Andrew Weisberg - Week 7 Devlog

Soundtrack Composition (~1-2 Hours):

There was a pivot in the direction of our soundtrack; spur of the moment, bear with me as I try to excuse how little time I've spent composing and more time listening to music references.

Grayson wants the music for Spit it Out to fit a 'Nintendo' sound profile (he specifically refers to Menu Music); he has given me references to listen to and gather some thoughts.  I think it's good that we have a clear idea on what we want our sound to emulate, and there are some things to keep in mind as we go forward:

To be clear, Nintendo hires excellent composers.  That said, me and Grayson both agree that we need a unique approach to the tracks that we're gonna compose, and we're more or less going in to pick and choose the stuff that we think works best with our themes, and to try and incorporate those elements into our own music as best we can.

I do wish I had more to go off of than Menu Music; it sounds nice, but it's a passive listening experience.  Nintendo music is so much more than just what you hear in the system settings menu.  I want to make the listening experience for the player as active as possible.

I also think it best that we have our environment designs in working order before I can move past drafting music and getting into the thick of composing dedicated tracks.  Right now, I do not have environment designs to look at and get a feel for how the music should sound in certain levels.  I'll get in touch with Elisa by Thursday/Friday-ish to cover our bases and see what we're working with in terms of environments.

The long and short of it all is that I need to compose new music.  Are we back to square one?  Yes, but also no.  I've worked on a very short draft piece for Lung Hanger called Hyperventilation, and I've gotten positive reception thus far from the rest of the team.  We think it fits the profile best for how the music should sound in Spit it Out, so I'll keep working on this and come up with more drafts for the rest of our levels going forward.

Sound Design (~2 Hours):

After doing some research into sound effects libraries and crying a little at how much some sound libraries can be had for, I've come down to two possible choices of sound libraries that we can make use of: SoundQ, and FMOD.io.

DMP has been kind enough to give me access to their SoundQ library, and it seems like the most feasible option for finding sound effects that fit a cartoon/nintendo-esque profile for Spit it Out at present since we have it available to us and the sounds are royalty/copyright-free.  FMOD.io is also a contender, but I think implementing it would also require us to use FMOD in Spit it Out, and I'd rather not give Sarah more work than she already has with coding the game.  In addition, we'd also be paying for sound effects individually, and that has the potential to add up in the long term.