Damaged Goods: Reflection, with Care

You are a mailman who must find your way through this castle to deliver your parcel to the owner. HOWEVER, it will not be easy. As you progress, the safety of the parcel may be compromised, and you know you will be held accountable. Can you make it through to the top without damaging the goods? Or will you return in defeat, with nothing left but a mangled, cardboard box?

INSPIRATION AND MY VISION

I had a vision of a game with a Mario Bowser castle aesthetic, with music that would work synchronously with the story - developing as it developed. I wanted to create a lighthearted game with darker connotations, and I was inspired by Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. and 3909 Studio's Papers, Please, which I thought would make an interesting combination, put together. Musically, I drew from Winifred Phillips’ 6 stem composition in Toy Story. The idea I ended up implementing was a semi-Winifred Phillips type composition with some states having overlapping stems. Finally, the music was to follow the mailman’s progression of the game through the quality of the parcel, rather than how far into the game the player is. If a mailman delivers an undamaged package in reality, it would be a rather mundane day, therefore the music wouldn’t reach the highest state (the common criticism that parcels may be damaged inspired that you cannot finish the game without some amount of damage). If a mailman lost the delivery, the music would also reflect that.

THE COMPOSITION

The composition is split into 14 tracks, including 6 states without melodies (40 seconds each), 5 melody lines (40 seconds each) and 3 endings (10 seconds each). Multiple states had overlapping stems, so I was able to choose different selections of tracks to create meaningful changes in the music.

Different to most games, rather than developing based on the progress through the game, in Damaged Goods: Handle with Care, the music follows the most important aspect of the game: the parcel. As choices are made during play that damage the parcel, the ‘parcel’ variable grows (from 0 to up to 5), and the composition develops with more complexity and tenseness through more layers and a recurring heartbeat drum that quickens when the player gets to higher states. In the higher states (4 to 5), melodies from previous states also make a comeback, which is to give the player a sense of wrapping up, or reflection. It symbolises that the next few moves will give them a result that is essentially the summation of all the choices they had made, emphasised in the ending sting for the passage they take. The first state the player hears is a simple chord progression underline with a granulated, sprayed version, which is meant to sound tentative, fearful and foreshadowing, while the player is introduced to the story.  As the game states progress, the composition becomes more distorted, slightly out of time and with dissonances in the melody. The deep, delayed timbre of the double bass acts to give darker connotations, which I found especially effective in Papers, Please, and wanted to implement in my musical system.

The last thing of note is the melody line, which is split from the harmony states so they could be removed at any time. There are choices throughout the game that will make the player lose track of the parcel, and just as a mailman is incomplete without mail, the track is played incomplete, without the melody.

REFLECTION

Overall, I feel like this was a success, and I have learnt a lot through developing this microgame. I would definitely like to come back to it in the future to fix a few things that I'm having trouble with working out right now - the composition could use some adjustments to better link the whole game together, and things like accessibility where some text is hard to read on the background. Hopefully, I'll be able to address these better in future projects and be able to come back and fix as much of these as I can in a minor update. Ideally, I'd be able to make use of some of the comments or feedback, good or bad to see where I should spend more time on.

PLAY NOW :)