I just finished up a week long game jam run by Unreal and the game we made is one I’m very proud of.
PLAY THE GAME ON PC – LINK HERE
(or watch some gameplay footage at the bottom of this post courtesy of our sound designer Andrew Monte)
The theme of this jam was revealed to be “Settle the Score.” After a lot of debate we decided on a space-pirate themed game. The main character “Nuggs” has a debt that needs to be paid by completing various 2D space shooter missions. The difficulty of these vary and so does the payout. It’s important weigh up risk and reward when selecting your missions.
For the main music theme I tried to create a pirate sea shanty using synthetic instrumentation. The gamplay music was the most complex musical system I’ve created to date (using FMOD as middleware). This involved an exploration theme (plays when undetected by enemies), a detection theme (triggered when detected by enemies) and a dynamic battle theme (triggers when battle is activated. As the player health reaches below 10% the another layer of music mixes in to increase the intensity followed by another layer when the health drops below 5%).
Screenshot of the FMOD session used to create the dynamic music system.
We had a great team assembled for this jam. They were so much fun to work with and the quality of their work in such a short period of time was amazing.
Rowan McDonald-Nyland – Game Designer
Adam Scott-McGuinness (myself) – Music Composition
