Sound and music!

Hello again!

So this week I have been working on getting sound for our game. It is harder than I thought, because if I have too many sounds in the game it just sounds annoying and becomes frustrating to play. What I need to remember is what kind of game it is. Is it important to have sound for footsteps? Or hearing a scream when player gets hit? Things like that you need think about when you implementing sounds. I also have to think of the sound level, so that every sound has the right sound level. Maybe you want one sound to be heard more than another sound, or the reverse. Small changes like that. that is important to think about. Then there is the most important thing, and that is finding the right sound. I have to think what kind of game it is and what I want to convey. Now, I really like to have some humor in our game, I don’t want people to take the game serious. It is a game about cleaning children with sponges that are flying out of vacuum cleaner. It is cartoonish and a bit odd.

So most of the sounds I have been collecting are from freesound.org which is a really good website to find sounds for free. Some sounds that I need are hard to find, like the sound of the player getting smeared with dirt from the kids or hitting a kid with a sponge. Things I am going put in is to change volume and get some music for our game. I really like to have a 15 second loop that is catchy and makes you to keep playing. I will see if I can find one, if not, maybe I have to make it myself.  I think if you have a 15 second music loop it is hard to hear when it ends and it doesn’t change that much. I don’t want the music to be the driving force of the game. I might make it a bit longer, it may fit better. I will test different lengths to be sure.

I am also trying to put the UI in different places of the screen. Right now it is leaning on being in the bottom of the screen. And there is also some tweaking in how fast the parent circles (read more about it in the older posts) are moving and I also have put in a lose condition when the circle reaches the end of the parent bar.

Well goodnight and stay tuned

Anton Larsson-Auna

Almost done for the beta!

Well hello there!

It’s been a long week. This time I was going to work on the sound manager. But you know, other things come up and stole my time. Well I am finally done with the parent UI (read more about it in the earlier posts). Now the parent balls are moving and have different colors. I had some trouble getting them to move, but I got help from Fabian in our group and now it works fine. So now that everything that has to do with the Parent UI is connected. I thought I could start with sound manager, but no. I also have finished the changes that our teacher wanted us to in the GDD.

So the things that need to change or put in the GDD were mostly sketches or pictures. When I made the document the first time, we had almost nothing of that so I knew that was going to be something he would point out. So now I have been collecting as many pictures I can, so he won’t complain about that. He also thought that it was messy and I should look over the structure, some may be messy but, it sometimes hard to know where to put it. He complains about our enemies’ movement patterns and attacks, but I think we already have good system. We have tables and a brief explanation for what every enemy does and then we show a table like this.

ATTACKS				NOTES
Dirt attack				Starts attacking when they are in close range
MOVEMENT				NOTES
Walk				Slow
Idle
Death (dematerialize)
ATTRIBUTES
Health		Damage		Power Ups
20			10	None

I also am going present our beta tomorrow for our class. I have to do a power point, something they complained about before that we didn’t have, so now I have think of 3 things that have gone well since last time and why? Which is pretty easy, I have no problems finding that. Than I have say” 3 things that have taken a turn for the worse and why? Give examples on how you could have prevented these situations and what your solutions are.” Well it is already hard to criticize a group you work really well with. There is always something you can criticize, like how we haven’t followed the scrum that much a couple of weeks, which as lead to us falling behind in schedule.

It is going to be along night  to get the last things done for tomorrow.

Have a great night   – Anton Larsson-Auna.

Parent UI

So what’s been happening? Well for a while I have been struggling with the parent UI, I didn’t really know how get It working and a was a bit confused until I got help and now things looks to be done soon(read more about what the parent UI does in the two posts before this one). So now there have been changes so it is easier to choose what kid that is going to be cleaned before the parents come. Our code structure hasn’t been the best. A lot of things have just been sitting the same class which made it really hard to find code you needed. We had a meeting with our scrum master who showed us UML, basically you draw diagrams to see what classes you have and how they are connected, the code is more structure by doing it and becomes like a blue print for the game. That way classes don’t get tangled with each other, and you have clear picture where to put code and where to find it. I just which I knew about it and that it we used it earlier. Right now all parts of the parent UI have its own map linked to one class that keep track of when they should be used.

I don’t really know what to write about, because I have already talked so much about this in my other post. So I will talk about what I am going to do now. I will now focus on music and sound. We have nothing of it done. So I will create a soundmanager and musicmanager and then I will start finding sounds for everything that needs it. I will probably make a combination of making my own sounds and using sounds form freesound.org which have a lot of sounds for free.

We also had a pre-beta meeting today with our teacher. He told us the game should be a rough finished game. Our game will have a lot of thing implemented for the beta I don’t know if I can call it a finished game. What we are missing right now is animations, collisions for the map, sound, music, put in sprites for the UI, menus, upgrades and the game over and win conditions. Some of these things are almost finished so I hope we get most of things in for the beta.

kids on a bike.

Anton L-A