Cormac's Log

My main role in this project was audio. I made a song in BandLab to play in the background, as well as using the Footsteppr tool on Bfxr to make walking sounds and Bfxr itself to make other sound effects. For the song, I tried to give it a noir feel by using violins and a tenor saxophone. I will admit that I have no musical training, this piece is not a professionally made song as I have no real idea what I am doing. I just made something that I thought sounded nice and was suitably eerie to fit with the game’s premise. The footsteps I also wanted to make a little unnerving. There isn’t anything super special about them, but the sound is realistic enough to make it feel off-putting, especially when there is a break in the music and the only sound is your feet. The walking is implemented in a weird way, but it does work how it should, so I think the weirdness is excusable. 

A big factor in improving the game was the small playtest we made near the beginning of the project. While it was nothing special, just being a room At first, there was no real visual difference between the two rooms besides the locations of the movable boxes and a door being open in one room. This caused confusion among players who didn’t really seem to realise that the rooms were different nonmovable boxes in the same room, and the fact that the goal wasn’t immediately obvious. Some of this is down to a lack of context. Given the story and premise, I feel that players would be able to figure out what was going on and what they had to do. However, these issues do need addressing. For the playtest, it was relatively simple to change the colour of the important boxes, adding differently coloured lighting to help show the difference between the rooms and adding a light to show the location of a key item that is unreachable from the ground. 

However, we did need to take these issues into consideration when making the actual game. Some were simply a product of the early build of the game having less complete assets, so in the finished version the distinction between movable and immovable objects are clearer. The way we fixed the issue of the two differing perspectives was to make the detectives view coloured, while the kidnapped person’s view is black-and-white since it takes place in the past. Another issue fixed by virtue of the game being more complete is that goals are clearer. In the playtest, the “key” couldn’t be interacted with, so it wasn’t super clear if it was important. Just by virtue of being interactable, that issue is negated.