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According to the style of the game we set up, the sound made by the footsteps when the player controls the movement of the hamster should also be the sound made by the paws of the real animal, but in reality, due to the small size of the hamster, it is difficult for us to substantively hear the sound of the hamster’s travelling in general, and we can refer to the sound part of it based on the game in which the main character is also a hamster. Because of the length of the problem, I have made some editing, please ignore the music and system beeps in it, focus on the sound of the hamster walking in it.
In our own game, we will design the hamster’s travelling sound to be a combination of the animal’s paws touching the ground and cartoon sound effects.
During play, the player may put the protagonist into a kind of standby state by thinking about how to solve puzzles or suddenly stop controlling the protagonist for something else, at which time the protagonist hamster can shift to a stopped state, followed by a dozing sound.
Produce a first-person perspective healing breakthrough game, players will control a cute little hamster, through the elaborate design of sound effects, guide the player into the game world, and become the key to solving puzzles and exploration. It brings players a relaxing and enjoyable experience during the gameplay. Through beautiful scenes, soothing music, and simple and enjoyable mechanics of interacting with the environment, players will feel a comfortable and healing atmosphere.
Reasons for motivation:
1) We are a team of people who are interested in games and want to make a sound-driven game of our own.
2) In a fast-paced life, people are busy day in and day out with daily chores, studies and work. We don’t pay attention to the sounds that surround us, the little things that make up our lives, but because of our busyness, we lose sight of how to appreciate the beauty of life. We hope that people will be healed by the lovely game world while playing this game, and that they will also discover the beauty of the subtle sounds in their daily lives.
Goals achieved in the game:
1) Enhance the player’s auditory perception and problem solving ability: We hope to enhance the player’s auditory perception and problem solving ability by relying on auditory perception to solve the puzzles and problems in the game.
(2) Provide a pleasurable and relaxing gaming experience: We hope that players will feel pleasurable and relaxed in the game, escaping from the fast-paced real life and immersing themselves in the healing game world. In the process of playing, players can discover the beauty of sounds that are not easy to detect in life.
Applicable playing crowd:
1) For busy working people who need a way to relax, reduce stress and escape the fast pace of real life.
2) Players who enjoy solving puzzles and exploring: those who like to challenge their intellect, solve puzzles, explore hidden content, or reach the full element of a collection, and who want to find novelty and excitement in a game.
3) Players interested in artistry and musicality: those who appreciate art and music and enjoy exploring new ideas and art forms, and who want to experience unique music, sound design, and visuals in their games.
What makes this project different:
1) The use of sound as the main cue is relatively unique in the gaming world. While most games focus on visual elements, we designed a game that guides the player through sound design and interaction to provide a new gaming experience.
2) Emphasis on exploration and discovery, allowing players to solve puzzles and discover hidden content by listening to sounds and observing the environment, which is different from traditional linear breakout games.
How to evaluate the project:
1) Invite teachers and classmates to play the game to collect user feedback and player satisfaction survey.
2) Ensure the stability of the game to avoid bugs, crashes and other problems.
Most of the games currently on the market are graphics-based, supplemented by sound. Most of the games I want to make need to be audio-based, with the graphics becoming assistive, so it’s a whole new experience. Through this game, people who like to play games can have the opportunity to try the auditory experience, hoping to attract more people to pay attention to the sound industry in games.
Game type: Healing first-person perspective game.
Our game may have a healing style, it may be a cartoon style, it may be colorful. Our purpose in designing this game is to allow players to experience the relaxation and warmth of the game in addition to their busy lives.
First attempt at modeling with Unity:
Since the game is in first-person perspective, I first created a first-person character controller. After the establishment is completed, a room need to be created, because our games all take place in the room.
Because I need to make players feel a sense of healing, I used many different colors on the floor and walls to make players feel that the game is visually very relaxing and attract players to continue exploring. Below is the first room I built in Unity.
In my room, I use a variety of color splicing to enrich the color of the scene. I can also use textures to increase the quality of the scene and make it appear more realistic. As shown below.
Our game is to search for items in the room. Every time the players approach an item, it will make a different sound. After collecting a few items, they can enter the next part. (Detailed game effects and gameplay will be clearly explained by other students in our group.) So next I need to find some models of items to place in the room to provide some sound trigger points for the players. As shown below.
After I set up a room, I was thinking about how to get players into the next room. Because there is no connection between the two rooms. Maybe use the “Is Trigger” function in the “Box Collider”. This function allows the player to be teleported to another specified item when passing this item. This enables the transportation between the two rooms. As shown below.
When passing the red cube, the “teleport” function can be triggered to transport the player to another room.
Different scene styles and themes can be set in different rooms, and the difficulty factor is gradually increased. For example, the number of items to be found increases, the environment becomes dark, etc. We strive to make players feel that every level has something innovative.
We are both students of sound design, and I have little exposure to the field of visual production. Since this is my first time trying to model with Unity, there will be many technical problems, and the details are not very accurate, but I will continue to study hard and strive to provide a more perfect visual effect when I submit the assignment next time.
After the game modeling is completed, it needs to be produced using Wwise. The current project has not yet combined vision and sound, but we will think about the specific sound of each item and create a good sound design work.
Finally, I want to talk about the background music of the game. I think I should choose music with a slower rhythm and long lines. Because when playing games, the player’s focus is not mainly on the music, but on the sound effects, so we should pay more attention to the sound design. But if there is no music at all, the game will become very boring and not vivid, so I hope to choose some relaxing background sounds.
For example, the second song “Nature Sounds” in the link below. It sounds like being in nature, which makes people feel very relaxed. Or the song “Relaxing Guitar”, I think it is also very suitable for our game, it sounds like it has a soothing rhythm and a nice main melody. Coupled with the scene of a room of the same style, it may be very playful.
With the hamster as the main character, it means that the style of the game will be warm and cosy. The colour scheme of the game will be light and multi-coloured. Characters and scenes will be designed in a rounded construction and hand-drawn style.
Examples of games with similar styles.
《Arise: A Simple Story》: Simple Colour Scheme
《Sunset Hills》: hand-painted style
Style
Since our main character is a hamster, each room will be explored from the hamster’s point of view. In order to better immerse the player into the character, we decided to use the first person perspective to explore the map (RPG). Physics puzzles and room escapes were added to add more playability to the game. So this will be a role-playing game as well as a puzzle game.
Examples of games with similar styles:
《What Remains of Edith Finch》
Room Scenarios
Game Theme
Explore sounds in a relaxed and fun atmosphere and get a feel for them at the end of the game.
This game is sound-driven, so the importance of sound is important
The importance of game sound is reflected in the following aspects:
* Atmosphere setting: game sound effects are used to create a specific game atmosphere, such as scary, tense, happy, etc., which helps to enhance the player’s immersion.12
* Information transfer: sound effects can be used to convey instant information, such as the location of enemies, the health of characters, etc., which is crucial for players to react.2
* Emotional guidance: Different music and sound effects can affect the player’s emotions, making them feel joyful, nervous, or fearful.3
* Artistic contagion: game sound effects can enhance the artistic contagion and depth of the game, and sometimes even play the role of a finishing touch.4 * Immersion experience: the design of game sound effects can enhance the game’s artistic contagion and depth.
* Immersive experience: sound effects can be designed to better immerse the player into the situation, for example, the sound of birds chirping in the forest or the sound of wind in the dark forest can increase the sense of immersion.5 * Interactive experience: sound effects can also increase the sense of immersion in the game.
* Interactive experience: Sound effects can also be integrated with physical interactions within the game, e.g. in some games, changes in sound effects may indicate whether a player’s action was successful or not.
* Accessibility: Providing audible feedback to hearing-impaired players makes games more accessible.
* Game quality: Game sound is considered an important part of game quality and sometimes even a key factor in attracting players.
In summary, game sound is not only an important part of the game experience, but also a key element in improving game quality and player engagement.
Players will take on the role of a small hamster who likes to explore and collect interesting sounds, and will be guided by sound elements to break through and solve puzzles. Before the start of each level, the player will listen to a piece of audio and then enter the level room, where each object in the room will emit a unique, representative sound, and the player needs to choose by looking for and approaching the object, and carefully distinguishing whether the object’s sound is the same as or similar to the audio that the player heard before the start of the level. Players will receive a sound clue fragment representing the object when they complete their selection, but move on to the next level regardless of whether that selection was made correctly or not. Once the clue fragments have been collected from all the rooms, the player will need to complete a sound puzzle to manually synthesise the pieces together to arrive at the final sound design audio.
Difficulty Setting
At the beginning of the game, the audio the player hears may be exactly the same as the correct object sound, and may be about 5 seconds long. However, as the game progresses in difficulty, the audio the player hears will become shorter and shorter, and may be at least 1 second long; the audio the player hears may also be the correct object sound that has been processed in a variety of ways, such as adjusting the equalisation, adding reverberation, and being partially distorted or intermittent. On the highest difficulty, the audio the player hears may only have a small resemblance to the real object sound. The player needs to struggle to distinguish and find the correct object while resisting these interferences.
Endings
Since as soon as the player chooses an object to end in the next level, the player only learns if they made the right choice after synthesising the sound clue fragments. Different choices lead to different endings. For example, if the player chooses the correct object in all five rooms, the final synthesised sound will be a complete, pleasing design, whereas comparatively, the more wrong choices the player makes, the weirder or harsher the final synthesised sound will be. At the same time, even if the same wrong object is chosen, a wrong choice in the first room and a wrong choice in the fifth room will result in a different synthesised sound, which will stimulate the player to replay the game in order to collect all the endings.
Mini-game
Among the multiple objects in the room, there may be special objects set up that the player will randomly get some special effects after selecting them, such as the next room can only be played in darkness, or the audio heard in the next room will be very muffled. The player can undo this by choosing to play some sound-related mini-games. Alternatively, the player can choose to play a mini-game to revive the game after selecting a special object that will lead to the end of the game.
Sound Design
According to our initial idea, the game is a creative game guided by sound elements, and the player can complete the final sound design by their own choices, thus leaving a lot of room for sound design. Firstly, in our conception, the game will not have text-based instructions, but rather a voice-over to tell the player how it needs to be operated and what needs to be done. The voice style of the narrator may be designed according to the overall style of the game and specific different levels. Secondly, how to design sounds exclusive to each object and how to process the audio that the player will hear must also be taken into consideration. Finally, in order to attract players to replay the game repeatedly, the game will have several different endings, how the sound material of each level can be combined to form the final sound design audio is another design focus. In the coming weeks, we will make various attempts to try to present the desired effect.
In a short meeting after submission 1, we discussed possible routes for the project to take next. The first step was to create a rough to-do list. The list included the various designs we wanted to implement in the game, such as sound elements and unity models. We need to arrange them in order of importance and complete them in sequence, this is to ensure that even if one of them cannot be completed, the final work will not be affected too much. Currently, the idea is to complete the basic gameplay first, such as hamster walking, selecting objects, etc. and then set up different styles of impression scenes with multiple levels. Finally, when there is spare time, we can try the design of mini-games and upgrade the difficulty.
For the most important element of the game, the sound, we should start to work on more detailed sound design. For the style of the final sound design, we can do some research and references, and for the basic gameplay, we can start to try to design the sound of some objects and do some sound examples.
