Identitree was originally designed for the Rainbow Game Jam which had the theme of "Identity" as the event is in aid of the LGBT society.
The team consists of 4 team members;
Conor Paterson - Programming
Niklas Evertsson - Game Design / Programming
Tom Dixon - Game Design / Art
Shane Ellis - Audio Artist / Game Design / Art
Software used: Unity, Wwise, Pro Tools, Ableton, Photoshop, SourceTree, Github
For this project we all sat around a table for a a couple hours, left with nothing, met again the at the same table with nothing but left with the idea we have now..well..a couple ideas popped up along the way to then influence the decision to make of the game.
The idea of the game is to grow your tree full of goodness with various traits by using seeds of various personaliseeds however there is always negativity striking along the journey of anyone's growth, these particular enemy seeds will reduce the players score when reaching the tree.
The more personaliseeds planted the more the tree will grow however it isn't the most practicle to pick up one trait just because it may be easier to come by, sometimes the good things are worthwhile so try getting a fair amount of each!
Not only will the player be slowed down by the bad personaliseeds but also by daunting rain clouds which will interfere with the players ability to carry the seed back to the tree. However! there are upsides to this stressful madness, power ups in bubbles...I'm sure it's as much as a thing as elephants with wings! For a limited amount of time these power ups will allow the player to either be unvulnerable to the heavy rain drops or give the opportunity to attack the bad personaliseeds before they reach the tree.
As being as game jam the participipants are usually required to do more than just their spicific professionalism, as for an audio engineer like myself I can't expect to have much audio to do but not only that it is more the fact that team sizes are limited to 4 members so consideration must be taken into account when entering a game jam (not to mention personality clashes).
Luckily I am learning the coding side of the creative production so I was able to save time for the programming members for them to not add in the audio.
I also own a graphics tablet and photoshop portable so I was able to draw some designs.
I came up with these personaliseed designs which inspired the team and I to introduce new ways in which we could improve the enjoyment of the game itself.
The seeds were originally meant to just be color coordinated seeds that contained the personality qualities however these new designs with style and faces gave the seed and most importantly the game much more character.
I integrated AudioKinetic's Wwise into Unity 3d as the audio middleware which I then pushed to the teams repository using SourceTree which included the integration package ready to decompress once pulled for the first time.
I then continued to code in the triggers by using a "MasterAudio" script with play event triggers from components within the game to be triggered with sound via this audio master script which tells unity that every sound triggered will be loaded via the soundbanks coded into this script.
Beginning of Identitree
My contributions
Art and Design
Audio Engineering
Sound Design
Due to the nature of the game being colorful, cute and fluffy the audio needs to match the vibe to set the tone of the game.
Finger popping the mouth seemed like a reasonable place to start for that soft acknowledgement for triggers from collision, adding EQ, delays and various other signal processing created a nice soft gamey tone.
Music
My first attempt was to create a digital piece that has a relaxing feel to it but not the "put you to sleep" kind but something that won't stress you out when the going gets tough. The idea was in the correct place but the final result was in the wrong place (maybe it was my lack of talent) so I needed to rethink my strategy, something with personality and out of all music genres the most recognized for its personality is Jazz, the improvisational musical pieces and that is where I knew I needed to be to get this game get the attention it deserves.
Having a jazzy feel to the music allows the random sequencing of loops in Wwise to be somewhat less of a wory on the topic of repetition
***speak about process, include screenshots***