Silent, But Deadly
One of the final tasks from the last batch that came in was to make the speakers in the basement lower the music volume once they’ve been defeated. I learned quite a bit about the Do Not Destroy On Load scene and the audio being used in the project while working on this task. It took many hours of thought, experimentation, and collaboration to get the audio to function the way we wanted it to.
A lot of the process involved finding the best way to lower the volume of the music. There was quite a bit of scripting involved. The final scripts weren’t particularly long, but they required a lot of editing and tampering with in order to get everything to work properly. Eventually, we made it so that once a speaker is defeated, the volume and pitch of the basement audio change. I also added in different channels so that we could keep track of what songs are playing instead of changing the audio source for a single channel.
Spin Doctor
Before the recent fix, the spinner in the beginning of the game would play the tutorial when the bout started if it was fought prior to having a talk with the creeper in the kitchen. I had been gradually thinking about this one for about a month while I finished other tasks that needed more immediate attention.
This was another task that took hours of poking around, but I realized that the parameters surrounding when the tutorial is played were not specific enough. The spinner bout was incorrectly assessing the current state of the tutorial. To remedy this, I created a new quest that is invisible to the player. It simply operates as a way to keep track of whether or not the player has completed the tutorial bout. It took some time to implement because of some wacky issues with quests that we ran into, but I got the job done.
Next Week
Next week should hopefully be pretty straight forward. We’ll be implementing various cutscenes that help break up some of the monotony and make the game slightly more cinematic. These “cutscenes” are simple images that pop and show what’s going on in a more dramatic light.
The idea is to display the cutscenes in a seperate scene that runs on top of the current scene. I imagine a lot of the work will be ironing out some of the kinks when this is actually implemented. I’ll likely need to do a bit of scripting to accomplish this as well.
Media Rec
I had a couple ideas for this week’s media rec, but I decided to go with Life Is Strange. E3 just passed, and there were plenty of new games to get excited about. Personally, I’m just super excited about Life Is Strange: True Colors.
I’m pretty young, so my gaming history doesn’t go back super far, but when video games really became my passion, Life Is Strange was one of the games that helped me understand the emotional power gaming had as a medium. Now, I’m a huge fan of the whole series. The games are far from perfect, but there some of the best narratives you’ll come across in gaming. The original game by DONTNOD and the prequel by Deck Nine are both being remastered as part of the Life Is Strange Remastered Collection. However, the experience is just as great with the original games. They’re all worth a try.