Last Minute Train - focus on audio

My good friend Nevis and I just released our game "Last Minute Train", made for miniBeansjam 7.

Here's how it went down from my perspective:
Unlike in most recent jams I've been contributing to, I mostly just took care of audio this time. In fact, I hadn't even originally planned to take part in this jam but then Nevis pitched their ideas to me and I liked them so much that I had to help in some way!

In this game you play as River (unrelated to River, the Glitcheon-Programmer) who is trying to find their crush Max to convince them to stay and tell them their feelings. The problem is that Max is departing on a train in just one minute and River forgot which platform their train is on.

An exciting race against the clock begins...

Music

I took the entire first day (and a good chunk of the night!) to make music. It was kind of nice actually to fully focus on audio in a game jam. Haven't done that since I worked on OVERCHARGE with Jonas Tyroller. I still wanted go all in and make it as good as possible so I went ahead and specifically designed quite a few new electronic virtual instruments for this game. Actually, this might have taken me more time than composing the music - I love the way it sounds though! Since the jam's theme was "Not enough time" and you're constantly unter time pressure while playing, there are many elements that remind you of the time limit in the music such as ticking clocks and rhythmic beeps.

Composition

That is not to say there aren't also some interesting things about the composition though! For example, we decided to give Max their own theme-melody that keeps repeating throughout the soundtrack in various ways. You can see it highlighted below in the piano roll of the main gameplay song "Catch the Train!".

Lots of notes going on there!

Implementation and timing

Another factor that was especially interesting about the gameplay music this time is that I decided not to make it a loop since the game has a fixed time of one minute - this meant I could develop the song and raise its intensity and urgency as the game progresses and perfectly match the ending with the game over screen if you don't make it in time. This way, the play experience is sort of choreographed through music which is something I'd definitely like to do again in future projects. It just feels so much more intense to play this with the music than without!

Listen:

You can hear the main song in its full glory right here or on my Soundcloud page:

Sound design

Being done with the music, I could fully concentrate on Sound Design and testing / giving feedback to Nevis throughout day 2.

As always, there were lots of audacity projects here!

I actually made most sounds digitally with the same instruments that I used for making the music this time. For example, Max' text-voice sounds are using the same instrument as Max's theme tune does. That way, I could create a unique and consistent audio-style for this game.

In addition to that, I found that I still had some of my own field recordings from various train stations in my library so I used those to create train-related sounds such as a train departing in the end if you lose.

Twice in the game, an announcement can be heard to give the player some clues about which platform Max might be on. For the announcement-voice, I simply used good old Google-translate, pitched it down and added reverb. I bet no one actually notices! :D

As it's supposed to be a German train station, I set the Google-voice to German and let it produce the finest Denglish for extra authenticity!

lol. (yes, the äs are necessary)

Testing

One more interesting thing for me this time was that I could spend lots of time just testing the game! This meant Nevis made a lot more builds but also that I could provide quite a lot of feedback that hopefully helped them to make the game as good as they possibly could within the extremely short time of 2 days.

It also meant that I could spend some extra time just making the itch page look ok and design a logo based on the font Nevis used. I hope it looks alright to you! :)

Overall, I think this was a very enjoyable experience and I'd like to just focus on a few things again. Not having to open yet another Unity-project was certainly nice for a change. 

My closing thoughts go out to Nevis: You rock! It's impressive how much you got done alone so quickly. I just helped a bit and you're the star of this show! Let's definitely do this again some time :)