Producer & Designer
Brave Valiant Warriors Wanted (BVWW)
Building Virtural Worlds Round 5:Â Fighting unorthodox monsters in a magical forest and castle (Platform CAVE)
You have been summoned into the magical forest that nobody dared to approach for 500 years. Approached with a sword, a shield and a horse and being trained for this for your whole life, would you make it out of the forest alive?
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In Brave Valiant Warriors Wanted, three guests are invited into the experience, where one drives (XBox controller), one attacks with a sword, and one defends with a shield (Vive controllers + props). In the experience, guests fight weird (some says cute) monsters through targeting their weaknesses in the magical forest and castle that requires unorthodox approaches to kill. The CAVE provides a nice touch to the castle scene; the platform also lends a hand to provide the bumpy driving experience of the guests in the forest and the castle, adding more elements of franticness.
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Co-Producers: Marieke Van Der Maelen & Zhiran (Karen) Xu
Programming - Ye (Leon) Wu, Guimin Ren
Art - Lai Wei, Marieke Van Der Maelen
Sound - Zhiran (Karen) Xu
Props - Marieke Van Der Maelen
The World, Its Sound Design & Composition Choices
To read the entire experience through the three week development cycle, you could go here to read all about it; to listen to the music, you could scroll down to the music player. Here's an excerpt of how I conceived and then two of my background music tracks...
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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.