Darryl Long

This week is the last week available left for the development of my game Op Command, a game inspired by Missile Command and the artwork of Bridget Riley. This week following from the playtest and improvements made in Dev Diary 3.1, I was focusing on audio and getting my assets and 3d models working and created. Finally, also polishing the game and getting it ready for a finished and working state.

I encountered a number of problems when working on the audio of the game, I had included the music already in my playtest on Monday but needed to add sound effects for the actions in the game. The explosions that the missile made had to make a sound that clashed with the music and I found this explosion that clashes heavily with the music. In contrast to that, I wanted a sound effect for when the missile hits the base area to be soothing and blend with the music and this was what I found on freesound.org. Finally, a suggestion from Ben, said that I should look for a rain sound effect to match the missile shapes and add another layer of calm to the audio in the game.

Game Music

There was a weird error that occurred while play testing the game when the explosion audio fired the music dimmed and the sound was much lower. I found this odd as there was no code that referenced changing the volume on the game. I tried playing the sound effects through a different audio source than the music and other methods. With the help of Steve, we managed to figure out that it was more of an audio illusion. When you listen to something and something else makes a noise that is much louder, then your ears adjust and to the louder sound and makes the previous noise seem much quieter. This is what was happening to the music because the explosions were too loud, once I adjusted the volume to be at similar levels the problem disappeared. This was an extremely interesting bug that occurs not because of assets or scripts but because of the way that the human body works, and that is really cool.

The other aspect of the game that I was working on was the 3d models, I still needed to create a pyramid for the pyramid objects to shoot the counter missiles and I needed different 3D objects than simple capsules. Using 3DS Max was something I had to learn, creating a pyramid was extremely simple as it was one of the predetermined models. The other object was more difficult, I wanted to create a droplet and I did this by creating a capsule and manually modifying its vertices so that it slopes inwards the further up it goes. There may be a more effective way to complete this however for just starting out this was a good start to learning and figuring out how to get the models that I want.

 https://itch.io/embed/152131

The rest of the time this week was spent tweaking and polishing the game in time for release on Monday. This meant improving the main menu UI and credits screen UI, cleaning up the code and playtesting to make sure that there are no bugs in the game. Overall, the project has gone fairly well and without any major speed bumps during development and will hopefully have the intended effect on people when they come to playtest on Monday.