful Pokémon.

The risk I faced when working on this particular character is definitely the texturing, I’m not nearly as secure in texturing as I need to be and that could pose a problem.

3D Computer Graphics – Blog Post Week 06 – Part 1

In this update I will try to shed some light on the character I chose to use in my pre-production package. I’m going to give some general information about my characters background and also its beliefs and its role in its society.

If I would describe the world my character lives in it would be the world in the movie “despicable me”. The setting would be earth, I would guess present day. Where on earth the movie takes place I cannot tell, although I would guess somewhere in America, probably somewhere in the southern part of the states. The world is inhabited by humans but also feature  strange race of yellow little people called minions. I actually don’t know much about these creatures other that they live to serve others. I’ve never seen a minion that looks “old” so I would guess that they do not live very long. I believe they are either unisex or all male. If they are in fact all male, maybe they were all born in test tubes. Since their society revolves around helping evil overlords I would say that their hierarchy is decided by their master. I think their beliefs and faith is in their master, since their lives seems to be pretty much revolving around the life of their master. As of different trades among the species I seem to recall there being different roles in which they operate, these roles can be mechanic or guards for example.

There are stories that say that the minions exist only to serve the world’s most evil villains and that they have accidentally killed every one of their previous masters. After killing of their previous employers they decided to go living in solitude in Antarctica where they decided to stay. Sometime in the 1960s, the lack of a master drives them into depression, so one of the bravest minions comes up with a plan to find a new one. Joined by a select few of their kind they set out to find a new master, they arrive at a villain convention, where they compete for the right to be henchmen for some of the world’s most evil geniuses.

Other than this information there is not much I can find out about these mystical beings. It is said that they have been here since the beginning of time and what they have been up to in between here and the beginning of time are just speculations.

Here is my character bio:

• Name: Minion
• Gender:  Unknown
• Age: Unknown,  average 30 years old
• Physical: weak, healthy, strength in numbers
• Movement: wobbling, jumping on two legs
• Appearance: Spherical, compact, bouncy
• Intelligence: Medium
• Religion: Gru
• History: Unknown
• Psychology: eccentric, humorous, loyal
• Language: Banana Language

Intelligence

Even though they may not be the brightest, they make up for it in effort and the fact that you can always trust them. There are however, some things that minions do less well. One of those things are abstaining from practical jokes, in some cases minions may end up failing their task at hand due to excessive joking and laughing.

Psychology

Minions in general have a bright sense of humor and are always happy and joyful.

Appearance

Minions have a round cylinder like body with tiny feet and long arms considering the size of their bodies.

Religion / Culture

Minions have a reputation of being extremely loyal towards their employer / master.
This is also where there beliefs are, they live for the sole purpose of serving their master.

My minion

He specializes in repairs and general engineering, assisting one of Gru’s lead engineering employees in his work. His primary tools feature a drill and a wrench. Even though he may not be the brightest, he makes up for it in dedication and loyalty.

Board game analysis: Stratego

This is a review of the board game Stratego, the classic boardgame of battlefield strategy. I will look into the game’s best and worst sides and I will take a look at the game’s core mechanics and I will try to interpret the game’s target audience. I will also choose one of the game systems that I found to be the game’s most interesting.

Stratego is a bit like chess except you don’t know which pieces are which on the other side. Each player has 40 pieces that represent soldiers, with ranks from Scout to Marshall (1 – 10). The object is to capture the opponent’s flag or make them surrender. In the event of no movable pieces for a player, the opponent is the winner, though part of the challenge is actually figuring out where the flag is.

Amongst the ranks of soldiers, there are four specialty units. The Scout is one of the weakest players in the game, but can move over many squares, as long as the movement is in a straight line. And the squares he moves over are vacant. Most players send Scouts out to battle early in the game to find out the ranks of the opponent due to their movement capabilities. The bomb is an immobile object that, once the game starts, must stay in position. If attacked by anyone, except the miner, the attacking piece is automatically defeated. The Miner is also a weak piece (just edging out the Scout) but his strength lies in the fact that he is the only troop on the battlefield that can attack bombs, thus disarming them. The last, and sneakiest, of the units is the Spy. The Spy is the weakest piece out of all, but he is the only piece in the game that can kill the top ranked unit, the Marshall. The trick is that for the Spy to kill the Marshall, the Spy as to initiate the attack. If the Spy is attacked at any time, including from the Marshall, he automatically is removed from the game.

