The Global Game Jam 2020 happened at the end of January and this year’s topic was “Repair”. Taking inspiration from said topic, we had 48 hours to develop a videogame.
I was lucky that I found a team of talented designers and programmers who were interested in creating a game that explores interactive music not just for emphasis, but as a core gameplay mechanic. The game’s working title is Roadie Simulator and the demo can be downloaded from the project page on the GGJ website.
Basically, the player is a roadie for a rock band and needs to make sure that the band is in good shape, or else the fans get angry and it’s Game Over. Oh, and all characters are robots, because robots are cool!
I composed and produced two 2-minute songs (one song per level) for our band of robots and broke the music down into individual stems for the instruments. Apart from the “good” stems, every instrument gets a bunch of alternative “bad” stems that are either out of tune, out of sync, distorted or anything else that could go wrong during a performance. Using an interactive music technique known as vertical remixing, all those stems can be mixed in various combinations to create anything from a perfect performance of the song (should the band be in good shape) to a total trainwreck. It is up to the roadie to bring the band members what they need to stay in good shape (tuners, new amps, beer etc.), or else the sound is not pretty!
I had so much fun composing songs for a robot band! As you can imagine, not much sleep was had. We didn‘t have enough time to build the 2nd level in the 48 hour Jam, so only my first song got included in the above demo. If only I had known earlier, I could have slept instead of staying up all night to record the second song, haha!
Either way, I think both songs turned out pretty cool and I plan to release them as singles sometime soon!