Tag: Development

In Need of Restrictions

The word “paradise” is derived from the Avestan word for “enclosure.”

This fun fact enters my mind every so often on a project.  With modern technology, just about anything is possible, and I don’t usually notice at first the cost of all of this possibility.

Today’s case was writing music for Escape Goat.  I used Impulse Tracker to compose the score for Soulcaster I and II, and since then I’ve moved into Renoise.  It has higher sound quality, runs in Windows, and can load most VST instruments and effects–something I haven’t had access to until now.  And I’m blown away, you MIDI sequencing folks have had it made for years–dozens, hundreds of free virtual instruments and effects.  Many of them sound as good or better than hardware I paid dearly for ten years ago.   Can you believe this is a free instrument?  Listen to that quality.

I went on a spree grabbing as many free 80’s style synths and effects that I could find.  I came away with about 20 instruments, at least 10 of which were of excellent quality.  I could score the whole game with just one of these.  The GTG-FM, linked in the above video, is just as capable as a Yamaha DX7, an instrument that went for $2000 new back in the 80’s.  And this is just one instrument.  I have in my virtual arsenal a synth collection that would have cost a fortune back then.  Cause for celebration!

The only problem is, I can (and did) spend a whole night just auditioning the built-in sounds on these guys.  They can do such a variety of sounds.  Though I started working on a song, it ended up as a love-fest of synth presets.  Not much work got done on the actual composition itself.  The problem?  Too many great sounds.  The solution?  Force a limitation of them.

It took some time, but I whittled it down to a collection of about 20 instruments and samples I’m going to use as the signature sounds for Escape Goat.  I’m only using 3 of the virtual synths.  This way I’ll spend less time finding the ultimate bass sound and more time writing the song.

The open desert is scary.  Build an enclosure.

Finding the Hook for Escape Goat

One of the great things about living and working in the Emeryville area is the local game development scene. Case in point: this afternoon, at the local coffee shop I ran into none other than the Chris Hecker, developer of Spy Party. We had spoken before briefly after a talk he gave at UC Berkeley, but this was the first chance I got to really chat with him.

Chris is the nicest guy ever, and was gracious enough to give me an hour out of his work day to check out Escape Goat and give me some feedback on it.  Laptop only, and I had left my 360 controller at home.  Chris happened to have one on him. Preparedness.

I got some great feedback on “initial impression” details such as the tutorial and mouse summon controls.  The real value was in Chris’s perspective as an uber indie artist (he might even say perfectionist?) which is a new role among my playtesting group. (To contrast, an actual quote from my friend Ryan: “You’re giving them too much for $3. Get this thing out the door.”)

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Soulcaster I Behind the Scenes Part 2: The Design Doc

By popular demand, I’m going to continue this series and dig up some of the relics of the Soulcaster design process.  In part 1 I talked about lightweight design and posted shots of a few levels that ended up on the scrap heap.  Well for today I’ve found a special treat: the original design document of Soulcaster 1.

I haven’t edited anything besides coloring the text.  Stuff in red is stuff that never made it into the final design.  Italics are annotations I’m writing today.

Tower Defense Adventure

like tarchon, but more focused on individual rooms with finite enemies and handling “waves” perhaps [Tarchon was an earlier concept featuring one-player party-based dungeon exploration]

take your party into a dungeon room and you start to get attacked. you need to fight your way from room to room within a floor, surviving waves of mobs. when one aggros, all others in a small radius aggro, so they start filing in for the attack.  [I never tested this behavior, and it would be cool to have leader and following types of enemies in the future]

there are choke points like in any tower defense so you are facing waves of guys.

basically you set up your defenses by placing party members at key locations. you have ranged units who can fire at enemies, or over walls. aoe based attacks and that sort of thing. there are melee units, some of them can set up barricades. other disables such as stuns are also available. [There were no barricades or stuns. Status effects is something I hope to introduce in SC3, though it will be time consuming to balance.]

when you place a party member, he stays in one spot and executes a simple script. usually it will mean just firing at any enemy in range. it can also mean moving within a small radius to melee attack enemies that come that way. [The random skeleton friends in SC2 were an experiment with melee allies.  I could experiment with it a bit more, but for the first game it took away from the unit placement strategy.]

Continue reading Soulcaster I Behind the Scenes Part 2: The Design Doc