This entry is pretty crazy; either you guys put a lot of content from other projects in here or you didn't sleep at all.
What I like the most has to be the music. The energy and soundbites in the Music are just really fun. The character designs and their animations are also just great. The environment is vibrant and varied. The catch mini games creative. This is just a great experience all around!
I did end up having memory issues at some point, which made catching the second dipshit incredibly hard (Maybe unload terrain that is not visible). Also when you stomp with solidude, there was barely any feedback for if something is happening (which made me question if I should continue stomping or not).
I would love to see the fully realized ambitious version of this game someday :)
Viewing post in Munch Planet jam comments
Wow, thank you so much!
Actually, we were super stressed out since we barely had any actual gameplay before the final day since we spent so much time on literally everything else before that part lol (including the intro + tutorial section). So unfortunately we only had one day to finalise gameplay. But that last day melon worked probably 20 hours straight on the game, and I did 15 hours following my already 6 hours at my job haha. Melon worked pretty much non-stop all day this final week. There was quite a bit of reuse from other projects such as the spherical movement which we had experimented with before (and assets that we didn't have time to make ourselves).
The dipshits are indeed horrible to catch with lower fps lol. We added a graphics slider which helped for my laptop, but we didn't know about the memory issue, so that's a shame.
And thanks for liking the music!! I was so happy with it myself that I released the soundtrack already. There are links in the game's description, and it's coming to Spotify and Apple Music soon!
To me there's no real difference between how I approach soundtracks and other types of music. For this jam I just played around with silly compositions and sounds until I hit stuff I liked, really.. I've been putting a lot more effort into making music this past year and it helped me improve a lot. I will say though, I usually have a very hard time being inspired to create music. Essentially just coming up with stuff to create, and sticking with a project, is very challenging for me. Game jams like these usually give me that inspiration, since the game we're making provides context to the music.
Something that I felt always held me back was my limited set of samples to pick from. All of the percussion and some sfx in this soundtrack was pretty quickly laid out with samples from my sample library. I use FL Studio and they recently got a subscription system for samples (such as other similar services like Splice), and getting access to that allowed me to way more easily look for sounds to use in my tracks. Just having access to a huge library of high quality sounds helped me achieve a good foundation for the music, and it really boosted my creativity too I think. That said, my previous OST was made almost entirely using free instruments from spitfire, where I heavily focused on composition. So it just depends on the scenario I think. But even then, just high quality sounds and instruments in general helps a lot for how the song turns out.
Although I think for the most part I focused on the composition itself for these tracks too. I usually just pick or create some instrument and play around on my midi keyboard to find something interesting. Some of these tracks I didn't even have any plan going in - not even where in the game they'll be used lol. I just had fun! Others spawned from an initial idea, such as the beginning of Gogogo!.
I think composing interesting melodies and arrangements just comes from experience. A lot of the time when I put stuff down, it's either just intuition or landing on an instrument/melody/sound that I either think sounds good, or I just find funny. Most of the time you gotta just trust the process and play along. Make a lot of stuff and use other songs as references! I'm sure you'll get to a point you're happy with soon enough :) Good luck making music!!