Before anyone says anything, I know that GMTK happened months ago. I put off writing this because I had a lot going on. I was working on things behind the scenes and spending time catching up with some friends a week or so later in Los Angeles. This is going to be a shorter post than I normally would make for this, because so much time has passed, but I will try to let everyone here know how my first GMTK went.
My first “Serious” Jam
This was a jam I was pretty nervous about. Most of the other jams I’ve participated in, even Ludum Dare, I treated as a fun jam to participate in while building up my skills. GMTK was different, and I’m not sure what made it feel like that. It felt like there was an air of seriousness going on with that jam. A big YouTuber, whose whole niche is game design, is holding this event. Game developers are taking this seriously, and it’s arguably more popular now than Ludum Dare.
Fortunately, I had my friends over at RVA Game Jams to lean on, and take the edge off of this competition atmosphere. We got together and formed teams. Then we gathered around and learned that the theme for this jam was “countdown”
For this jam, I had my attention split between 2 solo devs, who were eager to have me on the project for audio.
10 seconds and 9 Lives
My first team was with Ben, a good friend I got to hang out with quite a few times at the meetup. He’s one of the few in our group who has commercially released a game on Steam (Lumina Rush). I was really excited to get the opportunity to finally collaborate with him on a game!
During ideation, I pretty much let Ben figure out what game he wanted to make; after all, he’s doing everything but sound! But I had a very good idea of what style of game he was most likely going to make because of Lumina Rush. My goal for the main theme of the game was to knock his socks off.
Since the game was most likely going to look like an arcade game, maybe a bit Tron-esque, I went with a genre of music that was home for me, electronic music.
For the main theme of the game, I grabbed an Arturia recreation of the ARP2600, and found the nastiest, most aggressive, interesting noise I could find and made that the basis the entire track was built around. This sound is actually the very first thing you hear when you boot up the game. The rest of the track was just noodling around with different instruments and putting the pieces together to make something intense and upbeat. My favorite part of the whole thing was the violins stabbing at the end. It added an extra layer of depth and intensity outside of electronic sounds.
The funniest part about the composition later on was the lead melody instrument. I grabbed something that was obviously a fake guitar sound. I used it because it sounded cool and reminded me of the lead sounds you would hear from games like “Sonic Heroes”. After the composition phase, I found out the main character of the game is a cat, and the idea behind the lives is based on that old saying about cats. A lot of people came up to me afterwards and thought I was a genius for my choice of lead instruments, because it sounded like a cat. First off, I am a genius, but second, the lead sound sounding like a cat to people’s ears was just a happy accident!
Once I got that theme written, I was tasked with writing boss theme music. Because it was close to the end of the jam, and I was working on another jam game, I was panicking a tiny bit. The best solution I could come up with was looping a small part of the main theme and feeding that into Gross Beat. It’s one of my favorite time manipulation plugins ever; you can get so many different variations. It also happens to be the same plugin Daft Punk used for their song “Derezzed”.
Once I fed the audio feed into Gross Beat, I just messed around with presets until I found a sequence of presets I liked, then recorded the automation of switching presets.
The rest of the audio in the game was just generated through a basic SFXR, so not much to say about that, except for what I have already said in previous posts.
While working on that, I was working on the other jam project.
TwitchSlap
This game, I collaborated with Momin again! At the beginning of the jam, he just told me, “I’ll think about a game for the next day or so, then I’ll let you know if I need anything.” A few days passed (I believe on the final working day), and Momin came back to me and said he needed a song that was “Psychedelic”
Going off of that, I immediately put on my experimental music hat and tried to evoke the sound and playful nature of the 1960’s. My main inspiration was Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys, and the general experimental nature he had when making the unreleased album “Smile”
Here’s an idea of the playfulness I was going for.
Besides, psychedelic, all I knew was that it would be an interactive piece that would speed up and slow down dynamically, depending on what happened with the game. With that in mind, I tried to pick sounds that would sound interesting sped up and slowed down. Around this playfulness, I used a wooden block sound to simulate the ticking of a clock. That fulfilled the theme of the jam, acted as home base for the listener, and also made it sound interesting when the whole song changed speed.
I was really happy with how the song turned out, especially with the short amount of time I had to put it together. When I delivered this to Momin, he said I nailed the vibe because it sounded like a Jackbox game track. That was the type of game he was going for, which is a party game that you play on your phone. In this game, there’s a countdown timer, and you have to tap your phone on your turn or lose the round. Simple, but effective!
Results
At the end of the jam, we all gathered around at ardent and showed off our games, Everyone had a great time!
After a week or so, we all got our final results from the voting, here’s the score I got from 10 Seconds to 9 lives
And below is the score from TwitchSlap.
I almost think TwitchSlap, with the audio score, is an outlier. I believe people who played this game didn’t really play it on their phones or with other people, and the game doesn’t really function outside of that. Because people didn’t understand that and might not have enjoyed it, I believe the audio scored lower.
At first, when I saw the score for 10 seconds and 9 lives, I was pretty disappointed. I really wanted to break into the 4-5 star range. After thinking about it for a while, there were 10,000 game entries to GMTK, and that score put me in the top 20% in all of game audio. Pretty good!
In fact, I was obsessively looking at everyone’s votes in RVA Game Jams, and I’m proud to say that pretty much everyone in RVA Game Jams scored in the top 20% overall! It makes me super proud that I’m part of a rich group of folks who are deeply talented. Some days I still can’t believe I’m here with them. Thank you so much for letting me be a part of it.
If you’d like to play the games that I worked on in GMTK Jam, you can find them below!
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