Info
My position: Lead Design and Scripter
Team size: 9
Developed by: A seven week project during my time at Future Games
Engine: Unity
Genre: 2.5D platformer
Features
- Soar through a lost open world
- Find and collect a number of mythical gramophones to wake up your friend.
Description
Play as Dilán, a magnetic Aramdillo on a quest to wake up its friend. Traverse this lost world and discover what it may inhabit.
Responsibilities
Objective Handler
Sound Manager/Sound Effects
Collectibles
Objective Handler
I created the objective handler of the game. This is where the players progress where stored. It managed how many gramophones the player had picked up and it handled the waking process fo the cat, it also communicated with the Sound Manager to que each of the instrumental tracks that were added with each gramophone.
When you entered the area of the Objective Handler, if you had picked up a number of gramophones (wether it was only one or seven), the Objective Handler would add that much to the blue altar at the center.
The Objective Handler also managed the wake up animations of the cat. Where it went through three stages: asleep, barely awake, almost awake, and fully awake and dancing. These were triggered whe the player had collected a set amount of gramophones.
Each gramophone placed on the altar also added a new music track to the music playing in the background. But more on that in the Sound Manager section.
Sound Manager/Sound Effects
The Sound Manager stored all of the SFX and music in the game, it also connected all audio to three volume sliders (SFX, Music and Master) Using Unitys Audio Mixer. We ound the value to a in-game slider as well, so the player also could adjust the volume to their liking.
For every gramophone you collect and place at the altar, another music track starts to play, to avoid the tracks to get out of sync we did so all the tracks starts to play when you place the first gramophone, ut their volume is turned down to zero (this is not done through the audio mixer to avoid complications and issues). For every gramophone you collect we turn another track up to the corresponding value again. This is how we managed to keep the audio in sync and give the player the feeling that the tracks were added sequentially.
Sound Design
Player Movement: The player assumes the role of a small magnetic armadillo. We wanted the armadillo to feel light and easy to control. So the footsteps are light and swift, there is not much bass to the movement sound effects. The player sorts of flies through the world, with swift movements. When you are rolling it’s a different sound though, it’s a quiet rumbling sound with a faint metallic rustle.
Magnetic and transformation: Since the player is going to be magnetic alot of the time, I didn’t want to make the magnetic sound annoying or offputting. So the magnetic track is pretty long, this is to avoid it to loop. A looping sound can easily ecome annoying to the player quite fast. The magnetic sound is also not too loud, I didn’t want it to be intrusive and cancel out the music. I also put alot of work on the transformation sound. Since it’s also something the player will do alot. I wanted to make the sound satisfying. Both when the player transformed into a ball and when the player transforms a back into the regular shape. When the player tranforms into a ball i wanted to accentuate the mateallic feel of the shell. so it’s a sharp/bouncy metal “schwing!” combined with a few clicks. When the player folds out it’s sort of a pronounced click-sound. This is to pronounce the tranformations and make it feel good to transform back and forth.
Gramophones: When collecting a gramophone I didn’t want the player not to notice it. So when picking up a gramophone a pronounced “GONG”sound is played, along a fast track where a neelde is played on a vinyl. This way there is no way the player won’t notice that they picked up a gramophone, it also feels good to hear. A variant of the sound is played when you turn in the gramophone, I just pitched it up a notch to provide some variation.
Collectibles
Since we hade this big open world to explore, we needed a reason to do so. So we decided that the player would fly around and collect gramophones (because of course!). There a total of ten gramophones, but the player is only taksed with finding seven, since running around a world that big finding “that one gramophone” can easily become tedious.
The colectibles also has a “sign system” where a sign i splaced to guide the way towards the gramophone, each collectible has about three gramophones pointing at them, and when the gramophone is collected the sign disappear. This is to ensure that a sign always leads the player towards a gramophone.
