Lost crypt - A practice project

I am better at expressing my thoughts through music so forgive me if the following isn't clear....i'm working on it.

I hope you enjoy the read & the look through my process of creating this project.

The Music

The beginning stages were fleshed out through spot listing elements of the gameplay and the style of the art & environment.

The key elements in terms of music were broken down into 3 sections.

1: Game start/ day theme.

The day theme was simple in its creation and the thought process behind it was essentially "How do i create a calming tone and theme?"

so i started as i always do, improv.

Improving on the piano has and will always be a key starting point for me as it helps bring out my own feelings and express my sub-conscious feeling towards this section.

After improving for awhile i felt i had a good starting point and i began to add some textural & subtle "vocal" synth pads that really helped bring this theme to a point i liked.

3: Night theme

The night theme was somewhat easier to "score" as essentially it's a variation of the day theme in style but toned down to bring that relaxing feeling through the strings and the cascading piano melody.

the subtle textures i added of the distant "howls" i felt was a good touch which really helped glue the piece together.

2: The transition

After capturing some gameplay footage i began to score the transition that transforms the environment from day to night through a small sequence.

The key elements were simple enough to score once you break them down such as the sceptre passing to the player was a simple hi toned "woosh" sound effect mixed with a choir swell & a quick textural pad crescendo to emphasize the motion and feeling of gaining magical power.

The expansion of the particles into the air was a mix of again a "sparkling" sound effect to enhance the expansion of particles (which was also reversed and placed on the tail end of the transition) and a simple piano chord shift to end the cue.

FMOD PARAMETERS

The music themes were placed in an FMOD audio event with a set global parameter to ultimately switch between the day theme through the transition theme and finally end on the night theme.

When the player enters a trigger (shown in the left image) with an FMOD event emitter global parameter. The parameter will know to switch to night with which the night theme is placed in the FMOD session event.

For a more in depth description about this parameter method used or just FMOD parameters in general check out Marie Havemann on YouTube. She has some really great videos and insights into using FMOD parameters. I've linked a video below.

Marie Havemann - Branching and layering with transition

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfzshDQILr8&list=PLYJ9Gb9bkmc8UrJ_b2ArPJy63kpL75kHE&index=11&t=1188s

Music sting

After creating the themes and implementing them into the game i noticed the ghostly characters lurking in the background and thought it'd be a good idea to bring them out further into the world.

I decided to add a subtle distant howl or "Ghostly Winds" trigger point when the player passes this wolf looking ghost.

The process of triggering the music sting was simple(ish)

By placing an FMOD Studio event emitter on an empty object and setting that object as is trigger. I would simply set the parameters as seen above.

Play event = Trigger enter 2D. This is set as such because this project is in 2D space so when the player (Collison tag set to player) goes into the trigger point area the sound will be triggered.

For this project the trigger object was a simple empty object with no mesh renderer placed manually in the desired spot.

The thing to note for this particular project is the transition from day to night which i believe is done through essentially turning one layer off and another one on through scripting. So this requires me to place the empty object music sting trigger under the night FX parent folder (This parent is not visible/Active during the day theme) which avoids the music being triggered during the day theme.

The Sound Design

The implementation of the footsteps was probably the most difficult as it required some scripting in which i have no experience.

So this left me with a somewhat controversial solution....ChatGPT.

The sounds themselves were simple enough. Two variations of ambience (Day/Night), Two variations of footsteps (Grass/Stone). Subtle "dialogue" for the jumping animation like "Huh" and "ha"s. Fire SFX and abit of reverb programming.

As with the music themes

The ambience sound was set-up with a similar parameter method that switches from day to night when a player enters a trigger point. Note that the night ambience layer has a 6 second start delay.

I set it up this way because of how the ambience was triggered to change at the same time as the start of the transition animation was to begin, SO in a janky quick fix i decided to just delay the start by 6 seconds so that i fades in just after the transition animation ended and in this context it works fine because the ambience won't change again.

The reverb zone was made through the use of snapshots in FMOD

When implementing the footsteps sounds into unity from FMOD i had to find a way of doing it through scripting which led me to utilise A.I to write the scripts. After alot of trial and error...and shouting at artificial "intelligence" i managed to get it working. Again the process of having the SFX change dependant on the terrain i set-up a basic parameter in FMOD but with a multi instrument for each type (Grass & Stone) with several variations on the footsteps with some additional randomisation of pitch.

FOOTSTEPS

Using a snapshot in FMOD to create the reverb zone made the process simple and easy to manage.

A Great video that goes into detail about FMOD Snapshots is linked below.

How To Use Fmod - Reverb Snapshots

SEGIO RONCHET

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cedIxEtuFHI

PARAMETER SET-UP

FMOD SNAPSHOT EXAMPLE

The implementation was simple enough for the fire as they were your basic FMOD event emitters placed onto the fire prefabs with basic settings such as Play event = object start, Stop event = object destroy.

The fire elements have 3D attenuation which was set-up in the FMOD session simply to allow further emersion for the player when the player gets close to the fire it gets louder which works fine a 2D context.

I'm surprised you made it this far....

Thank you for going through this blog post which at this point in time stands to be my first ever post and so I wanted to share something I enjoyed and share some work I'm proud of.

Be sure to subscribe to the newsletter below and yeah maybe you'll see more work based blog posts in the future ;)

- Deanx