The road to Alpha is where we're at in development now! After getting past greenlight in the previous weeks, our team has finally started to put all of the pieces together to make a fully playable alpha build. That includes placeholders for everything, like all assets, levels, systems, UI, and even sound effects. Needless to say, we've all been pretty busy trying to get everything in.
Let me take a moment to talk about where most of my time has been going over the past couple weeks. As lead audio designer, I've been working on not only creating/finding the sound effects for the game, but also working on the mechanical systems that tie them into the game. I've been working with our lead programmer, Scott Aquino who made a very comprehensive AudioManager to ensure that sound effects and events are all handled in largely the same way. Naturally though, when working on something like sound that touches nearly every interaction in the game, you're bound to run into a few issues.
Mainly easy to fix, some of the old audio code from before I was brought on the team was still in use, so Scott and I had to dedicate a majority of our time to change it. This wasn't anything difficult, and Scott was able to make the new manager really designer friendly, but it meant that my work was slowed. In the meantime, I started to find and manipulate sound effects for use in our game, and those that did make it in (like the Walrus effects), I was able to play around with. This last week specifically I spent tying the remaining important game events to the sound manager, and implementing placeholder sounds for everything important.
Unfortunately this means I've had little time to work on music. As I've come further along in development, I've had time to reflect upon what I've been most passionate about in the project so far, and it seems clear to me that its the music. If I had more time or if it were a higher priority, I would love to make a full soundtrack for the game with different music for each level. I know this is because its where my passion for games originates, and I can't help but get inspired every time I walk around our frozen mysterious world.
With that said, I still did have enough time to make a basic ambient track for our title screen. Its not much, and is just supposed to fit the atmosphere. Check it out here!
Reflecting on my original hopes for this project also has me looking towards its future; within the next couple weeks I'm going to try my best to make it a point that I want to write more music for the game. The only obstacle I have to overcome at this point is just making sure to finalize placeholder sound effects and making everything fit before Beta in a few weeks. My work for the next couple weeks will be broken up by a vacation to Europe I will be taking, so managing the next couple audio related features is going to have to be very precise.