Typically, one player uses red pieces, and the other uses blue pieces. Pieces are colored on both sides, so players can easily distinguish between their own and their opponent’s. Ranks are printed on one side only and placed so that players cannot identify specific opponent’s pieces. Each player moves one piece per turn. If a piece is moved onto a square occupied by an opposing piece, their identities are revealed; the weaker piece is removed from the board. If the weaker piece was the attacker that piece is removed from the board; if the attacker is the stronger piece, it will remove the weaker piece and occupy its square. If the engaging pieces are of equal rank, both are removed. Pieces may not move onto a square already occupied unless it attacks. Two zones in the middle of the board, each 2×2, cannot be entered by either player’s pieces at any time. They are shown as lakes on the battlefield and serve as choke points to make frontal assaults less direct.

Best sides:

Stratego is easy to pick up and play, it has a very short play time which I personally appreciate. The game features a simple set of rules but there are many things that you can abide by in order to be a better player, for example bluffing. Bluffing can be a great help when playing Stratego, for my first match I didn’t quite know where to place my different pieces and my setup was rather close to random. On my other playthrough however, I started to realize that I could trick my opponent into believing things that weren’t true, the location of my flag for example.
I choose a random low level character as my fake flag and all I needed to do was keep it stationary, since you are not allowed to move the flag, thus fooling my opponent into thinking that it was my flag. In reality I had kept my flag in the same location I used for our previous match. And that is just one of the things that make me like this game so much.

Worst sides:

I do not have much to say on this part, there isn’t much that struck me as bad and less that actually was worth mentioning. I will say however, that if I have to mention something bad it would be the fact that there are many, maybe too many pieces to set up which takes time.
I also wonder if all the pieces are necessary to play. At the end of all our games of Stratego we’ve played, both me and my opponent have had several low level characters left,  that we never even moved, this leads me to believe that maybe these aren’t as useful as the game make them out to be. And therefore I would like to try and cut down on the numbers of some of the low level characters and see what that does to the gameplay.

Core mechanics:

I would say that this games core mechanics are moving, attacking and planning.
Every troop piece, with the exception of the Scout, can only move one square at a time. During a player’s turn they can either move a piece or attack.
Attacking is as easy as getting adjacent to an opposing troop and placing your piece over theirs. The players declare what rank each piece is, and the higher rank wins and the losing piece is removed from the game. Stratego also involves a lot of strategy. I will list the most basic ones that I used when playing here. One of the most commons strategies in Stratego is the actual placing of your pieces. You want to place your pieces so that your flag is well protected, but you want to place them in a fashion that leads your opponent to believe it’s someplace else. You also want to place your stronger pieces so that they are available for attack (don’t place behind a cluster of bombs or all the way in the back).
Another important strategy is to try and analyze the way your opponent is moving his or her pieces, in order to find out their rank. For example if your one of your opponents pieces has remained stationary for most of the game you can assume that it’s either a bomb or his or her flag. Then there is the placement of your special pieces. Take the spy for example, you need to consider its placement carefully, place it to far forward and it’s more likely to be captured early on. Placing it too far back may make it inaccessible when your opponents Marshal’s identity is revealed. All these things are off course up to you as a player.

Most interesting system:

I would say that the trickery and bluffing is the most interesting system. I reckon this could be described as a risk / rewards system. To me, this system is what makes this game interesting. Some of the tricks you can pull are:

Placing a cluster of bombs to fool your opponent into thinking that your flag is hidden there, since placing bombs near your flag is a common strategy.

If a Marshal wins a battle (and is thus revealed), and the opponent immediately moves a piece near his or her back row, the player with the just-revealed Marshal may assume that this piece is the Spy when, in fact, the Spy may be several spaces away (and already close to the Marshal.) This is a common tactic as it may cause the Marshal to move next to the Spy, allowing the Spy to attack first.

A player could threaten a known high-ranking piece (such as the Colonel) with an unrevealed low-ranking piece (perhaps a Sergeant) to convince the opponent to retreat.

These are just some of the things you could do to trick your opponent and get the upper hand in the game.

Target audience:

The target group according to the makers of the game itself says ages 8 and up. I agree but also think that you could go as low as maybe 7 or 6 years old. The only really necessary thing that players need to know in order  to play this game is basic math for when comparing the ranks of the pieces attacking each other  and technically since you could win this game on pure luck I think 6 year olds could play this game without difficulty.

Summary:

All in all I think Stratego was a great game.  It’s a game with rules so simple you’ll understand them fully the first time you play, and yet so open to strategy and cleverness that you’ll never play the same game twice. With its fast setup and addictive play style, it’s the kind of game you find yourself playing twenty rounds of when you only wanted to play one or two. Then there are several elements that help this game stand out and make it less like ordinary chess and more like the strategy board game it really is. First off, this game has a memory type element to it, if the player attacks one of his opponent’s pieces randomly, his or her opponent must then reveal the rank of that piece and this gives you a chance to memorize the location of that piece.  There is a great deal of trickery involved in this game as well.  As stated before, the player can use the position of his unused pieces to fool his opponent into thinking that it is in fact his or her flag.

Board Game Analysis – Carcassonne

This is an analysis of the board game Carcassonne, in this post I will examine some of the good things about this game but also some bad. I will take a look at the games core systems and how they interact with each other. I will also look into the game’s target audience and the reasoning behind it.

The game of Carcassonne is based on an actual French city with heavily fortified walls. Players take the roles of founders of the area and their ultimate goal is to move in on the terrain. There are elements of strategy and luck, which makes for a diversified game experience. The game can be described as a mix of puzzle building along with elements of strategy, all while trying to claim territory.

Here are some of the things that I think made the game worthwhile to play.

The game is very social and does very well when played with more than 3 people. It’s very easy to learn and no one can be eliminated. Also it doesn’t take long to get a grip of the games rules. Because of the fact that many tiles that the players use to extend roads, cities and monasteries are faced down on the table there is always a feeling of suspense when it’s your turn to draw. Another good thing is that since there are so many different pieces of land or city in the game the end results almost never look the same as it did the last time.

There were some negative things that I would like to point out.

One thing that struck me as sort of a negative trait was in fact the name Carcassonne. I’d doesn’t say anything to me and it doesn’t describe the game in any way, if I saw this game sitting in a store shelf, it wouldn’t look at it twice.

Core systems.

Creating long segments of road, building large cities or farms gains points. At the end of the game, when there are no tiles remaining, all incomplete features are scored. Points are awarded to the players with the most followers in a feature. If there is a tie for the most followers in any given feature, all of the tied players are awarded the full number of points. In general, points are awarded for the number of tiles covered by a feature; cloisters score for neighboring tiles; and field’s score based on the number of abutting completed cities.

Your objective is to gather points and move up the scoreboard, the player with the most points in the end is the winner. When it’s your turn you get to draw a card that is face down on the table. On each players turn, they will place a new tile onto the table and connect them to other pieces already on the board.

The core game systems are divided into several steps:

Step one:

Players will draw a tile from a pile and each tile will feature one of these three. They can be green farmland, a rustic road, or a medieval city. Players will then have to decide on where to place this tile on the board. Players cannot just randomly place the tile anywhere. They must attach to any previously played tile and must match all sides to place the tile. The other feature will be a cloister/monastery that is located in the middle of the tile. Each one of these landscapes can build on to places the player has followers on or gives options for players to put their followers in the next step.

