Building a Platformer in 11 days

For 11 days, starting from Tuesday on May 10th to saturday night on May 21st, we built a whole new game called Spark. A combat platformer where you would would play as the last spark of hope (symbolized as a female knight armed with a sword and a torch) who must defeat shadowy monsters who symbolize deppresion, anxiety and paranoia in a nightmarish world.

For this new project, I was tasked with three types of assignments: making prototype assets, create/collect/edit/implement sound effects and music, and editing a Trailer video of the game.

I made a health pick-up, which ended up in the main game.

I made a animated health-bar. This was only used briefly in the prototype version.

I made a drawing of Big Ben. This art-asset was scrapped.

I made a destructable vase. This was scrapped.

And lastly, a concept art of a potential monster sprite. This was scrapped because a member in the team already made two different monster sprites and his art style was superior to mine.

My main role in Spark was to create and collect sound effects, making me the team's Sound Designer. For the short time we builded Spark (11 days), I made a total of 33 tracks by using a web sound software called Bfxr. where you can create 16-bit sounds from 9 different waveforms and edit 30 individual filters. You can also mix different tracks into a single multilayered sound. I also used a audio editor called Audacity for further tweaking, since the editor in Bfxr. is very limited. I implemented the sound effects and music to our build on Unity, by adding tracks to the animations of the main character and the monsters. 

However, on wednesday on May 18th, we had our beta presentation of our newly built project. The new game was approved, citing a slight improvement compared to our previous project (Synapse), but they cited multiple problems. One of these was the 16-bit sound effects, which they regarded as improper comparted to the game's art style.  

So I was tasked to search for traditional sounds effects. I burrowed a external harddrive containing the school's sound library. I browsed trough the hundreds of tracks and found a total of 55 tracks. I edited some of these on Audacity to make them sound better, and implemented the new sounds to each animation on our Unity build. These where then edited by one of our programmers so that these wouldn't sound too loud in the main game.  

In order to add some kind of narrative in the game, one in my team came up with the idea to record short lines of dialogue that would be played on different locations in the game. But since we had precious little time to tweak the game before GGC, we came up with the quick solotion that I would make a 20 minute ambient music track that would replay three kinds of ambient music tracks and add 12 dialogue tracks with a 1.5 minute interval. 

And finally, I edited the trailer for Spark.

One teammate created a story board for the trailer which I used as a guideline.

I used Sony Vegas Pro 12 with the art assets from the game, along with the 16-bit sound effects that I've made. The music was composed by Mattia Cupelli. It took me two days to edit it, and I followed the story board only partially since not all the animations was ready in time when I edited the trailer. However, the team liked my trailer and we could present it to the teachers and the GGC jury-members on May 21, the first day at the GGC.

During the same day, we put up our game in the games exhibition.