[Sound Challenge] Challenge #7 - Beat Attack! - 13th June deadline
Hi there!
I think its time for another sound challenge!
For those unfamiliar with our challenges, the aim is to create sound effects/music for a game or to replace the sound/music from a video of the game. Here is our last sound challenge (#6).
This challenge is a bit of an experiment. We are trying out the itch.io platform for the latest installment of our game sound challenge. (Usually we use our local forums on MakeGamesSA.com)
Here is the jam page:
http://itch.io/jam/mgsa-sound-jam-7
Deadline: 06/13/2015
Once again check out the jam page for more details.
Beat attack forum thread.
So who is keen? Any questions or comments?
I think its time for another sound challenge!
For those unfamiliar with our challenges, the aim is to create sound effects/music for a game or to replace the sound/music from a video of the game. Here is our last sound challenge (#6).
This challenge is a bit of an experiment. We are trying out the itch.io platform for the latest installment of our game sound challenge. (Usually we use our local forums on MakeGamesSA.com)
Here is the jam page:
http://itch.io/jam/mgsa-sound-jam-7
Deadline: 06/13/2015
A little video of beat attack!
The challenge:
For this challenge we will once again be replacing music/sound effects for a game. Steven Tu (aka. @Tuism), has graciously volunteered for us to use his game Beat Attack!. You will need to replace the sound files of the game and send them to @Tuism. He will create a build for you which you can then enter the challenge with.
Beat Attack!'s current sound is produced by the talented Tim Harbour (aka @Tim_harbour)
This is quite a unique challenge due to Beat Attacks procedural-like music generation system. The music is structured in a way so that it can speed up and slow down as the game progresses, without bending its pitch. Each song is built up using short samples that are fired off in a regular timing pattern (like at every beat in a 4/4 time signature).
If you don't want the hassle of creating sample files and sending them to Steven, you may replace the sound to this video of the game instead. *** Note: this will be quite challenging due to the changing tempo of the game!
Technical details:Challenge details:
- The game engine will trigger off samples at regular time intervals at set beat-per-minute timing. For example, when the song is running at 120bpm, samples will fire every 0.5 seconds.
- The current format for the sound files are any sequentially numbered audio files eg. BeatAttackTrack02_001.mp3, BeatAttackTrack02_002.mp3. The song is structured in sets of 8 beats (the blocks rise by a level after each set of 8). The sample sets are available here:
http://www.twoplusgames.com/share/beatsamples/klein_beat_auf_faster.rar
http://www.twoplusgames.com/share/beatsamples/klein_beat_auf_slower.zip- The gameplay runs (on the easiest level) from 90bpm to 120bpm. That's a game constraint. At the hardest difficulty it's 120bpm to 170bpm. Keep this in mind.
- Once you have created the samples and would like to test them in-game, send the files to Steven and he can make a build for you.
Who can enter?
- Make a post of your entry on MakeGamesSA.com with a link to your itch.io jam entry! Entries without a post on MGSA will be disqualified by the admins (after prior warning). If you particularly don't want to post on MGSA please get in touch with one of the admins.
- When submitting a game please check the "other" category. That will stop our entries being indexed as games on the main itch.io webpage.
This is primarily created for members of the MGSA community and South African musicians/ sound designers/ game developers. Feel free to join even if you are not.
Admin details:
MGSA forum name: @creative630
Email: creative630 [at] gmail [dot] com
MGSA forum name: @Tuism
Email: steven [at] twoplusgames [dot] com
Once again check out the jam page for more details.
Beat attack forum thread.
So who is keen? Any questions or comments?
Comments
@Tuism Does the game pick up automatically on the BPS of the music track?
or is the music Played with samples being fired at a specific rate?
I haven't kept up with the tech news too much, but didn't I hear that Wwise can now use MIDI directly? If you're using custom samples, you could have them triggered similarly to using a normal DAW/Sequencer by MIDI and change the tempo through Wwise?
Sounds fun as a challenge, I'll see what I can do.
But just would like to say yay for expressing interest @McCoySoundD :D Would be awesome to see your take on the music! :D
If you really don't want to hassle with exporting loads of file, there is a video without sound that you can track sound/music to.
Edit: Thanks! I have clarified the comp a little in the text.
@Tuism - What platform is the game built in? Would it be possible to submit a Wwise build? (Need a reason to check out Wwise's new Midi features!)...
That's pretty out of scope for the comp. So we are going to limit this comp to the way @Tuism has set his sound system up. Check the jam page for details on how you will interface with that: http://itch.io/jam/mgsa-sound-jam-7.