Step two:

During this phase, a player may place one of their followers from their supply on to any of the 4 possible land types on the tile they just played. If they take one of these spots in the farmland, road, city, or cloister the follower now takes the role of a farmer, thief, knight or a monk. These followers will remain on that tile until the road, city or cloister is completed. The farmer will stay on the board until the end of the game. The one catch with playing a follower is that no other player’s followers can be on the same connected land type, even yours. For instance, if you attach a piece that connects to a city segment, you can’t place a follower in the city if another knight is already in that city. Part of the strategy of tile placement is to place tiles that allow you to later connect with larger roads, cities and farmland.

Step three:

All the types of land above can be completed before the game ends. Players receive a point for each tile that is used to complete the road. The city tiles form a completed city when the segments are fully surrounded by a city wall. The player that has the majority of followers in that city they gain two points per tile. Once all areas around the monastery tile are filled, the player receives nine points. Players can gain points on other players turns if that player completes any of the features above. Every time you or another player complete one of these segments, you gain the follower back into your reserves. It’s a balancing act to keep enough followers in your supply and try to put as many tiles as possible on each segment to gain the most points.

When the last tile has been played, all uncompleted segments of road, city and cloisters are counted. Farms values are determined at the end of the game. Farms are separated by cities and roads on the game board. This is one of the more confusing parts of the game. It takes a decent amount of explaining to make sure people understand how these are scored. Once the owner of each farm is established they gain 3 points for every completed city that borders the farm.

Players need to decide if they should finish one of their cities and gain the points or place it next to another city to attempt to steal some points from another player by placing one of their followers on the others players city.

There are several elements of this game that spoke to me, here is one of them.

When picking up a card the most logical move is to try to extend your own city or road, but there are other things you can do. Carcassonne allows two or more players to compete over control over cities and if you just picked up a city piece that doesn’t go anywhere on your own establishments there are several choices for you to make. You could either extend your own city, thus requiring you to find more pieces that fit in order to complete it. Or you can start a new city and place another follower there (if you have any left). Or you can choose to extend another players city and either place one of your own followers there and try to elbow your way into the points that can be earned there or simply extending it delaying his or hers chance of finishing that city and collect points for it. When you add a piece onto one of your opponents establishments the option to add one of your own followers in order to try to take points away from your opponent seems like an easy choice. But you have to keep in mind that you do have a limited number of followers at your disposal and if your next card turns out to be a monastery, being stuck with no followers is a real bad thing. Basically this game requires you to make the best of the situation. There is a substantial luck component to the game; however, good tactics greatly improve one’s chances of winning.

Target audience

I would say that this game is fun for both children and adults. For children the ”farmers” could be a little too complex, due to the fact that you need to plan ahead quite far, but the game works very well without that element.

The target age is 8 – 12 years, which is quite fair since there are some things that require some knowledge take the score for example: Each segment of city is 2 points + 2 additional points for each pennant during gameplay and 1 point per tile and tenant at game end. This makes for a pretty elaborate calculation when tallying the score and I think that some mathematical skills are needed.

Summary

Overall I enjoyed Carcassonne, the game was very easy to pick up and play, there weren’t a whole lot of complicated rules to abide to and since there aren’t any player eliminations and since the game relies largely on chance and luck (getting the right cards) I would say this was an excellent beginners game.

After reading some reviews of the game online it would seem that this game is considered a so called “gateway game” that is used to introduce new board game players. Since each turn is composed of three parts: Pick up / place tile, place follower, and try to finish segments of road, cities or place a monastery, there are no long waiting periods when other players make their moves, which makes replayability an option. And because of the relatively short play time there’s room for more playthroughs, and every round has a different ending due to the many different tiles and the fact that the tiles you get are random.

To summarize: great game, not too long, not too short. Not too complex, not too simple.

Light at the end of the tunnel

This week has been filled with pretty much the same as last week, mastering, mixing, editing, iterating and a lot of listening. It takes e certain amount of coffee to bear with these kinds of things because if you are unlucky, you could spend an entire day making sure one sound is just right, and that means playing it over and over and over and over again.

