This week I worked on adding music into my game as that's both an integral part of video games and also for perfecting the ps2 era I am aiming for. PS2 games often featured jungle, dnb, and breakcore style music, especially in racing games such as Gran Turismo. I wanted to incorporate this aesthetic by finding music within this genre. If you want to listen to Aero Rush's music you can find the playlist here.
Once I had all the music I then worked on creating a script for it. I want it act like a radio station almost, taking inspiration from how the music works in SSX3. Although there isn't any dialogue (yet?) I have managed to create a playlist that is shuffled each time you play a level, allowing skips as well as returns. It works by creating an array of all the songs and randomly ordering them. Skipping forwards and backwards is easy as you then just play the next song ahead +1 or behind -1 in the array.
I then added an animation to go along with it that simply slides a panel on the bottom left of the screen telling the player the title and artist of the current song. For the information to display I just had it display the name of the file playing, and renamed each song to be [song - artist]
As you can see in the image I also added more items to Level 2. I decided that it was feeling too empty after completing Level 3. I still want it to fit in theme with being an abandoned desert on a abandoned earth and so I went a bit meta and added a destroyed stands object and shade covers inspired by the sails on the barges from star wars.
I then went about creating the next and possibly final level for my game (depending on time constraints.) For this I wanted to work on introducing split paths as that was brought up to me during playtesting. The very first thing I did was create a rough sketch of what the level layout would look like:
Very professional. I took a lot of inspiration for the location from Mass Effect and its planet Virmire. I want to have that combination of paradise island and large sci fi, gleaming white buildings. After all the future can't be all doom and gloom right.
I then started work on building out the track for testing and adding grayboxes to feel how the level would play.
For the ocean I created a tileable texture and used the texture scroller script I created for Level 2 to make the ocean roll into the beaches.
I then created rock assets for the cliff sides and found assets to create billboarded trees to really build out the PS2 look for foliage.
For these cliffs I faked shading by painting on darker areas. For the cave however I baked an AO map to use.
I then worked on integrating them into the level:
It's nowhere near done but I am happy with the way its looking so far. The last thing I did was make the pause menu look nicer which you can see in the video here:
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