Did some music. Still is a WIP and stuff. Enjoy!

Tutorial finished!

And so, the logo is done!

Things are moving along quite nicely!

Due to positive feedback on our game, we’ve decided to post the sound track (which consists of of 1 song) of our game; The Westport Independent (check it out here). We posted an early version of this song during the jam, but seeing how it wasn’t the version that’s in the game, we only felt it fair to post the finished song as well. So, here goes:

Seeing how the people on this site usually don’t write what tools they’ve used when composing music, I thought it would be nice to give a short rundown of what software was used in this production.

As this song consists of a Jazz trio, very few instruments was used, meaning every instrument had to sound good in order to compensate for the lack of other instruments covering them up. Also, when working with jazz, you need to be quite careful with how you use velocity, as you lose a lot of the “feel” that defines the genre if you handle it incorrectly.

So, onto the software used:

The DAW (Digital Audio Workstation)

I work with Logic Pro, because that’s what I’m comfortable with.

The Piano

For the piano, I used Eastwest Pianos gold. It’s a costly plugin, but if you can afford it, it’s pretty much the best piano plug-in that you can find on the market. The piano actually consists of two tracks, one melody track and one accompaniment track. There’s really no differences between the two except for the melody track having slightly higher volume.

The Double Bass

I don’t really have any good plugs for the double bass, so I had to settle with the one that comes built in with Logic Pro’s sampler, the ESX24. It’s not great sounding, but with a bit of reverb it sounds okay when played together with the piano track.

The Drums

This one was a bit tricky. The only non-standard-Logic-drum-plug I have is Addictive Drums (AD), but I only own the trial version, which is very limited. However, even with it’s limitations, it sounds far better that the drum kits that come built in with Logic Pro. So I came up with a compromise: Seeing how there was no brush or jazz kit in the trial version of AD, I hade no choice but to use Logics jazz kit for the snare, toms and bass drum. But, I could still use the hi-hat and cymbals from AD, which was a very lucky thing seeing how big a part they are of the track.

And that was about it! If you haven’t checked out our game yet, be sure to do so here!

So now that that a few days has passed so were properly rested, we felt it was a good time to wright a Postmortem of our game, “The Westport Independent”. (Play it here)

Theme and original vision

I first heard of the theme at around 7am (We live in Sweden, so the theme was anounced at 3 am) and instantly tried, and failed, to come up with a good idea. The first idea that came fourth was a game about managing limited resources whiles being stuck inside a bunker/safe house/Fallout-styled Vault. We never felt too confident with the idea, mostly because we never got a good grasp of it. Added to that, when we logged on to the Ludum Dare we found that like 94% of all games that people had started posting about was either under ground or under water.

So we changed direction completely, and instead tried to make a game that was about things happening beneath the surface in society. Some ideas were thrown around, and what we ended up with was a Papers Please-ish game about censoring a newspaper.

The Good

• We managed to create a gameplay focused narrative that told the story through play
• The aesthetics managed to deliver an old, depressing, concrete-like atmosphere
• We managed to create a relatively simpel system for adding new articles and paragraphs to the game
• We managed to write 20 unique articles for the game
• We managed to make a tutorial that both told of the games setting, and how to play the game
• We got featured at indiegames.com (Although that’s probably more due to luck of being noticed than anything else).

The Bad

• Hard to put down certain papers. This is due to the collision boxes of the text getting in the way, and it was unfortunately not something we were able to fix in time for the jam.
• The articles are very ambiguous, and it can be hard to know what the government/rebels will get angry about. The ambiguous nature of the articles was something we did on purpose (as we felt that it was more interesting for the players themselves to judge what they found correct or not, rather than the game pointing out where everything should go), but it’s also something that multiple people have been frustrated with.
• Lack of ending credits. Due to Unity starting to mess with us the last couple of hours of the jam, we weren’t able to get a proper credits screen in there, which is a bit of a shame.

All in all, we learned a lot from this Jam and look forward to the next LD!

Also, be sure to check out our game here!

A little bit of gameplay from our game. Now it’s time to hit the hay so we can do the finishing touches tomorrow!

The music for our game! It’s a work in progress, so there are still some things that need to be fixed.
A bit of slow jazz for those of you who feel you need to relax a bit from all the jamming!

It’s always nice having a handbook during harsh times!

More fun with censorship! Who needs books anyways?

Having some fun with article censorship. #StillNotAPapersPleaseRipoff

The splash-screen for our game “The Westport Independent”. (#TotallyNotAPapersPleaseRipoff)