These last two weeks were really big weeks in terms of the game's timeline. For starters, we made it past Greenlight! That was a huge milestone for us, and there was a while we weren't sure if we were going to make it past or not. But our game really came back from the conceptual proof of concept, to an actual playable prototype with levels, art, puzzles, and my biggest contribution: music!
As art assets began to be placed in the scene, and levels began to be fleshed out, I found myself with ample time to actually sit down and focus on the music; which was going to be my primary focus on this project anyway. I had already sat down previous to this and came up with a few melodic ideas, but I wasn't satisfied with any of them, nor did I think they matched our theme well enough. The biggest challenge was trying to create a sonic context out of a game that didn't even have much of a general context. In previous posts I talked about inspirations from other games and the atmosphere's influence on the direction I wanted the music to take. I still stuck with my general inspirations, but the music turned out to be more reflective of the game it was built around than I had originally thought.
Because Eira: Echoes of Adventure is centered so much on the character's exploration of this open, frigid environment, I didn't want the music to feel too constricting, or become too repetitive right of the bat. Using inspirations from the other games I mentioned before, I decided to make the track an ambient wind-filled track where the piano glides gracefully over a bed of bells and cavernous noise. It had space for the atmosphere to breathe, and it loops naturally with the rise and fall of the arctic wind in the background. I was actually really happy with how it turned out! (Here's the link!)
Of course even with all the ups, there were a few large points of contention to reflect on. Namely, our games' relationship with narrative. When I was brought on to the team earlier this year, the general consensus was to make a fun adventure game with a large focus on exploration, with a distinct lack of story/narrative. As we've delved further and further into development, it seems almost impossible to create this game without implementing some strong form of context and purpose, primarily in the way of a narrative. Through external pressure and our own design ideas, we tried to work out a way to fit the context of our game into an easily deliverable format that our younger audience could take in and understand.
We did this by implementing a rudimentary world-space dialogue system. That is, the player could interact with various points of interest in the world, and would be given small narrative clues about their world or next objective. While on paper this system works, it doesn't really slot itself well into a game that is primarily exploration and gameplay focused without having been a part of the game's design from the beginning. It feels a little forced. And what's more is that most of the feedback we've been getting from various groups has been to drive home the context of the world to the player, and clearly explain what their motivation is and what part they play in the world as a whole.
It seems its going to be largely back to the drawing board for the team as I try and think back to my previous experiences with narratives as a designer. I wouldn't call myself primarily a narrative designer, but I definitely do love to design narrative for games which is why this challenge seems so frustrating to me. I would hope that my past experiences would be able to provide a methodology for conveying everything we need to within the confines of our design. For the next few weeks I'm going to try and split my time between solving this problem and implementing audio as my tasks direct.