Thinking about Sound Design

Been ignoring this dev log for far too long. Started work on another game, life took over, other games demanded to be played (hello Animal Well) and this one took a backseat.

But still wanting to get Crystal Daze more polished, and I've been gradually thinking about sound after a fellow Discorder got in touch to offer some music. As a result, I started thinking about Sound Design which is totally not something I've done before, but hey, that's the fun of indie dev, right?

Plotting out music has had a couple of good effects. 1: it really got me thinking about atmosphere and feel much more. Like, these were there in the back of my head, but mostly manifested purely as words - the name of the game, how characters talk (or not) and how descriptive text creates a reading flow.

And then 2: Adding some really basic tunes and sound effects really made me appreciate how important sound design is to a game. Even just one daft little pulp tune can lift everything to a much richer level.

As ever, I reached for a fresh spreadsheet to start organising my thoughts about what I wanted to do, which you can see here (spoiler warning: later parts of the game are mentioned): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qwWVQjY8nKYGvDB7ZzEajYBRxEnb6W7j_lM94_Sb...

There's definitely a vague narrative arc to the game that I'm attempting to tie into how the action and "scening" unfolds, and the progression of the music fits in with this. The intro music, for example, needs to match the title, the title screen, and the way the player "slips" into the game.

(I don't know why the character starts out in bed. It just made sense, based on the initial Crystal Maze/Daze pun. Some things are unexplainable.)

(Also why do I start making up words when I do something new?)

Alongside this, I really want the music to be threaded along a coherent theme or motif. I'm riffing largely off the initial tune that fellow Discorder sent over, and sticking to the same underlying chord progressions, with variations based on that narrative arc mentioned above.

For instance, tunes at the start of the game should be simpler, with more "voices" being added to match the complexity and difficulty of the gameplay increasing. And the key / tempo of each tune should match the sense of progression and confidence that I think the player should feel at that part of the game - whether it's "comfortable confusion", "temporary certainty", or "involved panic".

There are lots of details to think through, depending on what pulpscript lets me do (the "bpm" command looks useful...). It remains to be seen whether I can actually carry this through, but I'm having an unexpected blast thinking about it.