A good soundtrack is one thing. It is important, especially in the indie sector. A good or phenomenal soundtrack can make the difference. It can make a good game to an outstanding experience. That’s for sure and we could list a dozen of games which are incredibly good but their soundtrack made them legendary.
We are pretty proud of our soundtrack and in the near future we’ll definitely share some more details on it. However, today we’d like to describe a neat mechanic we included in Resolutiion, which allows us to directly influence the behavior and gameplay of the playeurs. It is a really inconspicuous effect which improved the overall reception of the sound design in various playtests.
It is a speed up effect. During the fights you’ll survive in Resolutiion, you’ll often find yourself fighting against difficult enemies. That means you’ll be challenged a lot and often get low on health. And that’s exactly the moment when the effect kicks in: When you’re low on health, the music speeds up and gets faster the more damage you take and the less health you have. The result: Pressure. Through Audio. And it works pretty well so far. Whenever the music gained speed, testers started swetting.
We’ve seen in other games that the music usually gets slowed down and we tried that, too. However, tests indicated that the effect we wanted was much stronger when the music got faster.