Inspired by metroidvania titles such as castlevania and the gothic sub-cutlure.

loops made in ableton, sound effects online

Nano drive is a retro space game that feels very nostalgic to play. We decided to go with a Sci-fi kind of feel for the music and the SFX. The music we picked is a loop generated from a synth pad that has some reverb on it to mimick space and to describe how interstellar travel would feel through sound. The sound effects we picked were to show the player firing lasers as well as having lasers fired back at them. Different sounding explosions for every hit on or from the enemy. And a deep hum and some beeping for the large space station moving across the screen towards the end.

Hip-Hop background track with gritty, realistic sound effects to match the dystopian feel of the game.

##Game We chose Mzito because it looked fun and had interesting opportunities for creativity.

##Process We watched all the game videos before selecting Mzito. We also played the games we could access in order to hear the original sound effects and have a starting point. We then broke down the requirements in terms of music and SFX from the requirements/guides in the slides.

For music we had:

• Environment:
  • African landscapes
  • Lake Nakuru, has flamingos who feed on the algae in its alkaline waters, creating a spectacular sight of a pink carpet across the lake surface, mountains, clouds, water, (Besides flamingos and rhinos, the park also houses lions, leopards, giraffes, waterbucks, and various other animals)
• Emotion: driving beat, power, force, strength, tension, urgency to stop corruption
• Key instruments: drums, ululation, arpeggio - energetic synthesizer bass
• Music: driving beat/music, ululation,

For sound effects we had:

• Actions/events:
  • Landing: poof sound, like dust lifting
  • Totem collection: currently like coins, combined birds and pickup
  • Corruption clearing landing: currently low synth, whoosh sound
  • Death sound: tiny beep, opposite of strength, loser feeling, like a leaf in the wind
  • Damage sound: oof sound
• Additions:
  • Running: small footsteps, crispy, on grass
  • Ambience/atmosphere: Flamingo and jungle sounds overlaid
  • Environment: see above
• Emotion: strength
• Realism: hybrid, atmosphere can be realistic and impact sounds more "unrealistic".

We worked in around 15 minute chunks, checking in and going back and forth. James made the music from scratch and I (Joanna) used freesound.org and Audacity for the SFX. An interesting bit is that there are snippets of ululations in the music that ended up sounding like bird calls. The ambience is a combination of jungle sounds and flamingo calls. Some things we let go of are the death and damage sounds (since they weren’t in the video even if we had heard them in-game), and one of the melodies in the music (cause it sounded annoying XD). Then James put everything together in the last few minutes, managing to put SFX in the first seconds of the clip. Though it was short, we had a lot of fun.