When dealing with a lot of sounds that are going to be played at the same time it’s important to make sure that each and everyone of them has an individual volume setting and in some cases it is really helpful to pan the sounds out in order to control from where the sound is coming from, not making sure to differentiate each sound can make it difficult to set them apart, therefore it is important to make sure your sounds are on different wavelengths and coming from different directions in order to prevent your audio from sounding sluggish and all melted together.

Things are slowly coming together for us and we are now down to finalizing our last artifacts and polishing the result, my job these past couple of days has been to test our game so far and listen for what sounds needs lowering or raising in volume, adjust these sounds and then put them back in. There are also some problems that can be really hard to notice if you don’t try them out in your game first, like for example if a sound needs speeding up or slowing down. One of the sounds I made was for when our melee type enemy swings his weapon and said weapon hits it’s target, I made this particular audio clip sound just like a bat swinging through the air and eventually end in loud thump, now while I was totally happy with how it sounded there was still a matter of making sure that the sound is synced with the animation, it is not a hard thing to do but when you have 20 sounds or more to adjust it can take a little while.

Melee enemy swinging his weapon.

Next week will be pure testing and balancing, I expect my job getting a lot easier when all of our sounds have been implemented because it is a lot more of an easy job to perfect something when all the pieces are there, at least for me personally.  It has been a long, loooooong road from idea to final product, but it seems like there is a bright light at the end of this tunnel, and I can almost see it.

Tying up loose ends

This week I’ve mostly been working on getting the final editing done to all of the sounds that we are going to use in our game. To ensure an even level of volume I had to apply either one of these tools – Audio normalization or Compression.

Audio Normalization
Audio normalization is the process of adding a constant amount of gain to an audio recording to bring the average or peak amplitude to a target level. What this means is that you change your recording’s overall volume by a fixed amount to reach a target level. There are 2 good reasons to normalize, getting the maximum volume or matching the audio of several recordings.

If you have a quiet audio file you may want to make it as loud as possible without changing its dynamic range. If you have a group of audio files at different volumes you may want to make them all as close as possible to the same volume. It may be individual snare hits or even full mixes.

Compression
Adding compression to a recording of, for example, an electric guitar can be a really great tool for balancing your audio. Normally, strumming the strings of your guitar really hard will make the sound it produces really loud and plucking a string lightly will in comparison make almost no sound at all. Compression solves this problem. Compression is the process of lessening the dynamic range between the loudest and quietest parts of an audio signal. This is done by boosting the quieter signals and attenuating the louder signals.

Normalization can be done automatically without changing the sound as compression does. While this is a huge advantage, it can’t replace compression, as it can’t affect the peaks in relation to the bulk of the sound. This means you have far less control.

In addition to mastering and editing the sounds I already had there were still a couple of them that I needed to create. One of them was a sound we had decided to call “Snooze you loose” which is the sound that will play when our character’s “pumpmeter” reaches zero and he falls asleep in the middle of a riot.

 ”Snoozers are loosers”

This is what I came up with:

http://cl.ly/2u3a2P2F2T3b

For this sound I played a low note on my guitar while using one of my effect pedals called Pitch Shifter, when pressed it will simulate the sound of a single note getting dropped several steps. You can control how low the tone will drop and how fast it will do so. When I was satisfied with that part of my sound I added some piano chords and toped the whole thing of with a lullaby style melody.

Aggressive Bystander – Voice-Overs

This week I’ve been focused on getting some voice-overs done for our game, voice-overs are essentially all of the sounds that can’t be produced using sound effects and digital tools in a DAW (digital audio workstation)

The sounds we were going to try and produce was the sounds of our various characters getting hit by various blunt objects or getting shot, there was also the matter of producing the sound of a crowd chanting various non-propaganda like chants which was sort of difficult. I started out with just randomly grunting into my microphone to try to simulate people getting shot or injured. The most difficult part of making the sound of our main character getting injured was to actually imitate an old man, which is harder than you might think.

After our recording session we ended up with a bunch of grunts and moans for the sounds called Enemy Melee, Range, AOE and Main Character Death and for the AOE enemy’s attack, which is essentially their chanting, we ended up with just a bunch of random chants and rhymes which I will edit in order to give the illusion of an actual crowd shouting out complaints and demands.

One of our Area of Effect enemies.

I haven’t had time to process these sounds like I have with all the other sfx I’ve done so far, for example adding some effects like delay, reverb, flanger, chorus and phaser. If you’re not familiar with any of these effects and would like to learn more I recommend clicking this link and read a bit about it.

http://www.uaudio.com/blog/modulation-effects-basics/

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/may00/articles/reverb.htm

With these effects I can affect the way we perceive the sound itself, for example: where the sound is coming and if I’m successful you should also be able to tell how the surroundings look like without actually looking.

When recording your own audio it fairly vital to be able to add effects and to be able to process the audio in order to make it suit your needs. For example when producing the sound for an angry mob of protesters it might be nice knowing you don’t actually need to gather up a large crowd with each and everyone in the said crown wielding a megaphone, those things can be added digitally when processing your audio.  Of course if you happen to have a crowd of say…..oh, I don’t know….20 people laying around that comes with matching megaphones…I say go for it, but if you don’t, to master your audio digitally is very convenient.

Happy-Pill Power-Up Activation & Title Screen Music

This week iv’e been home, away from school and Gotland. I’ve still got work to do on our project though and this week my focus has been on cleaning up the last bit of sound effects laying around in order to completely focus my efforts on voice-overs for our main character and enemies. In addition to making some of the sounds you’ll hear in our menus i’ve worked on a sound called “Happy-Pill Power-Up Activation”. When our character takes a happy pill his “pumpmeter” will decrease by a a set amount of points, which is a good thing if you’re nearing a total heart-failure and need to cool down.

This sound, as opposed to the activation sound of our other power-up “Blue Cow” which is an energy drink that increases our main characters moving speed, was rather easy to come up with.
I simply went for the opposite of “Blue Cow”, which was the sound of something speeding up, ending with a cow mooing, and I tried to make a sound that sounded like something slowing down. After making a sound which went from high to low in both velocity and tone, which is in other words just a tone that you slow down and decrease pitch on gradually, I wanted to add something that conveyed the fact that this was a happy-pill he just ate, in order to achieve that I added a little old man’s laughter towards the end of the sound by simply recording myself chuckling.

I also made a remix of the three parts of our soundtrack which I put together and made into our title screen song, I basically took out the parts I like most out of the soundtrack and slapped them all together and was quite successful in creating something that according to me builds up suspense and gives you a small heads up of what our game’s going to be like.

When I get back to the island I need to get going with all the voice-overs for our characters, how i’m going to make that work is something i’m going to have to figure out then, i’ve got somewhat of a plan which involves me finding a good sound proof place and laying down all the voice tracks myself with some help from some of our team members. All I need basically is a Condenser microphone and a place to do the actual recording.

This is a typical Condenser type microphone, this model is great for recording voice and acoustic guitar, it can be equipped with a wide range of filters which is great for noise canceling. I will be using one of these when doing the voice-overs.

This is a dynamic type microphone, this model is best suited for higher gain instruments such as electric guitar and drums.
I have been using one of these when recording percussion sounds and some guitar through my amplifier.

Pumpmeter increase & “Blue Cow” power-up SFX

All the sound effects I’ve done so far has been pretty straight forward, although our game has a very distinct cartoonish feel to it I decided I would keep all “real” sounds simple and realistic. The sounds of feet hitting concrete or a cane striking another human being should be as similar to the real sound as possible because I wanted to keep our game from becoming too surreal. When it was time for me to produce sounds for things like an increase in our “pumpmeter” and various sounds for when picking up power-ups no particular sound came to mind and I decided that even though I wanted keep all sound effects fairly real I found no alternative to the standard cartoony sounds that you usually hear in space shooters, the sort of sci-fi inspired sounds that make you think of aliens and spaceships.

I realized that the sound I was looking for was going to have to be something that conveyed the feeling of something increasing, a “rising” sound with a climax in both pitch and velocity. The best description of the sound I can think of is if you can picture a bubble of air traveling up towards the surface in a lake. When I had constructed such a sound using several separate sounds that I modulated using various effects such as something called flanger and pitch – correct, I was pretty satisfied.

Above is a set of effect pedals, these are not the actual ones I’ve been using but for this purpose it’s better.
These are a set of standard stomp boxes but in digital form, the ones I use are look like a bunch of graphs and diagrams
with a bunch of random values and slides on them so I figured bright colors and funny names would be nicer to look at.

Now it was time for the sound of our main character activating the power-up called “blue cow”. I had no idea of what to use for this one, I knew that the effects of this power-up makes our main character faster, whilst everything else keeps the same pace. With that in mind I used the same principle as I did when producing “pumpmeter increase”, going for a sound that conveys “increase” and something that “rises”. In this case it was our characters speed that increases and with that I was able to create a sound that I think does the job pretty good.

Something that has been on my mind lately is how we are going to implement these sounds into our game. Will we be able to pan these effects properly? to be able to make sound of footsteps come from the right while the sound of our “pumpmeter” increasing coming from the left can be a vital part of making things sound okay. Are we going to have the ability to control volume on each individual sound effect? And how will the soundtrack’s three different parts work when transitioning from high to low? Will it even work at all? These are all things that will need to be sorted out in order for this to work properly but since I don’t have any experience with actually implementing sounds into games I’m just going to have to wait and see.

Above is a Mixer which gives you a basic overview of all your tracks and lets you adjust volume and panning.

SFX – Dangerous Dander

Early on in the production stage I decided that I wanted to do my own sound effects instead of using pre-recorded ones you can get online through various sound banks. My goal was to try and use midi instruments which is basically a simulated software instrument as much as possible because of the simplicity, I can easily modulate sounds through the use of effects and pre-amps, my favorite effects is a nifty little thing called Bit-Crusher, it adds a sort of Super Mario 32-bit feel to the sound.

Another great thing about using midi throughout your recording is that you’re free to change tempo without the loss of sound quality. But of course there are some sounds that are too hard to create using only software generated audio and to record them using a microphone is just so much easier. I started combining the two and added certain sounds that I thought that particular sound effect lacked for example I added the sound of a lighter hitting an empty mug of coffee made of paper to give the sound of a baseball bat hitting various enemies.  Last week I ended up walking around in the hall of the D building recording various sounds that I came across, me hitting one of the radiators in the staircase with an open palm, hitting a metal ladder, me and Simon walking through the hall, a cushion chair knocked over and me tapping my fingers against a bulletin board. I can then combine, add effects, pan, cut, change tempo in order to create the sound I want. The sounds I was going for this week was: character movement, attack and death. Trashcan death 1, 2 and 3, rubbish spawn and “pumpedmeter” decrease. I have some small plans of finding a place that’s sound-proof  and do some of the sounds by recording it using the object itself, like kicking a trashcan or hitting something human-like with a bat or a cane. Then there’s the talk of voice-overs for our game which would also require a studio of sorts. 

My typical process this week has been starting out with a base sound, typically something that describes the sound I’m going for, like for example I’d go for a trashcan tipping over and spilling it’s content on the sidewalk and in order to achieve that I usually prefer to start out with a sound that has many of the base traits required to mimic that sound, in this case me striking an object made of metal with something equally hard.
Now that sound can easily pass for a trashcan hitting asphalt, but it lacks several different key components that makes it sound realistic. For example it may be missing some treble or bass, or maybe it needs a sound to simulate the actual barrel traveling through the air, a sort of “swoosh” sound. There are many aspects of the sound you need to consider changing, for example: will the barrel bounce after its initial impact? Is the can empty? If not, you need to simulate trash moving around and possibly spilling on to the sidewalk.

Above is a part of the arrangement for the sound ”character movement” for this sound I used my recording of me tapping my finger against a bulletin board. what I did here is that I split this recording into smaller part and isolate what would be right foot and left foot hitting the sidewalk, I put those into different tracks and added just a touch of reverberation and then I adjusted the panning of the two tracks putting one a bit to the left and one to the right. After that i started to fine-tune the recordings using a channel equalizer.