BEHIND THE SCENES
Design, UI/UX, Art, Data Management, Production, Publishing.
Design, UI/UX, Art, Data Management, Production, Publishing.
Pix started as a lo-res game-jam that people seemed to like, and I was interested in building it out further, while investigating and comparing the process of hand-crafted levels, procedurally generated portions, abstract areas and narrative concepts.
Because the gameplay tolerances in a platformer can be very sensitive, I started by scoping out and defining limitations that made sense, then logged that data. Continuing in the open-minded spirit of the game-jam, I then built the levels in Google Sheets by "painting cells with 1's where platforms should go". This allowed me to visualize the level by converting that data to a kind of heat map, that let me know at a glance if any areas might be too tight or present other common problems.
I then parsed the spreadsheet data through a toolset that converted it into game data which was immediately playable. By repeating the process of studying the grid-based construction in the abstract, then visualizing the tolerances on the heat map, and moments later playing those levels to see how they felt, it helped me to develop an intuition in the next level's design.
As a safeguard against getting stuck in a methodology and developing "blinders", I would randomly corrupt the level data and then see what it did to the gameplay. This led to an interesting observation: I had anticipated that correcting the corrupt data would simply be an exercise in "level repair", but it turned out as often as not that the corruption led to new ideas. The levels were not necessarily "broken", but rather sometimes they were just "new" which led to innovations in further level designs.
I also wanted to write a chiptune style soundtrack that felt like a good match for the pixel art. Again, in the spirit of the original game-jam, I wanted to see if I could do this using all free software. I found some tools that produced an "8-bit" sound, and was able to get a result that I liked.
I worked out the basic idea of the bass line, and a little bit of the melody on this bass guitar. From that pattern of musical notes, I reverse-engineered what scale I must have been using: Aeolian (natural minor) in the key of E.
To input the MIDI notes into GarageBand, I used this small keyboard. I don't normally play piano, so I made a paper template and taped it onto the keyboard. I labelled the notes and scribbled on them with a highlighter, so I could visualize the scale. I then used the keyboard to input the notes for the bass and melody, and then experiment with arpeggios and other flourishes.
More often than not while inputting the notes, I just hammer on one note that represents the rhythm, timing and pressure. Then I go back to the piano roll in GarageBand, quantize those notes, and drag them around to their proper pitches.
Mixing: A true "chiptune" track might only have 4 channels, but I was going for feel, not technical authenticity.
This one has 19 tracks, which break down like this:
* 4 lead / melody tracks
* 4 accompany / fill tracks
* 2 grow / volume swell tracks
* 2 bass tracks
* 7 drum tracks
This one has 19 tracks, which break down like this:
* 4 lead / melody tracks
* 4 accompany / fill tracks
* 2 grow / volume swell tracks
* 2 bass tracks
* 7 drum tracks
In the case of some like the 2 bass tracks, they are all identical notes, but each has slightly different effects like chorus or other flavors, and opposite stereo panning to help create a wider overall sound landscape. Same kinds of reasons for the drums: 1 center panned track for the snare, with equalizer pushing treble. 2 identical tracks for hi-hats, with slightly off-center stereo panning. 2 bass/kick drum tracks with identical notes, with equalizer pushing low-end, and wider stereo panning.
Mastering: this final part of the soundtrack was done in Audacity. The basic objective was to get a loud, full sound (and not over-compressed) for what turned out to be multiple pieces of music, with waveforms similar to each other so they sound balanced together.