Audio in "To The End" - Global Game Jam 2016

“To The End” is a game that was developed during Global Game Jam 2016, and developed for a short period subsequently. I worked on the audio for this game (soundtrack, sfx).

The theme for GGJ 2016 was ‘Ritual’. We decided to explore the idea of using rituals as a coping mechanism for potentially overwhelming issues such as grief, obsession, and anxiety.

This led to an idea for a game - someone pursuing a figure through maze-like levels, completing ritualistic tasks in order to move on.

On the audio side, there were a few potential directions for the soundtrack:

1. Repetitive, minimalistic music, reflective of being in a repetitive, ritualistic process
2. Repetitive music that brings in increasing dissonance as time goes on, to reflect discomfort at the ritual not having been completed - interesting thematically, but deliberately antagonising the player can be risky
3. Two intertwined themes, representing conflict of the primary characters - musically and thematically interesting, but would require more time to build something a little more layered and intricate

Given time constraints, we went for option 1 to keep things simple.

First level

The music here is pretty simple - a meandering melodic line, representative of the player’s first steps, beginning to find their way, with some soft strings to provide a bit of warmth. The switch sound effects are intended to blend in with the music.

Scene music

This scene was constantly evolving in length, with art being added, story developed, and text speeds being tweaked.

This made it difficult to score, as the amount of music required was changing quite frequently. To get around this, I decided to write the music as a series of string snippets, triggered on each of the text draw cues. This allowed a lot of flexibility to get around changing scene length.

Advantages:

• Made it much easier to adapt to length of scene
• Reusable in other scenes (different audio, different ordering) - the eventual plan for this game was to be having 5 scenes in total with similar presentation
• Playing on text cues helps punctuate the flow of the scene

Downsides:

• Not a silver bullet - there’s quite a lot of down time in audio in the above video, particularly with the longer passages of text. This is down to us slowing down the text writing speed. To amend this, we’d need longer audio snippets
• Rigid form - music bound to text writing audio cues. If we want to change when the snippets play, it requires code changes (not necessarily a bad thing, though it’s an indication we’re shifting some of the complexity from the music into the code)

Overall, I think it was a reasonable decision to make given our time constraints. Given more time, I would record a separate piece of fixed length for each scene, but given our circumstances it worked reasonably as a workaround for the rate of change we needed.

Other music (not yet in game)

There are two other pieces that were written for this game.

“Tension rising” is a track that’s intented to go in more dramatic parts of the game. The track starts with undercurrents of tension, and builds as various elements of danger (parts of the level collapsing, dangerous obstacles) would be introduced to the player. This is fairly simple in structure, and can be broken down into 4 bar sections. The original intention is that each of these sections could be played separately, and initiated as the player reaches various trigger points.

“Moving on” builds much more slowly, and rather than building in drama, builds in melodic layers. The intended area for this track is somewhere where the player isn’t in immediate danger, but exploration and forward movement are encouraged.

Wrap up

What did I learn?

• Having such a tight window of time forced me to focus on what was important, and what was achievable
• The smallest tasks can sometimes be the hardest - getting the right sound for “wrong switch” took a lot of trial and error
• Cutting corners is reasonable under severe time constraints, as long as those shortcuts are kept track of (and subsequently dealt with if time is available)
• There are some amazingly talented people working in the game industry. I got the chance to meet and worth with some great people over the weekend!