Adaptive audio is when the audio changes in response to events in the game. It's honestly really cool and it really immerses the player into the game, though it really isn't used in many games, especially game jam games. Now, before I talk about how our team used this concept for some really stupid and silly details in our dating sim game, This Date Blows, play the game first! (There are some silly surprises!)

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Spoilers Ahead!!!!!

If you've played the game, you know that it's actually two games in one. With a tap of the spacebar, you are brought from a dating sim to a high-intensity and time-sensitive bomb defusal. Yes, you defuse bombs every 10 seconds. This means you hear two people speaking at all times, your date and Emmet, a bomb defusal specialist giving you instructions. This leads to some silly interactions where your date thinks you're being rude since you're always looking at your phone, oblivious that you're defusing bombs, and some other silly stuff (you know if you've completed the game!).

How can you listen to two voices at once in real life? You can't really, one will always be out of focus. Same goes in our game, when you look at the bomb, the voice of the date will be lowered and muffled. Same goes for the opposite when you're looking at the date. You have to be on your toes at all times, constantly looking at both the bomb and the date! Also, one small visual detail is that the color grating of the camera is red when you look at the date, and it's blue when you look at the bomb, pretty cool, right?

Another piece of adaptive audio is the background music. There's two version of the music, a date version, and a bomb version. Both versions have the same melody and bpm, it's just the moods are different! So when you switch from the date to the bomb, it seamlessly changes from romantic calming background music to an intense bomb solving jam! Both songs are actually playing at the same time, it's just one is always muted! Take a listen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vB6Wg_ZKqk

https://youtu.be/R-iYEKFdkaI

So what happens when you defuse the bomb wrong? It blows up, of course! A severed hand will fly, a piano will break... A piano will break? Adaptive music time! In addition to changing the background (a table mysteriously disappears and then a piano...), the background audio will change!

Here's the background unbombed:

After 1 bomb:

So there's restaurant background chatter when you look at the date, right? (It's two random muffled tracks of our team members improvising random dinner conversations lol, among them is one is about a killer seal, another is about grandma's soup). Anyways, getting a bomb wrong blows up a table in the background, reducing the amount of background chatter tracks playing from 2 to 1.

After 2 bombs:

When the piano explodes, you hear the sounds of a broken piano, ala Looney Tunes. This removes the piano from the background track. Take a listen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFkUcdiWDzM

Seems more somber, right?

These are just some of the small audio details in the game. One of the cool things in a game jam is that you work really closely with the musician, so small dumb things like these are possible! Audio often feels neglected in game jam games, hopefully this game is a breath of fresh air!