I present to you the first entry in my Post-Mortem series. Why multiple, because I write them just before I go to bed. Especially this entry on Audio could be of interest to other Compo participants because this strategy worked out perfectly.

Personal Challenges

The main purpose for me to participate in Game Jams is to challenge myself and learn something new. Usually this involves things like: "Multiplayer", "Custom Hardware" or "New Art Style". Always trying something new to see how people interact with mechanics, UI elements and Always with mixed results, but always improving me as a (hobbyist) game developer. Additionally this helps to be a bit more creative, or at the very least focus creativity a bit more and come up with a great idea faster. Both learning and being creative are fun (I would even argue that learning is creativity). This time it was "Audio is not an afterthought".

Matching the music with the game

Something that I think is the hardest part of making music, is having music that matches the game and it's mood. So naturally the first thing I did when I came up with the idea is setup the mood. No final art, just creating a style I would be happy with. I felt this was important for creating the music, which was not going to be an afterthought. During deciding the art style I listened to a lot of game soundtracks for inspiration of the music to the art.

Garageband

Since I have never composed enjoyable music, I spent the entire Friday learning how to use the program, and get a feel for the many instruments it contains and a bit of music theory (I don't have a free resource for this, but search for things like Scales, Timbre and Tempo). Luckily I have an iPad which comes with a free copy of GarageBand. It allows me to make music with less static keyboard press speeds (velocity) and change and record parameters while rotating the buttons. Also, and many audio tools have this nowadays, it is possible to play using a set scale. This is very important to get sounds sound well together. (It is not the only way, but it certainly helps) E.g. A Major Blues scale or a Pentatonic scale. There is a lot of ambient sounds, 80s sounds and even a pretty versatile Chiptune style Square Wave. What makes GarageBand even better is that it syncs up with any GarageBand for Mac project, which made doing the final tweaks a breeze. If you don't have a setup like this, there is a ton of other music programs you could check out. Although I didn't finalise anything, during the jam I composed an entire track!

Dynamic Music and the Unity Audio Mixer

What I also never touched is the Audio Mixer included in Unity. I knew that it is great for dynamic music, so I decided I wanted to do that too. Unfortunately I didn't have time for that on Friday. So in spirit of my previous entries, I learned this on the go. It was not entirely straightforward, but it seems Unity is doing it's best to optimise so that's great! For example you have to expose parameters explicitly, and any changes you make during play are saved. But in the end it was pretty easy and it took me only a couple of minutes to add music changes to trigger areas. Which would mean I could switch separate music tracks during game play. More specifically; noise would fade out when out of danger, and the soothing bells would be replaced by more aggressive alternating notes (arpeggios) when nearing enemies.

Sound Effects

While music is great, without SFX a game feels very dull. So I needed to come up with some sound effects. Since the game is about emitting bubbles a bubbling sound was required. Luckily such sounds can be found easily on the internet, like freesound.org. (Watch the licenses though). Of course you can't just put that in your entry, (it's against the Compo rules and it wouldn't sound right). So I used Reaper for tweaking the sound, making it loopable and reducing recording noises. Finally I needed some pickup sounds. Usually I would just bootup BFXR and generate some sounds. But I learned that it doesn't work very well when you have a bit more decent music. So I booted backup GarageBand and searched for some matching sounds, while running the music I made in the background. It turned out pretty atmospheric.

Results

I'm pretty happy with what I was able to create knowing it was my first time doing something like that properly. And, even better, it seems I'm not the only one!