Run Guys

The teachers gave the class a design brief for this project, which said to create an experience in which a physically co-located audience where everyone have their individually controllable view or can together control a shared view. After breaking down the, originally complex, brief and a lot of brainstorming — the group decided to combine the fun experience of the game "Fall Guys" and an autorunner game.

Dividing the responsibilities among the group, I chose to focus on managing the project and take the opportunity to learn more about sound design. We did not have a lot of time to finish this project and the team was very ambitious on this one, trying to challenge ourselves to learn a new area. Meaning, as a manager I wanted to make sure we made the deadline for the final exhibition date. With sound design I set the target of creating a music track for our game, something I had not tried before.

I used the application Discord for communication and documentation, and Miro as a online whiteboard. As I usually try to do, I had a table where everyone can update what they are doing and each meeting we would discuss what we have done and what we plan to do. "To do"-list and documentation on the online whiteboard Miro.

I am not a musician, but another person in the group was and he helped me get started with creating music. Using "Ableton Live Lite" and a tutorial I started playing around with virtual instruments and beats. I took inspiration from the "Fall Guys" soundtrack, wanting to get the same intense and fun feeling.

Working on the soundtrack in Ableton.

We managed to get the game ready for exhibition day, crunching quite a bit but we had fun! The game was exhibited during a open house at our university for a day and all visitors who tried it had a lot of fun, especially kids.

I managed to get a soundtrack that both I and the team was pleased with, it captured the playfullness and intensity we wanted for the game. You can hear it in the video below starting at 0:54.

Even though I got a nice soundtrack finished, I learned that I do not have the time to continue to create music. I only managed to get the soundtrack thanks to following tutorials, making something from scratch would require me to learn much more about music theory, mixing, composition and so on. However, the knowledge I have gained can help me in communicating with other musicians about sound design on future projects.

I also learned that a team can get very motivated to work hard with team-building. As the team was starting to crunch, I proposed we round of the evenings by playing computer games with each other in the study room and we had incredibly fun. After that, I think everyone was eager to come to campus to work on the project as we knew we would finish the day with lots of fun.