Week 4, 8 February
Weekly meeting with Eleni
Group members elaborated on the new project outline and then discussed with Eleni, proposing new ideas, which included: the difficulty of the game and the setting of the levels, the impact of the player’s choices on the final ending, the form of the mini-game and the insertion mechanism, the style of the game graphics that might be referenced, and so on. After reaching a consensus, the group confirmed the content to be submitted for the upcoming submission 1.
Online Discussion
For the content that needs to be submitted for submission 1, the group summarises what can be accomplished at this stage as: elaboration on the uniqueness of the main core of the project, the source of inspiration, the expected goals, etc.; elaboration on the interactivity of the project’s gameplay specifics, the level settings, etc.; research and reference of the project’s related content; the presentation of the unity project in progress; Meeting records, project progress notes and summary index pages in the blog. After discussion and selection by the group members, the group finished setting up the division of labour for these contents and scheduled to make the final summary and revision before submission on the 12th.
Week 4, 7 February
Workshop with Eleni
In the first half of the workshop, guided by Eleni, the group learnt how to analyse and elaborate their own project outlines through the hypothetical imaginary project method. In the second half of the workshop, the group learnt how to use unity and tried out some of its operations with some free resources.
Week 4, 6 February
Online meeting
The group combined each person’s ideas, using Linghan’s hamster setting as the story background, Huixuan’s core gameplay of searching for objects through sound clues, and at the same time incorporating Liyuan’s mini-game and Wenxiao’s sound puzzle, and finally came up with a new project prototype as follows:
Week 4, 5 February
Weekly meeting with Eleni
Upload ideas to teams and discuss them with Eleni
Decided to consolidate their respective ideas into one concrete project by Thursday
Week 3, 1 February
Weekly meeting with Eleni
During the morning presentation, Jules suggested that our initial ideas for the project were too complex, and that instead of focusing on the core elements of Blind, we should just ditch the visuals and focus on the sound elements and player interaction. After sharing our idea with Eleni, we received similar feedback that our problem was that we wanted to focus on too many things, and that each element was so complex and specific that it might not be necessary to focus on both narrative and gameplay at the same time, and that it would be easier to focus on one core element and drill down to develop it. At Eleni’s suggestion it was decided to reverse the previous project outline and rethink it.
Online meeting
As the original proposal was not very feasible, the group discussed a few more similar ideas online, but none of them were agreed upon by the group. In the end, the group decided to each come up with another idea of their own, this time dropping the narrative elements and focusing on the gameplay and sound interactions of the project based on the references they had seen previously, and each posted it to the Teams for Eleni’s input by Monday of next week.
Week 3, 31 January
Offline meeting
In order to come up with an initial project idea, the group decided to meet offline at the ECA’s cafe.
Regarding Eleni’s question at the end of last week, the group felt that making a sound-driven game with simple visual elements would be more in line with our needs. Based on this Liyuan came up with an initial idea centred on the element of BLIND. The other members of the group enriched this idea according to their preferences as mentioned before, and finally a rough project outline was formed. The outline included game keywords, element types, game difficulty settings, gameplay styles, and several possible story plots.
Week 2, 25 January
Weekly meeting with Eleni
In the first meeting, led by Eleni, the members of the group introduced themselves to each other and gave their initial thoughts on the play project. Although we all chose this project, all four of us have different preferences, for example, Huixuan is very fond of horror and suspense elements, and wants to create sound design that includes these elements; Liyuan values the interaction between reality and the mediums of visual and sound, and is interested in VR technology; Linghan is good at depicting stories, and wants to create game sound that is guided by the plot as the core, and has a deep connotation; Wenxiao wants to learn more about the technology and knowledge of game sound and visual because loving playing games.
Since the group was all from sound design programme and had little knowledge of visual techniques, Eleni showed us a variety of possible references for different types of games. Some of these references did not require visuals at all, some required a simple abstraction of the physical model to build the visuals, and some required time to learn some of the techniques in order to complete the more complete visuals. Eleni suggested that we let the group talk about their needs and decide in the next week what kind of project they would like to eventually complete.
