As a matter of fact, you can play thousands of them. But I was hoping you’d play mine.
Our little team of seven game developers made Asterisk for the 72-hour Ludum Dare 48 game jam just a few weekends ago. What’s a game jam, you ask? It’s an event where you’re given a certain amount of time (often only one to three days), and usually a theme or other constraints, to make a video game. In its entirety. Yeah, believe it or not, that’s possible.
The winning theme, chosen by participants’ votes and announced at the start of the 3-day virtual jam, was “Deeper And Deeper.” I was audio lead, dialogue designer, mixer, and one of three sound designers for Asterisk, a little 2D pixel art platformer where you’re an expendable employee for a giant, soulless corporation, drilling deeper and deeper into asteroids for ancient alien artifacts. And, oh, it’s in a demilitarized zone, so watch out for buried explosives. Our tagline: “Everything is valuable… except you.”
This. Was. SO MUCH FUN. I managed to assemble a really excellent 5-person audio team of mostly game jam newbies, but people who had serious talent and particular strengths in music and sound. Together with an excellent programmer and a wonderful artist we cranked out a game that we all really enjoy playing—so much so that we’re continuing to debug and develop it post-jam. Here’s are the WebGL and download versions submitted at the end of the jam, bugs and all, as well as credits:
I’ll share more cleaned-up and feature-rich builds for you to download via this Google Drive link as they get made.
If you’re looking for a deeper dive into the tech stuff… We worked in various DAWs and implemented in Fmod. Our programmer built the game in Unity but did a bit of hard-coding for some of the Fmod implementations. In the middleware we’ve got a system that gradually adds weight and darkness to some of the sound effects as you descend deeper and deeper into each asteroid.
Our composers put together an interactive soundtrack that responds to depth, as well as the player either dying or surviving the two minute excursion, and transitions smoothly between the title screen, gameplay, end screen, and other screens.
I built us a responsive dialogue system that gives story background, time-remaining announcements, and snarky corporate encouragement, all voiced by Alexa Thanos, one of our two fantastic composers. (The VO has been one of the big hits of the entire jam, people have overwhelmingly adored it!) The system also radio-futzes all our dialogue so it’s all coming from the helmet in your company-provided space suit, and responds to the depth parameter to become more glitchy and distorted as you dig deeper. And ID numbers of asteroids, names of deceased coworkers, and whole lines of dialogue are randomly chosen to add interest in case, like me, you get mildly addicted and want to play for hours.
Aside from functioning as audio lead and building this dialogue system, my own contribution included some sound design—the bombs, bomb countdown timers, item collection sounds, and time-remaining notification sound are mine. I also mixed the game, including a few side chains for ducking (especially when bombs explode) and dialogue glitching, and using Fmod’s priority system to make sure the bomb sounds, dialogue, and music don’t get interrupted. Post-jam we’ve been fixing bugs, working with our programmer on tweaking instance limits to manage the instance and voice count, and planning some additional VO and music.
The audio team has been talking about doing some short little behind-the-scenes videos. I’ll share them here and all over the socials when that happens. It’s been a great group of humans to work with and I’m really enjoying this.