Great game! The message was nice, especially considering the jam's theme, and the gameplay felt satisfying even though I'm not really good at platformers hahahah
I really appreciated how the music evolves throughout the game, I love these little details. One small nitpick: the sound effects felt a bit quiet compared to the rest of the mix, I think.
Overall, really well done, thanks for sharing!
Thanks ❤️! The theme immediately rang with life struggles, so the messaging came quite naturally, especially after playing Celeste some weeks ago. Glad the gameplay felt nice, it is still rough on the edges but spent a few days just on that, trying to get the best feeling in that time-frame. If I had more time I’d had added difficulty tiers, but I doubt it would have been doable within 2 weeks with all the rest.
I tried making dynamic music for the first time in a university project, it was really fun, now I want to put that in all my projects! Especially as it doesn’t take more time, and on the dev side it is not so hard to implement (just smoothstep on volumes based on parameters, here the ratio of completion). But I agree the sound effects are hardly noticeable. Music was done on Tuesday, audio effects on Monday, and Wednesday was focused on fixing an atrocious music desynchronisation. So I lacked time for proper mix balance (not sure if it’d be better with stress, thinking about it). But some of them should probably evolve as well, since they are pretty calm compared to the music being a bit more intense in the end.
Heck yeah, working with dynamic music is really fun! I also tried it for the first time in this jam, and it made me realize I still have a lot to learn about composing and arranging for it, so I definitely want to experiment more with it. If you happen to check out our game at some point, I'd love to hear what you think about what I did with the music there.
And yeah, pulling that off alongside everything else in such a short time is a crazy amount of work, so congrats on the result
A bit too intense to be honest But it helps that I already explored quite a few aspects of it all (writing a devlog on that as well). using modulation over a very small texture count and having a small recycled music loop (30s or something) also helped to gain some time). It also helps to be out of a job right now, it basically was a full-time job with some overtime on the last 5 days or so.
I don’t know if I’ll do it before the voting frame but I’ll try to give it a try. Otherwise Under Belly (You Suck At Producing), Hack Music Theory and 8 bit Music Theory are great learning sources.
The first is more production/mixing/mastering oriented. With good explanation in addition to some touch of humour and auto-derision. The second one is more theory oriented like 8-bit Music Theory, but not specific to game or analysis, more on very focused tips. But you have to scroll back to old videos as he stopped making free content on YouTube for years now.