Maybe we can have a wwise comp after this one if there is enough interest :)
So far I've discovered I can't beatbox (plan A), and that if I start at a low BPM it usually doesn't translate well at the higher BPMs. The tricky thing is trying not to make something too similar to @Tim_Harbour's original, which suits the game and style very well already.
It'd be good to try a Wwise or FMOD solution to the beat syncing issue, just for practise, and maybe share the results or how you overcame the problem. @IamTheMustard, do you know how MIDI is implemented in Wwise?
I've had a couple of revisions with @Tim_Harbour to arrive at what we have now. There are styles that fit the game better, but I know that there are still a lot of space to explore.
What we've found to fit Beat Attack best:
1. Obvious, chunky beats. This is because the game's mechanics call for it, the music should assist the player.
2. 8-beat cycles, because the game runs in 8-beat cycles, though I thought this was true for music in general.
3. Shorter "pieces" of notes/samples rather than winding instrumentals, due to the nature of the beats being broken up and reconstructed at runtime.
As for the starting at lower BPM to take higher thing - I theorised that if the samples are a mix of medium and short pieces, and that we run two "layers" of samples concurrently, it would transition between BPMs easier... But I haven't been able to test that theory yet.
What we ended up doing was to have different sets of samples for different BPMs, but I feel that is impractical for production as it would triple the file size on each song... As well as feel a bit like cheating something that could be solved in a less clunky way. *could* - I don't know for sure but I theorise that it could :/
Other than those, I think there are a lot of stylistic freedom :)
Apologies if this is mentioned already, but I'm just trying to figure out the process of replacing the sound files. Do we get a build to download that we can use to swop out the files on our own machines, or a Unity project to fiddle with?
I can make the source available but traversing other people's files are always a big problem!
http://itch.io/jam/mgsa-sound-jam-7
You can either do that by replacing the sample sound-files (samples are provided in a DL link), or by tracking to the video provided (also available via a download link).
I updated the original post to be more consistent with the Jam page. Hopefully that will clear some things up!
http://itch.io/jam/mgsa-sound-jam-7/rate/28040
Audio Files:
http://aglinder.itch.io/beat-attack-mca
'OST' Version:
https://soundcloud.com/aglinder/composition-beat-box-attack
Credit: Tom Thumb for the original beat boxing samples lifted from his TedX presentation (worth watching)
Here is the game page http://creative630.itch.io/synthy-beat-attack
The youtube video of how it was designed to sound like:
@MCA Once you have made your itch.io entry, you still need to submit on the Jam page!
Was keen to try take part in this but it's been a crazy work year... will try and see in the 2 days remaining if I can at least do something with that video as an entry.
Love how both of them really step up with the BPM increase :D.
@Tuism should maybe think about having a variety of artists doings songs - the diversity is really cool! :)
Really congrats to everyone for the really great range of stuff made!! :D
We had good fun doing this and will post asap
Rhapsody Recording team
Just posting the audio file for the sake of showing I tried. :P
There were also a bunch of things that I think could've been done much better. I would've liked to different pitches/instruments to different actions. The horizontal movement of the spaceship could've been one movement (the drum beat, for example, given that it's most regular). The high pitched chiptunes arpeggios could've been reserved for multipliers, powerups or explosions. Perhaps an accompanying upward or downward arpeggio could've matched whenever a piece was lifted or dropped. And the rest of the middle pitches would've been filler music.
But yeah, I've never really composed music digitally before, so I'm happy just to have done something.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9847316/BeatAttack02.mp3
If you've got Firefox you can install the plugin Video DownloadHelper to grab videos off YouTube, though I imagine there are similar offerings for Chrome, otherwise I can also just email you my vid, it's only 3mb.
Sorry about the video link! It seems to be working for me when I right-click-save-as, so i'm not sure what was going wrong? Oh well :(
If you entered please take the time this weekend to vote for the other entries! The deadline is Monday the 22nd June.
Here are the results: http://itch.io/jam/mgsa-sound-jam-7/results
Most imortantly congratulations on completing something awesome! I was really impressed by each entry. Everyone did something different, which is great.
I think we will start the next challenge in about a months time. If anyone has a theme or game idea we can work from, please let me know!
I don't invision we will use itch.io again, and I am thinking of replacing or just removing the whole scoring aspect to the challenges (will be more chilled that way). Any suggestions on how the challges are run are welcome!
For example: