Crits
In the build up to the Crits, there was a moment of radio silence (understandably) from the MA students as they were wrapped up with their hand in. So Szymon created a video to show our progress with the class.
The response was positive mostly, main feedback indicated that the engine rev sound was repetitive. With Harry I believe saying it was quite easy to input multiple sounds to one action with a randomiser. This is a good suggestion that we will implement into the next build. We hadn’t managed to speak to the game design group about it yet so had just gone with one of the engine revs I had recorded. However I have recorded 7 at varying dynamics so that will be easy to edit in. Some were slightly too long but I have a feeling they can be faded before the next event in engine.
We personally decided on a little more variation to the background sound, which Szymon will edit for the next version.
MA Student Feedback
We received a video of the game running in Unity from the MA design students, they didn’t use all of our sounds how we had initially intended, but were very positive about our contributions and very happy with their hand in. They used one of our idle engine sounds as the background sound for Level 2 which was quite jarring to us, but in their minds it made sense because there was a mining cart on tracks later in the level and the sound had a train-like quality. In their defence, my laptop broke unexpectedly and took two weeks to fix after I had just got back from covid absence, so I think it was more out of necessity as we hadn’t managed to get a background sound for level 2 to them in time. Level 3 was a last minute addition which we didn’t know about until a few days before.
They chose to use a sound from Monika’s menu as the action sound over the engine rev sound. I think in both demos, there is a point at around 35 seconds where the same sound quickly happens about 5 times within two seconds with no variety which was a bit jarring to us. So on our hand in we will see if that can be improved with the randomised engine revs and the additional background sound missing. I also noticed that the menu uses the same sound for each click, whether you are pressing start or navigating your choice of level. The crash I think could be a bit more beefy and also I think the ambience shouldn’t reset after crashes. As the fail sound is musical, it makes sense to cut the music and start again as they would clash but the sound effects starting again I think is slightly unnecessary.