Fan Game Production
Sound & Music
This project - although it seems very far in - is a work in progress with various people over the world. We gathered a team of people who were good at character design, scenery and landscape design, clothing, and all things attributed with the making of characters within a game. We gathered people who have experience in a free gaming engine for creating the game itself, we also gathered people for scriptwriters, people to manage files, and others to animate videos for any cutscenes through the game. I was asked in to help - originally - with room design, however was swapped over to Music/Sound as there was no one in that area at the time (which there are now 3/4 of us).
Due to the game being a fan game - no profit on any party will be made from it, it's purely volunteering - everyone involved has work/school/college/university etc. - so the production has been spanned out over a wide timescale.
The game really came about after all having watched Markiplier (a gaming youtuber), and all are involved in the fanbase.
The sound aspect to the - still in the works - game started off really slow, we were unsure what sound we wanted in it. We decided to wait for script writers and storyline writers to finish with the overall story. The implentation of a music box as a key item within the game, I felt I needed to work with a music box VST within Ableton Live Suite. I felt like having solely MIDI music wasn't best for the game. We now have other people working on the project within the music area who have access to live instrumentation and know how to play Pianos and various string instruments.
We kept two songs I sequenced myself for the title screen "Calm" and a Game Over screen "Stone". The third soundcloud box on this project page is a cover of a song on a music box that is a verydefining song associated with Markiplier, whom the creators of the game are very pleased about.
Due to the implentation of sound within the game, we plan to sequence voice clips from previous videos of Markiplier, into the running of the game. This means that we needed someone to help with any sound design projects for animations/general sounds within game. Due to myself having worked on stuff like this in college we decided to pass that to myself. I have sounds in a Foley bank - a collection of recorded sound effects to emulate various things - and I plan to work on this sort of thing when I leave education. Although we weren't sure how to implement the sounds into the game directly without using a simple on-off switch for the sound effect.
I looked into a program called F-Mod which works with the 3D engine that we're using for the runtime (Unity engine). It's a program that lets sound designers who are interested in making sound for games, actually edit clips, shape sound and then use an extra feature of coding that sound directly into the engine - enabling the freedom of letting sound effects decay over time rather than a simple cut-off. (An example of the implementation below).
As stated, the game is very much still in progress and won't be up with more information until more development happens and everyone finishes and breaks off from School/Work/College etc.
A screenshot of the implementation of F-Mod into a 3D rendered gaming engine (Unity). This image doesn't show the coding aspect behind the implementation of sound into the engine. Although it is a sub-window within the image.
One of the various character designs within the project, this one having been done by Karina (clickable link to her art page via photo) - Who works as a Sony Pictures Animation Story Artist, previously working as an intern at Disney.
A screenshot of the implementation of F-Mod into a 3D rendered gaming engine (Unity). This image doesn't show the coding aspect behind the implementation of sound into the engine. Although it is a sub-window within the image.