Hello again! This is the first devlog of 2024. The factory line here has been chugging ever forward, and today I come to talk (and rant!) a bit about the sound design & some seaweed.
Firstly, the sound. This project has the most fun and most infuriating sound design challenges that I've had the pleasure to experience so far. It was not planned to be this way, but together with Likop we ended up using mostly self-recorded trash (staying true to Abyss City's values) like heavily processed tea slurping for isopod dialogue & old laptop fans for the sweeping hums of the soundtrack.
Whenever I start bumping a wall, reminding myself that we are supposed to have fun making games has helped me find fun solutions. This method has worked for most(!) of the sound design tasks where I could wrap up many things in the first or second try... but there is one track in particular that has defeated us many many times:
the racing music.
For the love of all detrivores, we have had so much trouble with this. Likop's solution has been classified as "psychological warfare" and is staying as backup in case we don't end up making it less repetitive, longer, or inflicted psychic damage.
I've scrapped more than 4 attempts, maybe 5th time is the charm. We shall see. I will hopefully return with happy news regarding the race track soon.
On other developments, Abyss City has recieved a fantastic layer of varnish from Nicole (our very own hired gun technical artist!), and she has done an amazing job glueing all the visuals together with her post-processing magic.
She also managed to implement the seaweed flora, but unfortunately we haven't yet figured out how to make them wave around. This might be down to us being locked into Unity's Standard Rendering Pipeline(it would be really nice if Unity can one day decide to stick with just one!). We will look into this if there is a good solution.
Until next time!
-maaruska
cohost: https://cohost.org/maaruska?page=0
wishlist: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2410700/Isop0dyssey/