Something I'm starting to realise about this new industry I'm entering is that projects come and go like trains at a station. Before I even realised it Pinata simulator (my last game project) was already over and packed up and I've already starting planning for the second game I'm working on called Castle Lovers. These two games are part of my major project for this trimester, it's basically a test of endurance, creativity and work ethic by finishing two pretty solid games in under 11 weeks.
Castle Lovers is a phone game made by the same team I worked on with Pinata Sim with. Basically the player is a ruler in charge of a kingdom and they must balance their resources, listen and command their subjects and at night fight of waves of monsters all in an effort to keep their kingdom running smoothly. This project is a great opportunity for me as there are many aspects of the game I am looking forward to working on which I'll break into three sections, the music, the events and the Simlish (dialogue). These three aspects of the game are like nothing I've really worked on before and I'm really interested in adding them my game design utility belt as they are elements of games I see all the time in professional titles.
Before I get into these three jobs let me give you a quick feel for what the game should turn out like.
A key reference for this game is Reigns. Reigns is a minimalistic kingdom ruling game where you make choices and decide the fate of your people and lands. Reigns like Castle lovers is also a phone game so it make a perfect reference for our team. In reigns you choose between two cards balancing your resources of faith, money, popularity and strength. If any of these run out or reach the maximum your ruler gets killed and you start the game again. Castle Lovers uses a similar resource system but your are more in charge of taxing your people, defending them from monsters and listening to their needs and making decisions. Anyway gameplay aside from an audio aspect, Reigns is closer to the mark for my role as well. Some key audio features of Reigns are event sounds that play when certain positive or negative things happen like a mass prayer or you getting burned alive at the stake for being a witch... These events also exist in Castle Lovers and there are a huge variety of things that can happen and accompanying sounds that play when they do which I'll get into later. Another audio tool that I'm trying to replicate is creating Simlish like dialogue. Basically Simlish is a gibberish language games use when characters are speaking but doesn't have the actual dialogue spoken like in the Sims. Simlish is really common in a lot of indie titles so I'm keen to start learning exactly how I'm going to achieve it in game, so I suppose that's a good place to start.
Simlish! DO YOU SPEAK IT!?
Simlish might seem like a pretty easy aspect of game audio I mean it's just mumbling right? Yeah you're not wrong but also it's harder than it seems. The way I see it there are three different ways I could incorporate this into my game. The easy way, the hard way or the right way?
The Easy way:
The easy way for me to incorporate this gibberish language works as simply as you might think... Record some mumbling, edit it to taste, whack that in Fmod and attach it to an event so it looks something like this.
As you can see it's easy, it works and most of all it's super boring... You would hear the exact same line delivered over and over again so I decided to make it a little more interesting but first let me show you my inspiration and also the super hard way of doing it.
The Hard way:
I found the hard way while I was perusing an open Fmod session from the game Celeste. The game's team at Matt Makes Games released their entire Fmod session a while ago after completing their Indie game success and I only found out about it recently. Since then I've been referring to how they actually use Fmod in their game and after looking at their dialogue section I was blown away let me show you what I mean and I'll explain how it works... kinda... it's tricky.
Here's how the team explains the process in the Fmod session...
"Basically, a given character's dialogue event will play/loop for the entire duration of a conversation for which that character is present. The portrait shown next to each line of dialogue in-game drives the "dialogue_portrait" parameter in FMOD, which then throws the event's playhead to the correct emotional state on the timeline. Once the playhead arrives at a given emotion, we've got transitional "hubs" in place that do a pretty decent job of semi-randomly cycling through conversational syllables for each emotion. Once the text draw finishes for that line of dialogue, the "dialogue_end" parameter is thrown to 1, and the playhead returns to an idling standby state." (Power Up Audio, 2018)
This is a great example of dynamic simlish dialogue and would love to make something similar in a future project. However as I'm sure you can tell it is a little over scoped for my current project so that brings me to my current compromise.
The Right way!:
The solution I've come up with is a combination of the above two, something dynamic and simple. I plan to record 3-4 different vocalisations that would fit in a sentence and use a multi instrument to choose between different samples and make completely unique sentences each time a character has to deliver a line. This plan will require some finessing and tweaking but I believe I can get it to work properly and make my dialogue quite unique. Below is a rough draft of how it will work.
As you can see it works but is still pretty rough. It's success will depend on the variety of responses I record and how well they are edited to make sure they flow properly together. I look forward to showing you how well my idea works in the project.
Dynamic scoring for dummies!
So another part of this game that I've been wanting to try for a long time is making a dynamic score. Basically I was hugely inspired by two games that used this extremely well Legend of Zelda: Skyword Sword and a game called Moonlighter. Below is a clip from the game Moonlighter to show you what I'm trying to achieve. A dynamic score that changes between different themes seamlessly never breaking or fading out but ever continuing and flowing...
As you can see and hear as you move around the town the music will change to match the shop you are near. This blew me away when I played this game and is honestly so inspiring to me and I wish to replicate this effect in Castle Lovers. Basically my plan at this stage is to create a main score and change the instrumentation and delivery per screen in the game. So far I have made some progress with said theme but what I was most confused by was how to get them working together in Fmod.
So here's what I came up with.
After watching a few tutorials and meeting with someone who's worked on this kind of thing before (which I'll cover in another blog) I managed to get something working. Below is my dynamic music fader which works kind of simply (wasn't simple to work out that's for sure). As one track is turned on (value set to 1) all other tracks are muted and only the enabled track will play. When the player changes screen in game the value will change from 0 (off) to 1 (on) and the track that was currently on will be disabled (set to 0). When this happens the value will transition slowly from 0-1 or 1-0 which will follow that gain reduction/rise on the automation. This allows the last track to fade out and the new track to fade in and keep time within the song never missing a beat. This is due to the seek speed which is the speed at which values change up or down in Fmod as pictured below.
So as the value in game gets changed to 1 or 0 the value in Fmod will slowly ascend or descend through the values between 0 and 1 allowing the tracks to actually fade with their automation rather than turn on of off like binary values. I'm really proud with the progress I've made so far and I look forward to showing it working within the game itself because I believe it will add a lot to the game's feel and atmosphere.
This looks Eventful!
After talking about the dialogue and music the events almost seem self explanatory. In the game the player will random scenarios thrown at them as a ruler would when running their kingdom. Who knows whats around the corner, maybe your town has developed a new plague or a hoard of pillaging raiders has come to torch your buns. Each of these events could be a stationary card or even told to you then values would change in the game but how boring would that game be!? So we decided that each event that could happen in the game has a audio event that plays with the news. Below is a list of potential ideas for events and their corresponding audio idea which honestly I'm excited to make because the list looks like a lot of fun.
As a sound designer this kind of thing is my bread and butter and I want to have a few different variations across the more common events as well so the player doesn't get too bored hearing the same thing over and over. So far I've had one foley session with Ryan in which we've recorded a lot of the audio for some of these events already. I will go into more detail after I actually get a chance to edit these assets but here are some of our processes and fun that we've had so far.
Once these all get edited I plan to implement them into Fmod as 2D events that will be attached to the corresponding events in the game. It's a pretty self explanatory process but the real challenge will be in the editing and design of these events which I'll cover in another blog.
So that's a brief overview of my newest project, it's shaping up to be a great mixture of lessons, pain and fun as well. I hope you all learn something along with me, thanks for reading.
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