Hempuli's blog

To be honest, work on ESA has been really smooth lately! Joonas “Kissa3” Turner joined our team to make sound effects, and against my fears his sounds (which are amazing) work really well with Roope “Noby” Mäkinen‘s musics (which are amazing). Amazing!
Multimedia Fusion can play sounds either “on its own”, shuffling them to empty channels without the user having to worry about it, or on specified channels. I’ve usually played music and looping ambient noises on a specified channel, and other SFX without a specified channel. Usually this works well, since I can adjust the volume levels of the channels to make some fade effects etc, and don’t have to really care about what happens to the “generic” SFX.
However, now I’ve ran into a bit of a problem with this system (although I’ve been aware of it before). I can’t properly alter the volume of the samples not played on a specified channel, and thus the only volumes I can adjust are the Main Volume (affecting both SFX and music) and Music Volume (affecting the channel the musics are played on). In my older games I’ve just ignored this and put only “music” and “general volume” options in the settings menu, but in ESA the sound effects and musics are pretty different in style, and thus need to be balanced more carefully (not to mention that I’d like to do my very best with this game!)
Fortunately I think I’ve found a way to manually work around this, by making a system where every sample is played on a specified channel so that the game is always aware of “free” channels and only plays SFX on those. This is somewhat cumbersome to do and will require some extra attention to stuff like several sound effects playing at the same time, but I think it’ll be worth it.

  …So I guess the point of this post is that I’ve got some work to do!!
(Also working on a new trailer)

The voting phase of Ludum Dare #30 ended last weekend, and my game fared pretty well considering that I entered it in the ‘jam’ category with teams allowed and generally more lax rulings. In the end, I ranked

9th in category “Fun”
11th in category “Mood”
57th in category “Audio” (The song in the game was made by Cotton-in-law, so this is very much his achievement!)
70th in category “humour”

…and 10th overall!

I was really surprised at how much people liked the game! Maybe I should keep working on it…?
Anyway, the download link is in the post below, here’s a timelapse/gameplay video: