Sounds for for the Game and Alpha Goals

I've been talking to Jack Corrigan, my friend from Park City, and Leeland, a sound designer in the EAE program, about music for my game. I produced the music for our prototype but I think it'd be nice to have a pro make things. I will stake make a lot of sound effects and probably some of the songs but I would love the help.

I've exchanged a couple emails with Leeland about the music. We've talked about the best way to go about the music. The biggest thing I've been thinking about is how to make the music easy for the design team as well as the sound designer:

4 world themes (level select theme i.e. Super Meat Boy. This would be a very good game to model since each world in super meat boy had a world theme that looped continuously while in level select and in playing levels. It only changed during boss levels and warp zones, I could do something similar very easily, this is just a suggestion)

Using this model, we basically have to make 4 world themes with a couple special sections. It will be a lot easier than making 20 individual songs.

potentially 20 background tracks for each world's 3-5 levels (the basic format for videogame music I've noticed is each levels theme has three parts that loop like this, A B C A B C A B C, intro Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Verse, Chorus, Bridge)

The good thing about using the world music model will be the ease making background tracks for each level. From a designer standpoint, it would also be really cool to have a buildable sound track. As we play around with levels, we can just re-arrange the sound track for the appropriate boss battle or intense sections. We could make an infinite number of background tracks and we could easily match tracks with new level designs as they come out.

4 boss battle themes

These are the most significant sections of the world music outside of the main loops. Each world will have a special boss sequence for the final bad guy. I think this could be a fun time to play with the genres.

4 special move jingles for 4 different midi instruments lets say there are 3 special moves for each instrument then we would need 12 different little jingles/riffs probably about 5 to 8 seconds long is my guess.

Right now I have at least 5 special moves planned.


The final product will have this full suite of sounds and sound effects but for the alpha we don't need too much:

• Combo sound effects
• 1 background song - Main loop, 2 intense sequences, 1 boss sequence
• Small enemy attack sounds
• environment sounds

I'd like to have the sound work done by the 27th so that we can incorporate everything the days before we submit alpha.