CGD: Week 8 and 9 Recap
After our lecture on sound design in games, I was inspired to work on the audio direction for our project to give the world of Sol that extra flavour and enhance the experience for players. I followed the steps laid out in the lecture and came up with a brief for our audio design:
“Team up with your friends to save the once-peaceful island of Sol and its holy deity from the clutches of evil. Solve puzzles and collect relics to sacrifice to the Sun God and help him gain his strength back before time runs out... Or ruin it all and sow chaos in the name of the Great Dragon!”
The next step was to look into media references for the type of atmosphere we wanted our game to have. Since we were basing the concept on legends from the Central and South American civilizations of the Inca, Aztecs, and Maya; I decided to seek inspiration from movies and games based on those cultures. However, as Land of Sol features a more light-hearted, cartoonish, low-poly art style, I decided to explore animated features and their game adaptations for inspiration.
I settled on three animated films and their tie-in games:
Tintin and the Temple of the Sun (1969) and Tintin: Prisoners of the Sun (PC, 1997)
The Road to El Dorado (2000) and Gold and Glory: The Road to El Dorado (PS1, 2000)
The Emperor's New Groove (2000) and The Emperor's New Groove (PS1, 2000).
Our lecture mentioned looking at visuals as well as sounds for inspiration, so I compiled a file with the relevant images and soundtracks embedded within. Folks at KU can access it here, as it is a bit too long to be edited into blog format. I added some of my favourite visuals below, as they inspired quite a lot of the game’s visual as well as audio design.
I also managed to find quite a lot of good sources for audio we could use royalty-free, and will be compiling a list of essential sounds for our game using these libraries:
Tools and resources:
HZSMITH :
JDSherbert:
