Hello hello! It’s been a while. I’ve been kept fairly busy in between school work and other things, but I still had time to cook and take care of my plants, which I get trying to make up for not having a dog. I have written some of my round 5 composition experiences, as well as how we made decisions contributing to our world.
So in the fifth round of Building Virtual Worlds, we were instructed to build our world for the end of the year ETC festival, without much other restrictions. Having such an open ended prompt made me briefly panic, not having a super concrete idea that I would want to carry out; also, we had a wide range of platforms that we are able to choose from, which added another level of uncertainty. We were given three weeks instead of two, and we were asked to think about replayability as well as multiplayer platforms, as well as making everything kid-friendly as there are a good amount of kids coming to our worlds.
Upon meeting up with my teammates, we decided that we would want to experiment with the CAVE the most as we decided to not only incorporate props as something more heavily featured in our world because one of our teammates have suggested interests, but also, with the CAVE we could see more clearly the amount of space we are working with; it also comes with the platform that is able to wiggle around that no other equipment is capable of doing.
And it worked out, as the platform assigned to us is none but the CAVE. Having narrowed down factors we need to consider, our team came together having a unique element or two that we wanted to incorporate into our world. Some suggested we make a sword fighting game, some suggested we make it a multiplayer role-playing experience, some suggested we incorporate the winter theme and elements from the SCP foundation. Incorporated, we created the prototype experience of “driving through a Nordic forest with your friends to fight unorthodox monsters.” In order to make the experiences more engaging, we added more level design elements by adding in different monster prototypes, different environments and different monster/boss attack and defense mechanisms.
I had a fair share of sound design work laid out in order to help the guests immerse into our experience. In the first week of development, we created basic monster fight mechanisms, basic driving mechanisms and the driving path generation, which turned to the beginning of our experience. Not much of a fighting game gamer myself, I asked some of my classmates about what kind of music I should be listening to (Skyrim turned out to be their suggestion) and also listened to the Spotify and Youtube curated video games soundtracks. Having some references in mind, I thought I should be creating something that sounds fairly aggressive, frantic and fast. Some heavy synth bass and guitar has laid the tone of this background music, then some choir music, drummer beats and some game music loops in Logic has helped me arrange my first piece of background music (“STAGE 2” in the playlist below). In the beginning of the experience, in order to provide the guests some time to get a hold of how to drive around, how to use the sword and shield, I thought I should write some somber, simple piano music that is neither too slow or too fast (“prelude”).
We presented a simple fighting game where you’re in an arctic landscape and fighting eyeball like monsters and the end of the week. We knew that we should add more level design elements by incorporating different monsters, but we also got a lot of feedback about how the eyeball monsters doesn’t seem to make too much sense because they don’t look too monster like, and the shield, at this point, not having too much functionality. I thought about writing a story, while our programmers carry on and incorporate some monster attack mechanism to help the guests playing understand what they are up to with these not quite monster-like monsters. We brought our thoughts into office hours to see if these elements mesh well together, and our professors helped us explore some possibilities in both the storytelling aspect as well as straight up video game aspect (no storytelling elements; it would resemble a straightforward arcade like monster fighting game). I figured a smooth transition between the different monster attacks would be changing up the background music as a method of indirect control (vs direct control, which would be something like telling the audience “DANGER”; we thought for a smoother flow of the game it would be better to utilize indirect control) would serve well in either one of these deliveries.
Our artists ended up creating a small eye-ball like monster, a medium snake like monster, and an one-eye little girl like boss monster that will eventually swallow the guests, but still trying our best not to scare the kids too much. So, the experience would be three stages with three different kinds of monsters with different difficulty levels to tackle, and I would compose three different tracks of background music to work on. I liked what I did for the previous week but thought it would be really hard to go more frantic than that for two more stages, so I thought I will compose something that is less frantic, and something more frantic. I thought for STAGE 1, I could continue from the soothing piano music that I previously composed, and have that suddenly shift gears to being frantic, though the primary instrument here will stay the same (“STAGE 1”). In composing STAGE 1, I thought of Schubert’s song Erlkönig, which had a frantic piano motif that I thought was appropriate to include into the music. Afterwards, I think it would be a nice touch to add something very sharp on top of the piano music, which is why I decided to use a piccolo and flute doubling for that to come through. I also added some dissonant sounding piano bass notes to provide a scary eerie feeling for the guests that are newly exposed to the forest. Then it’s STAGE 3 time, where the seemingly innocent little girl is going to eat you! But it doesn’t end there, because you would be fighting inside the little girl some more. And I thought, it would be interesting if I try to combine stage 1 and 2’s music together and see how that turns out, and take the tempo up a notch! And the recombination actually worked quite interestingly when I threw in some more drum beats to bind it together.
It would be quite weird, however, if the background music switches without any sort of transition in between. So, the next thing I did was to create those. In order to make the guests feel a slight breather between STAGE 1 and 2, the music will slow down slightly (“transition 1”) with the piano eventually fading out, leaving only the natural ambience sounds of the forest and the car rolling through the snow-covered land. Transition 2 will begin when the guests finish fighting the second wave of monsters and see the little girl boss monster. The goal here is to create an eerie but still sort of cute atmosphere, so I found my answer again in piano narrating for the little girl. And then, the little girl will So, I created a sound effect for our boss’ swallowing, then transition 3 to help transition our game into the final boss fight. In this transition, in order to make it seem seamless, I continued what I did with the piano motifs, and basically slowly sped it up to make it match with STAGE 3’s music. One of this teammate, at this point, suggested that we make it a story out of the little girl; so I added some dialogues in there too, before the little girl swallows everyone.
We delivered a product that had all three monsters’ fighting scenes, and we added some more attack and scoring mechanisms; we added more functionality for the shield, so now it’s a magical shield that could bounce the monster attack energy back to them to harm them. Unfortunately, the product was still fairly confusing to both the professors and our classmates with having not enough storytelling elements and more fighting elements, as well as not enough feedback when the monster is defeated (at this point, they just disappear), and we decided with only one week left, a straightforward sword-fighting route would be best. We worked on clarifying a lot of our issues such as adding a slashing effect to the monster when they are killed and providing how much score is added by killing a particular monster to add more feedback. We also added another stage of fighting with the little girl with the castle now available to be added into the scene, but because this was added almost the night before the whole project was due, I had no time to compose new background music, so we continued to use STAGE 3 into this stage of fighting too. I got rid of the dialogues, and worked on some more sound effects for the game, such as an HP bag pick up sound, a rock smashing sound, more sword and shield sounds, et cetera.
Although we did not get selected into festival this time, it was a really rewarding experience working on this project and seeing all of our teammates devoting lots of their time and energy into the making of this experience. I’d like to thank Leon, Guimin, Lai and Marieke for this unique experience, and there’s no other way that I’d like to end my BVW journey.