The Sound of Silence

After finally deciding on the direction I wanted my game to take I decided to jump in and get my placeholder assets underway. When I divided up my time between 3D modelling and Audio editing I thought as I had very little experience in 3D modelling that I would need to give it the most of my time. Boy was I wrong, although the models did take some time, once I had decided to make them musical notes the recurring themes in the shapes of those notes made it easy to create them all.

It was when it came to the audio editing that I realised how much work I really hadn’t planned for. When researching Kandinsky I found that his most famous pieces were all made while listening to Richard Wagner’s musical and especially Ride of the Valkyries, I decided I wanted to use this in my game and after conferring with Ben Drury one of my classmates we came up with a great new way of implementing it. I planned to break up the orchestral piece into separate instruments and when you destroy a certain musical note (missile) it would add one of the other instruments into the piece for the length of the explosion. I really loved the idea and wanted to go ahead with it, I was really struggling with coming up with a way of completing the idea and thankfully my lecturer Steve had the idea of breaking up a MIDI file. I went home from class that day and used MIDI software to separate the instruments but realised there was no way of exporting them separately. I used OBS to record MP4 files of each instrument while all the others were muted and then used online conversion software to turn them into the preferred OGG file format. The amount of time it took to upload each file and convert it absolutely blew my mind; I finally finished after nearing 10 hours of converting. Thankfully while they were converting I was working on the completed files in Audacity top and tailing the files and using Noise Reduction and Equalisation effects.

Once all that was complete I was able to really pull my game together and at its current state its looking more and more like the source material art which I’m extremely happy about. After a massive week in my personal life it was really great to see some actual positive progress in the game, this weekend I am finalising the game and hopefully finally settling upon a title, I will keep you posted with a link to my Itch.io account when the game is up!