Hello again from the depths of the urban jungle (not really we live in a medium-sized town)!

Last week we got a bit stuck up on the question of how to change assets and how to optimize everything around it and we neglected the game loop itself so this week we all put our brainpower together to come up with fun stuff. Or at least we think it is fun.

Art

Art wise our artists have been working on the Art bible. They came up with some great concepts that we think will enhance the experience even more. They also looked into the level design and possible variations of the level in size or obstacle placement so we can have an idea on how it will look. We do expect that after we implement the tasks some paths will change and the level will be rearranged but that is all fine because we are still prototyping!

Code

Our programmers worked hard to implement most of the ideas in Unreal Engine. We brainstormed some fun mini-games ideas and after that we focused on how we will arrange the scene so that everything fits. We decided to do this so early in development because setting up the camera at the end will usually result in issues that we want to avoid (perspective issues, scaling problems, stuff being obstructed...)

All of our mini-games are implemented and even the AI for the project manager is ready and now needs some slight tweaking.

Sound

In the audio department, most of the time was spent brainstorming the game loop and coming up with ideas since that was top priority. Besides some administrative tasks I spent most of my time on researching how I can implement the music.  I am also happy that I managed to add around 80GB of new sounds to my sound bank so now I have new ammunition. I've also looked over the tasks and tried to envision the game a bit more and came up with most of the sounds that will be in the game, of course not everything but the list is already decently sized for our small scope game considering each sound will have variations.
But let's talk about music more in-depth.

Music

in this specific game, is very necessary. As for every party game, a catchy earworm is a must. Music will be what ties everything together, the sound effects should work together yet again be distinguishable from the music. If I do not have enough time, I will either use the Universal Music Catalogue to source music or contact an external composer, but I would really want to avoid that. Music will be dynamic, with stems playing separately and not at the same time, changed by multiple factors but mostly time left. 

Researching some games which I really think have inspired me with their dynamic music I have come up with some ideas about dynamic music implementation.

One game will always last 5 minutes, by making a 5-minute track and splitting it into stems that play at different times based on parameters we can make a truly unique experience.

 The most obvious one being the Timer influencing music.  At first glance I thought that I don't need to use the timer to make the track faster by bpm or play rate, I could easily do this in my DAW. So, the initial idea of just making the song faster based on time might or might not be on board. I think it would be much nicer if not only the bpm but the arrangement itself made it feel hastier as time progresses. In a bigger scale project, I would have made a specific song loop for every stage (Levels in between choices) so that if the timer would get tweaked one wouldn’t have to rewrite an entire song.

 Other things that come to mind is gameplay elements that affect the music. I have done this before in a game in which when the player gets close to a ghost it fades into an extra layer of violins. I could use the same principle when players get closer to the project manager to indicate danger. I also thought that while players do a task, I could add another layer of music on the background to indicate the fact that they are working.

 Of course, the entire concept of changing styles and mood when a significant choice happens is also considered, depending on which styles we would choose to have after the major choices in between sprint and polish I would love to add musical elements to really reinforce that decision. These things will either be done in DAW or in meta-sounds depending on what is required to convey the feeling the best.