Round 3:
Co-opterpillar
(Makey Makey)
Role:
Sound Designer
Total Dev Time:
3 Weeks
Co-opterpillar is a six player racing game where two teams of three players control a caterpillar. Using custom made buttons, each player uses their feet to turn their respective caterpillar part to the left or right. Which ever team makes it to the end first wins.
OVERVIEW
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6 Player Team Racing Game
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Made with Unity
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Custom Makey Makey Foot Buttons for Controllers
MY CONTRIBUTION
Design
Protoyping | Ideation | Feedback & Iteration
Every BVW project comes with a forced constraint.
For this project, we had the constraint of designing a game that would be suitable for the ETC's Festival.
This meant that the experience ideally should be short enough for people visiting to get the idea and play, and have a high throughput so that the maximum amount of guests can experience it.
Unlike every other round, we had this semester, we had three weeks to work with. This meant we had more time to iterate on our idea rather than jumping at the first idea we came up with.
For this project, we had two contesting ideas. The idea I came up with was about using your hands in a box with a Leap Motion to puppet 3D models in the game world. The other idea that was offered would soon be the start to Co-opterpillar. At the time, we didn't know which idea was better to work with, so we tried to prototype both within about three days.
This is the resulting whiteboard about both ideas and their minimum viable products. I provided some quick sketches of what the gameplay would look like.
The prototype we built for the Leap Motion idea included a box and black cloth to help the hands show up on the background. Because of this prototype, we quickly found that the Leap Motion could not reliably capture hands in such a small space all the time. We then pivoted to work towards Co-opterpillar.
Programming
Front End UI | Tweened Animation
Much of my work for the project came in during festival preparations. The room we were assigned had a second TV monitor in the main part of the room. We decided to use it as a scoreboard to showcase the fastest teams' clear times. For the scoreboard, we decided to make a standalone application that ran on a separate computer, because it was too far away for us to hook one computer to both monitors.
At the time, the two designated programmers were tied up with other tasks for festival, so I programmed the scoreboard myself.
The monitor where the scoreboard was set up.
The scoreboard consists of a place for name entry and an attract loop detailing game instructions. It was done using Unity's timeline feature. All of the animations were also done in Unity too.
Here is the resulting program and it's features.
Here is a photo taken during the middle of festival, showing some of the scores.
Art
Vector Artwork | Spritework | Illustration
We needed a logo for our project, so I designed one using Inkscape.
Here are some early concept sketches of the logo.
The final logo.
This logo really helped nail down the 2D style of graphics for our game. I was able to use this style when making graphics for the attract loop.
Instruction Assets
Title Assets
Each part of the logo and the border were separated so I could animated them in Unity.
Sound Design
Sound Design | Music Composition | Vocal Recording and Treatment
Music Composition:
The main inspirations for this soundtrack was Dino Dino Jungle from Mario Kart Double Dash, and the music from the original OutRun. For this game, I focused on making the music as fun as possible, which meant boosting the rhythm as much as possible. I also tried mixing sounds from 16-bit sound chips with my regular instrument line up to make it sound distinct from the other music I have made.
The game originally was going to be a lot more slow paced and focused on simply moving forward rather than it being a race. The music I originally composed played more to that wacky angle, but had to be scrapped due a shift in gameplay tone.
Sound Design:
In this class we are given a sound library for use of our base sounds. For this project, I used what I learned about synths to make sounds that reflected the squishy objects in game. I also layered a lot of background sounds to help capture the jungle aesthetic.
Vocal Recording:
Voice work was very minimal in this project. All of the voice work is done by me. It was inspired by the Mario Party announcer voice clips. All of the audio was filtered and edited in Audacity.