Adding a Melody ( Alpha Build )

The first thing I realized was that my game needed its core gimmick implemented. The lute had to actually play, and for that, I needed to make some music. I’ve never made music on a computer before, so I had to do some research to find a tool that could help me take the melody I had in my head, and make it a reality. As someone with no prior experience with any digital music making tools, I decided to use a website called BeepBox. I had messed around with it before, but this time, I had strummed my guitar in real life until I figured out a beat and melody that I liked. I tried to take inspiration from other fantasy style games like Wonder Song, and combine that with the calmer beat of something a lullaby would have, and came up with something I was pretty proud off.

One of the most important parts about this song, though, was that each layer had to sound good by itself, as well as with the others. Not an easy task, but something I think I managed with the layer system of this website. I tried to make the song structure repetitive enough to be catchy, but have enough variety to not get too annoying when listening to it the entire game. 

After working on something I’m new at, I decided to work on stuff I was more comfortable with. The pixel art graphics. Except it wasn’t actually easier, because I decided I was going to make an autotile to make the later level design more streamlined. I did some research and found a unity asset that helped you make tiles that followed whatever rules you set it to, and got to drawing all the different variations of a raised part of land topped with randomized and brightly colored grass. This was where I really had to figure out what the art style of the levels would look like, and I ended up with a sort of oil painting inspired bright and colorful look.

I thought the levels still looked very empty, and not very forest like, so I designed a pine tree to use as decoration on the top levels. I tried to make the lighting match the perspective, and to make sure the colors went well with the grass, but didn’t blend in too much. 

I though the player character deserved a bit of shading as well. I kept him much simpler thought, and not as oil-painting-like to not make animating him later more difficult.

With all the new assets, I designed a bigger level, that also needed a more dynamic camera to navigate. I used unity’s Cinemachine plugin and made the camera follow the player, but stay within a confined area as well. This allowed for bigger levels, but then also created a problem of having enemies target you from an area you can’t even see.

Before I worked on that, though, I added the layers of music to our bard's arsenal of calming methods. Now, depending on how many “strings” you play by holding down multiple keys, your area of effect for the calming power would grow.

Then I gave the enemy targeting system a field of vision, it wouldn’t start chasing the player unless they were close enough, as well as in their line of sight. I also had to fix some issues that arose during playtesting, including the enemies forgetting about the player the second they couldn’t see them anymore, making it a bit too easy to trap them in a corner. So, I gave them an adjustable memory timer.

Second to last on the list of the big additions, was a stamina bar. This would prevent the player from overusing the reach of the larger music bubble, but I only made it drain stamina when the music was actively calming creatures, because I didn’t want to dissuade players from pressing the music keys just for fun while running around.

Lastly, I thought the prier edition needed some kind of sound cue to both notify and explain to the player why the bard only gets tired when there is a creature in its bubble. For that, I gave the bard a voice. With help from my sibling, who has much more choral experience than me, we came up with a vocal part to the instrumental song the bard play on his lute. No words, but some humming and “La la”-ing that I think is silly enough to add to the whimsy of the game while also just being a good indicator of when the player is spending stamina, because they are singing to the angry wolves. From experience, I can now say the stamina bar is very realistic, because after recording and rerecording the vocals over and over, my voice was spent.

A lot of these additions were added because of comments I received during playtesting the prototype. Watching people play the game made me want to incentivize certain things to help build the experience I want to give players with this game. Focusing more on the fun and silly aspect of the gameplay, with the retro music and bright colors. My core idea hasn’t really changed, but the way I am going about trying to create the experience my original idea wanted to give changes with every playtest. The art and music are very important to how the game creates that experience, so having even some of it done is really starting to bring the idea to life. I still want to incentivize players to play the music more, so adding more fun visuals and perks to doing so is something I definitely want to eventually add. Animations I think will help a lot with that. Along with some clever level design, but for now, the basics of everything I need to make all the actual levels are almost all done.