Sound Design
Sound Design (Major):
My main role for our game will be for the sound design. My main goal for the sound design is to portray the feelings of our main character as best as possible. My choice in instruments will be a big part of carrying this out. I'm going to use more strings and orchestral instruments to do this with piano and some synths to get deeper tones. I will also be creating the foley sounds for the game as well. There will be Diegetic sounds for the anomalies that will take place in the game as well as the environment. The Non-Diegetic sounds will be background music to set the tone e.g - deeper tones to indicate more tense moments.
Environment Design / Texturing
Environment Design / Texturing:
With Alex and Jay doing the modelling and level design respectively, I'll be taking the two and putting them together. While looking into environmental design I started looking for the oldest theatre in Ireland (being the Abbey Theatre in Dublin) and techniques for the lighting. Older theatres typically used spot lights and the lights would be singular lights versus the light strips you can get for spotlights now. There also is a tradition of a "ghost light" in theatre where there would be a stand alone bulb left on the stage to either keep ghosts lit or to scare them away dependent on the superstition. This is one piece of the environment I definitely want to include in the game especially since, with the sanity meter it can come in handy for events. I will be looking into as many references as I can to get the best look and feel for our old theatre environment.
For the texturing I'll be doing the UV Maps as well and possibly need to take on Retopology, but since we're going with Box modelling we shouldn't need to have Retopology. I'm going to use Blender for the UV Maps which I'll be able to import the models Alex makes and unwrap them here and export the UV Maps for Procreate or Photoshop.
Monochrome Trailer
Anticipated Challenges
I think most of my technical challenges will be with Blender because sometimes it starts not working for reasons I don't know when I'm working with it. Some other challenges might be while using Reaper trying to source the right sounding instruments or getting the foley sounds to sound as authentic as possible.
While working with GarageBand and creating a custom pack of instruments there has been some slight teething pains while getting used to it. After creating the bare bones of the pack I then learned that there was a way to edit the clips individually and it's not just having to re-record them.
Relativism
For being able to portray the theme of our game using the emotions/ feelings of our main character will need to be done using the sound design and it's tonality. This is where the proper use of tonality and instrumentation will come into great effect. I want to be able to show these emotions and tones through the backing track (or lack of). I started messing around in Garage Band to try and get a sense of making a theme for the game. I started off with a tempo of 118 and A minor but ended up slowing the tempo down and changing the key to G Major to get more of the sound that I wanted with the deeper drones in the back and the highlight of the piano. I think the strums of the guitar wouldn't work for within the game but for the menu theme I don't mind. (Both versions attached within Sound Design page)
General Research
For research I've been listening to a lot of different games' soundtracks that I think portray the tone/ theme of the game really well and have a similar tones to our game. A big game in my head is The Last of Us Part II because of how Naughty Dog make you feel so involved with their characters and their story. TLOU (The Last of Us) also has a predominantly acoustic soundtrack with the guitars and banjos as well as using silence or low drones to stress tense moments. Some other soundtracks I've been listening to are Little Nightmares II, Bioshock and the Silent Hill games. Bioshock and Silent Hill have some tracks that are along the lines of what I'd like to achieve like "Witchcraft" from Silent Hill but those games also have more involved tracks with more instruments and I'd like to have a minimal vibe for the music like in TLOU and Little Nightmares. Bioshock has more rag time involvement in its soundtrack to give the tone of the era it's world is bases in.
I also looked at the making of The Last of Us Part II but it didn't talk much about the soundtrack but was good to hear about their take on how they portray their story through level design etc.. I'd like to properly delve into how different tonalities, keys and instrumentation can effect the outcome of soundtracks.
The Last of Us Part II (Making Of)
The Last of Us Part II (Soundtrack)
Environment Research:
I have done some basic research for the environment itself like looking into different theatre layouts, the oldest theatre in Ireland and some lighting techniques.
The oldest theatre I could find was opened in 1904 being the Abbey Theatre in Dublin https://www.abbeytheatre.ie/about/history/. I enjoyed looking through their website and did fine that they have a backstage tour available for booking but looking into the trailer they have for it, it seems to be more based off of the props and the current show versus the theatre itself. I also looked into different theatre layouts and architecture using this https://www.archdaily.com/799379/how-to-design-theater-seating-shown-through-21-detailed-example-layouts, the layout we will be using is the Wide Fan with a projector down the middle and the seats fanned out facing the stage/ screen.
For lighting I found this paper https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229139093_Intelligent_Lighting_for_Game_Environments but will be looking into theatre specific lighting as well, ( how the spotlights are used and also how some lighting ran off of gas and those different effects).