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DevBlog 21 - Sounds of CardLife

Hello and welcome to the 21st CardLife DevBlog,

We have a special DevBlog this week as we delve into our goals for the audio on CardLife as well as our usual information. We’ve also released a new patch (more info below) for you to check out, so let’s get to it:

New Patch (23) Live

We have released a new patch that you can grab automatically via the launcher. Here are the live patch notes:

  • A new pickaxe mining tool has been added
    • The pickaxe is used to mine hard materials such as stone but doesn’t dig dirt as fast as the spade
  • Spades can no longer dig anything harder than dirt
  • Materials now take different times to be edited i.e. stone takes longer to mine than dirt
  • Bushes can now be interacted with the spade/pickaxe to get berries
    • Berries can be picked up and added to the hotbar
    • Berries temporarily don’t have any function
  • Icons on the inventory now disappear if you have no material left
  • Materials now place the correct number of units on the ground
    • 6 units for a full sphere
    • 3 for a hemisphere (i.e. when placing on flat ground)
    • 1 and 2 units now place smaller discs
  • Fixed a bug stopping holes appearing in the terrain

Ongoing Work - Quick Update

As the majority of this DevBlog is going to be about Audio, I’ll just give you a quick update with what else we have been doing:

Mike has now begun work on adding all the snap points to the building prefab pieces in anticipation of the building system being implemented – which is hopefully going to start soon. Cian has begun work on cutting down trees. This works by using your hands or tools to cut holes into the trunk of the tree, similar to how our original CardLife demo worked. Once you have cut all the way through, the tree will fall down and you can collect the wood for crafting. We are also continuing our work on the terrain lodding system which is improving every day. This has also highlighted a memory issue we are having which was the cause of the runtime error crash you may have seen. We’re going to investigate this further.

The following is from our Audio guy:

Audio Update - Answers to be Found

Maybe someone noticed the background tune that accompanies you as you wander around the vast environment of CardLife. The most observant among you may have noticed the light wind or the quiet sound of your footsteps.This is because the guy that is writing to you now is the one working on the audio content of CardLife. Pleased to meet you. Believe me if I say that doing audio for a non-linear game can be quite tricky. You need to solve a lot of problems and find several solutions. The implementation part of a sound designer’s job in “normal” games is essentially you have an object, you associate a sound to it. Then, it’s all about the content.

In CardLife you have no “formal objects” (Prefabs in Unity’s language) so you see a tree, but that tree is not actually there, it’s not an object, it’s not something a sound designer can interact with. Moreover, the environment is so vast that you simply can’t put predefined triggers to play different ambient sounds in different areas, nor can you place switches changing the footstep sounds in the map. Not to mention the music. Now the pace never changes during the exploration, but what about combat (once we have implemented it anyway:)) And you’ll have to feel threatened sometimes, and all of this is going to happen in a non predictable way in a huge world. So... what???

Music - Keep it Simple

Let’s start with the music. We chose to offer a forest biome at first, so that’s why you are getting fairytale-ish flutes, harp and a cello melody. Basically the ensemble I had when I used to play in a celtic music band. At the moment the base soundtrack is 4 minutes long, but I would like to expand and develop it, so that it never gets dull to explore the huge landscape. Saying that, the music will be completely different for each biome and will be built around its base track, with basically two variations, one for when you approach something potentially dangerous, and one for the proper combat.

But CardLife is also going to be a game with fantasy and technological content, and brainstorming is free, so why not adapt the music to your style of game play? Are you wearing heavy knight armour? The forest music turns fantasy. Are you shooting with a laser gun? A drum and bass track gets added to the flutes and harps. Are you driving a mech? What about some heavy guitars in the background? You see, trying to solve problems you never had before can lead you to a whole new universe of solutions (and new problems as well)!

Sound Effects - Bring a World to Life

As I said before, what happens in the game will not be predefined, but the very evolved middleware tools we have nowadays can be very helpful for environmental audio. The most useful information I have are the coordinates defining the position of the player in the map. So I can build an environmental audio track based on layers activating/deactivating according the to the player character's position. Are they standing on a mountain? Maybe the wind should turn heavier. Are they underground? No wind anymore. Are they in a cave? Water spilling and a reverb could do the job. Near to the sea? You’ll hear the waves, as well birds singing when you are surrounded by the trees. A simple system of triggers and parameters will be read by the middleware to make you feel immersed in a credible environment.

So what about the ambience, what about footsteps? I have done two kinds of “switches” to be associated with the different textures, one for the surfaces and one for the material, managing the sound respectively of your footsteps and of your tools interacting with them. At the moment the surfaces you are walking on are just graphical textures, but in time they will have different behaviours (you can’t dig a rock with a spade, can you?) and many different properties which will all define also their sound.

An interesting aspect of the audio production for Card Life is that it won’t just be technically tricky, but also artistically. Also if everything is done of recycled cardboard, walking on a rock will sound exactly like you would expect in the “real” world. A dragon will scream and flap like an ehm, “actual” dragon, and a mech will be made of metal and servo mechanisms.
I have recorded lots of cardboard sounds just in case anyway. You never know ;)

Thanks for reading!

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Unfortunately we lost internet in the office and this is the reason why the DevBlog and the patch are coming out later than usual. Hopefully though it has been fixed and we won’t have a reoccurrence.

If you have any feedback, questions or comments please feel free to contact us at any of our social portals: Facebook, Twitter and our very own Forums.

Cheers,

Rich - Lead Designer