Game Prototype

Foreword: I became ill with what I think might have been a new weak strain of whooping cough between roughly 27/04 and 07/05, so I was isolating during that time. Since I was able to complete my sound design before and after this time, I don’t think it strongly affected my work.

For the second project, I took the role of audio programmer. My sound effects are split into three main areas: gameplay sounds, ambient effects and war sound effects.

Gameplay Sounds

The key sounds of the game are created whenever a player interacts with the world or their items. These include:

• SFX_CameraShutter
• SFX_Chime
• SFX_DoorClose
• SFX_DoorOpen
• SFX_Footsteps

Camera shutter and chime are the two effects related to the camera, the primary gameplay mechanic of the project. The shutter sound is a rapid click-click of an old-fashioned camera that is roughly the length of the fade to black sound effects that appears in game. Although it adds some satisfaction to taking pictures, it can be spammed by the player due to there being no cooldown on how fast you can take pictures. The chime effects plays in addition to this if the picture contains an anomaly. While unintentional, the start of the chime effect is partially hidden by the camera shutter sound; this creates an air of mystery as the strongest sound of the chime (a table bell being rung) is subdued, leaving only its fadeout.

The door opening and closing sounds were intended as subtle sound effects that make the common act of passing through a door more satisfying as though a real interaction is taking place. However, the implementation of doors as physics objects meant there was no blueprint event I could tie these interactions to. In their place, I used the door slam sound effect I had planned as a rare ambient event. It makes entering through the doors feel more “final” than it would otherwise, due to the player’s inability to pass back through doorways, which is a welcome alternative.

The final gameplay sound is the player’s footsteps loop. It contains a standard set of 10 footsteps on a hard wood floor, contains both soft and hard footsteps to break monotony. I selected a sample with roughly even time between steps to ensure it fades into the background – other than the 9th step, which faintly includes the sound of a door being closed. The quiet repetition of this sound, and the uncertain cause of it, creates further unease within the game environment. The primary floor of the footstep sound is that a new sound variable is created every time a movement action occurs instead of pause/playing the previous one, which means every new interaction will create a new instance of the first footstep sound. Fast stop/start movement will result in this sound being spammed.

Ambient Sounds

While walking through the corridors, I designed some spooky ambient sound effects to be played at random to create tension and suspense. During December through March I frequently played the horror survival game Lethal Company and took strong inspiration from their use of sound design while creating these effects:

• SFX_CreepyHouse1-6
• SFX_DoorKnocks
• SFX_DoorSlam
• SFX_WindowKnock

My original idea to implement the creepy house effects was creating an array of spawn points around the corridor that these sounds could have collision boxes appear in which would trigger the respective sounds. Due to various constraints, these sounds and the other three ambient effects were all moved to one collision box halfway through the corridor that appears consistently. While predicable, it was a useful way to test spawning random sounds through an array.

The door knock sound effect was intended to play at random once the player reaches a certain distance from the door they entered a room from, causing them to turn around. Upon walking back to the original distance the sound would play another faster set of knocks. Since the player cannot return through doors they already closed, this creates a sense of unease that something or someone may be following them and lurking just out of reach.

The door slam sound was intended to randomly replace the door closing sound; a sudden slam may be jarring for players who have fallen into a simple routine of entering doors and collecting anomalies, alerting them to potential danger lurking behind and around them.

The window knock sound follows the same principle as the door knocks, instead played when the player passes by a window. The inspiration for this was the classic scare in resident evil 1 where a set of dogs jump through a window – in the original game upon passing the windows forwards, and in the remake subverting this by occurring when passing the window backwards. The random element of which window this sound effect may happen at and which loop it spawns on retains this element of surprise.

Weather Effects

I created a set of two weather effects to amplify the rising mood of the game as it continues, adding suppressive layers of sound in addition to the ambient effects already playing at random:

• SFX_Rain
• SFX_RainLoop
• SFX_Wind

After roughly 1/3 of the game’s loops, the rain sound effect was intended to play. It contains a light rain/wild track that I altered with a filter to remove the strong wind, leaving a dampened rain sound that appears to be coming from outside the corridor. This quiet undertone is quite calming, which serves to amplify the menacing suspense created the anomalies and ambient sounds. The loop variant was created to allow the initial fade-in to play once, then have the calm variant remain stable until replaced by the wind sounds.

After roughly 2/3 of the game’s loops, the wind sound effect would gradually fade in and replace the rain sound effects. This sound effect has the opposite filters applied: originally it was a wind with rain track, but the rain has been lightly dampened to amplify the roaring wind to feel more like a tornado once it picks up. This leads to the latter portion of the game feeling far more oppressive, encouraging the player to escape as fast as possible.

Neither of these sounds are present in the final game build.

War Sounds

A key part of the character’s backstory is being a war photographer, so I created some sound effects to convey this that correlate to key items in the game:

• SFX_Cannon
• SFX_Machinegun
• SFX_Siren
• SFX_Sniper
• SFX_Tank
• SFX_War

The cannon, machine gun, sniper and tank effects were designed to be picked between at random whenever the player identifies a certain anomaly. While seeming out of place at first, these sounds hint towards the greater backstory of the character and relate to the items they have been attached to somehow. All of these sounds have various dampening or filters applied to blend into the background and appear as if they are sounds occurring outside the corridor.

SFX_War was created to be placed in the background of a newspaper the player can read which details the events of “current times”, or the times that have been rooted into the character’s mindset. As the newspaper goes on, it gradually breaks the 4th wall to berate the player; I designed this sound effect to slowly fade in as the player reads and emphasise this switch at roughly the time they would approach reading this segment at an average pace.

SFX_Siren was designed to be played during the final loop, where the corridor appears its most rundown and only one more anomaly is required to escape. It gradually fades in and raises in intensity as it continues, instilling a sense of urgency in the player without being overbearing due to its filters and noise dampening.

Unfortunately, due to time constraints of the anomalies not being implemented as physical objects as opposed to test objects, none of the war sounds were implemented into the final version of the project.

Closing Thoughts

Overall, I feel that the project may have had too much focus on the art aspects and more gameplay features would have been beneficial. Most of the bulk of the coding work (the camera and the corridors) was finished quickly, leaving only the art and sound work to be completed. While it did relieve some pressure to have the dev work on the project feel relatively complete early on, I may have been able to contribute more if there were additional small systems I could have done some coding work on.

Research Proposal: Narrowing Ideas

I used the presentation slides about choosing a research topic to narrow down my previous idea.

My expertise lies in modern rhythm games, so analysing “to what extent does the reception of modern rhythm games differ between Japan and a global audience” allows my research to be more specific.

Potential areas of analysis for paragraphs:

• Sales analysis of recent rhythm games – some arcade, some steam games, some console
• The arcade scene – very prevalent in Japan, but weak globally and often suffering from years-old games never being updated
• Song genre choices in games and their affect on user perception of the games and their popularity
• Fortnite Festival causing a resurgence of guitar hero-style gameplay, popular English hits performing well despite not being a usual genre

While searching for sources on google scholar, I identified the key areas of research that have been examined previously: using rhythm games as a tool for learning skills, such as music or improving reaction times. While not entirely relevant to my chosen topic, they may still provide useful insights on user experiences in recent rhythm game studies.

The most useful resources to find will likely be direct analytics for the performance of arcade, pc and console games. In addition to this, I may search for credible essays on the history of rhythm games to check whether bias towards any type of rhythm game exists, or knowledge gaps due to lack of advertisement from certain games.

Append from before submission: Hayden spent around 8 hours straight preparing a final build for the game by combining all the assets and fixing various bugs, so huge credit to them.