APD week7- PLAY and SOUND (revisit)

Context

Inspired by the games: Stifled - Echolocation Horror Mystery (2018)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/514830/Stifled__Echolocation_Horror_Mystery/

This is a sound-based Stealth Thriller Mystery, where SOUND is the only way you SEE, and the enemies HEAR your fear through your microphone input. It is an interesting concept using the sounds as the main alternative for interaction. And in the notion of that, I think of making a game that its sound effects are mandatory: noise, music, narrative and sound effects are keys to solve the question.

“Noise is the empirical body of abstract information, that which both grounds and confounds the transmission of a signal” (Nesbitt, 2010)

“More hearing and less of seeing” is the direction of how I play with sound to explore and enhance a better sense of how we observe the information.

Method

Using Photoshops to draw an image then import it to Adobe Flash to make interactive sounds.

Response

My very first intention when it started was to eliminate or at least, to limit the most of the Visual out of the game. I started with the whole scene black out and I just want to create a platform where players move the mouse around, the interactive sounds will pop out to give a sense of what is happening in the game. However, when it came to execute, I met the problem of composing the story and opponents into a piece. Since it just a black scene, I felt like it made no sense to get the players interested by just description and narration.

I then decided to draw an image in Photoshop just to illustrate and give out an overview look for what is on in the game. At this point, I did not have clear idea about the game interface, but how the sounds interact with the story and give out the information needed. I made a drawing of a crime scene since I thought that the easiest investigation scenario to start with: who is the killer?

After that, I have the drawing imported to Flash. I wanted to make the objects so that once player hovers the mouse, it will naturally response and based on that, the player may gather enough information to solve the puzzle. That lead me to more work of drawing items separately and make them work as “button” function in Flash. I used some sounds from free sources to test, but eventually thinking about recording my own ones to fit better in the concepts.

I did think about limiting the numbers of hearing/observing sounds from a certain object or else the player may break it and mess up the crime scene. It appeared to be difficult since the visual interface was just a simple sketchy drawing. I believe this idea would work better if I can make a 3D space dimension for the interface, however, that would go against my direction not to focus much on Visual.

Also, one problem I encountered was the mess all the sounds effects create because they are different in length and sometimes the player may trigger more sounds at one time. They started to play on top of each other and made a messy pitchy noise. I need to consider about sound length to have them play in harmony rather than playing one single sound at one (makes thing feel robotic and less involving).

Apart from the messy code, I also could not export the file for some reasons. Perhaps considering using a more powerful app will handle a better execution.

Reflection

I initially got this idea built up based on the video games and “click and find the mysterious items” games but approaching the process of making an interactive game based on sounds is challenging. So far, this week theme got me a chance to step out of my comfort zone in animation and explore more about the interactive aspect, which I believe that is one thing to play with excitement.