Hello again! This is our weekly devlog update on Familiar. This week we mostly worked on our internal documentation and further developing our prototypes. As like last week, we will describe our iteration this time around within each major domain of development (art, programming & sound).

Art

Building on last week’s progress, we came up with some designs for enemies. These could be the big baddies that our siblings will soon have to face in the nightmareish dungeon: We also ideated on what the environment could look like. From lighting and mood to camera angle and UI, every single detail has to be carefully considered and decided upon. This goes hand in hand with our programmers, since especially things like the camera angle can have major repercussions for the gameplay. How far can the camera zoom out and still show two players, what’s the best angle for making your attacks clear and visible but also gives you a good overview over the entire playing field? We’re looking forward to finalizing the designs for characters and environment and doing everything in our power to make our siblings as cute, energetic and loveable, and their surroundings as eerie, rough and full of strong, unsettling enemies as possible (sorry siblings!)

Programming

Continuing from last week, we kept prototyping both the major game engines. This week we focused on prototyping our core mechanic: the tether. How it disconnects, reconnects, how limited the distance should be, the repercussions of disconnecting, these such things were the major goals of our prototypes.

Alongside this, we prototyped simple camera movement to account for multiple characters being on screen. The idea we used currently is to center the position of the camera between the characters, thus allowing for smooth movement that doesn’t disrupt the flow of gameplay while also accounting for the players spreading out across the screen. This combined with the gameplay limit of the tether will ensure that the camera should never interfere with the players’ gameplay experience.

Sound

As for audio, this week was mostly spent working on our sound bible that contains and lists everything related to audio within our game. Within the sound bible, all art and tech related audio questions must be answered and listed in a way where if a new sound designer decided to join the team, they would be able to quickly be caught up with everything sound related.

I have also managed to lock in on a specific audio style! The style that we are going for will be all about a tactile and impactful foley driven sonic texture. Some games that inspired this choice were the yet to be released Crowsworn and Blasphemous 2. After choosing the style, I put my vision of the sound to paper and described it.

Afterwards, I spent a bunch of time listing and writing down the more technical and practical aspects of our game’s audio. This consists of a list of practical guidelines to follow to be able to achieve this style, an ordered list of where certain elements are placed within the mix, and more technical and practical mumbo jumbo which might bore you to death if I listed all of them here. Case and point, the audio is meant to complement the gameplay by providing useful player feedback, be satisfying to hear while also fitting the mood and style of the game.

After doing this, I decided to start my musical research! As students of Digital arts and Entertainment, we get access to Universal Studios’ massive library of music for use in our projects. And I’m not exaggerating, the library consists of almost 300,000 unique tracks! I started off by asking myself a question. What type of music do I want to go for? This is not a simple task. As a starting point, I perused the library, filtering and sorting music based on keywords that matched the mood of our game.

After finding some interesting candidates, I quickly realized that I was not feeling inspired by the songs that I had found. Most of the songs were of the kind that you would expect, more orchestral pieces of music which, while being very well made, felt very typical and overdone for the type of game that we were going for. Then, in a stroke of luck (hopefully), I stumbled upon a track that really spoke to me.

The track was a minimal dark techno piece. It has melodic elements akin to that of bells. There were ethereal vocal pads. Even though this wasn’t really conventional, not was it the exact instrumentation that I was going for, the track really spoke to me. Afterwards, I looked for more references in this style, and ended up finding an assortment of tracks from which I could distill interesting elements. Since I am personally a hobbyist electronic music producer in my own time, I decided to try my hand at creating a track of my own for our game! The music itself is planned to have some dynamic elements within the game too. Even though this week’s workload was mostly spent on research, I still thoroughly enjoyed myself and I’m looking forward to the future of the project. Till next time!