Alongside the influences from Nintendo games and Last of Us that I’ve already referenced, I am thinking about what game design springs to mind in response to ‘Super Delivery Game’ and will work out if there are any aspects I can bring into this project. As a one-button click adventure is even more simplistic than these old SNES games, and might be an example of a kind of nostalgia type trend within games. Flappy Bird’s 8-Bit look springs to mind games such as Frogger, and Paperboy. But also Super Mario with its suspicious use of green tubing.
Paperboy 2 is I feel nearing the kind of balance we will hope to achieve. Minimal punchy sound effects with playful music. Background ambience wasn’t really utilised at this point in gaming and as a group we are quite keen on bringing in background ambience alongside a soundtrack just to give a slight change of atmosphere to each level and also set it apart from retro games. As you can tell with Frogger at the top, the lack of any background sound is quite jarring and whilst music would help alleviate that it could also get repetitive quicker than it would with other background elements.
Monika has chosen UI Design and Menu Music, whilst Szymon is working on Background Music and Sound for Level 1-2. I will work on the action sounds within the game collaborating with Monika’s UI Design choices and I will work on Background Ambience alongside Szymon. We have identified a list of influences, including Animal Crossing, Hill Climb Racing, Frogger, Paperboy 2 and Flappy Bird. Monika hopes to create Gameboy-esque tones to the UI Design and Menu Music, alongside animal crossing and Szymon is looking to create music similar to that in Hill Climb Racing. I want my sound affects to have a similar punch to early sound design like heard in Paperboy 2 but I am drawing from foley created ambience alike to a more modern influence like Animal Crossing for my ambient sound.
We also wanted to give the option of providing engine sounds and level ambience to the MA students as we immediately felt that with the limited sound effects requested it might create quite a repetitive feel to the game. This also made it easier to delegate tasks between us with me primarily on engine sounds where I would work towards creating an idle engine running, alongside engine revs to act as an ‘action button’ sound.
We booked the Foley room at University to work together on capturing some of these sounds.
