Industry Brief

Gameplay Programming

My first task in the industry brief project was to design a minigame where the player has to input A/D repeatedly 8 times to knock something out of a vending machine. I used a boolean to track their last input and incremented a “hits” variable based on the total amount of inputs that were valid based on a branch.

During this, I realised the player input needed to be overridden during minigame play: I created two booleans “Minigame” and “CanMove” to track if one is being played and prevent the player from moving by branching the third person template code. I have not experimented with player states, but I believe using a state for a minigame being played may have proved more efficient than branching a large portion of the code that’s being run multiple times per second.

Sound Design

My primary task was sound design, where I created and implemented all the sound effects for the project. I drew inspiration from fast paced games within the same genre such as Plate Up! which include many small sound effects that reward the player for positive interactions. I created a set of small “bloop” sounds for tasks such as removing dust and successfully washing laundry to reward the player for completing their objective.

The vending machine minigame sounds used sounds similar to basic fighting games to add impact to the player’s inputs. Laundry uses a dampened version of a regular washing machine cycle sound to add weight to beginning a new cycle of laundry without overpowering the game’s other sounds. Finally, the monster sounds were sampled from a basic “monster roars” pack and then pitch adjusted; a happy monster interaction is high pitched and fast, and a sad interaction is lower pitched and slow.

Given more time to work on the project, I would expand the range of sounds available and add random elements to their selection such as “bloops” being randomised among themselves instead of tailored to specific interactions. This could also be applied to other objects: an array of punch sounds for the vending machine and a list of happy and sad monster interactions.

Full details of the sounds I implemented can be found in my contribution document.

Research Proposal Idea

Due to the recent popularity of rhythm games caused by the new Fortnite Festival game mode – drawing from guitar hero-style gameplay – I’m considering research along the lines of Japanese reception of rhythm games vs global reception. There is a heavily tendency towards arcade rhythm games in Japan, whereas arcades see far less play nowadays in other areas of the world. I’m curious to research which games see the most success there vs elsewhere, pulling on influences such as the game platform, music genres included and difficulty.

Since most of my hobby time is based around music and rhythm gaming, this will pull from my existing knowledge and develop it to become more aware of the gaming sector and trends within the rhythm game music scene.