Hello everyone!
I hope you are doing well and staying healthy!
Over the last month there has been a lot of change, growth, and reflection for my passion project: Duet of Sonance.
While I have always had a love for pixel art and design, I have heavily shifted the art direction to a 2.5D style. From the pictures that I posted from before on social media or even from my previous blog, everything was completely 2D. While I adore this style, one issue that I ran into was getting dynamic lighting properly implemented, especially for outdoor scenes. The lighting to me felt very dull, but I am feeling much happier with the visual aesthetic of the project.
Going forward, I think a month doing sprints for this project and then revealing the progress in features feels about right for what I want to share, as I don’t want to spoil too much of the story, characters, or plot elements. It’s really hard to say, but the game will probably have a playtime of around 30-45 hours, which is fairly standard for many RPG games.
At the end of this Dev Log, I wanted to talk about some goals that I want to have with this project, as I have a huge passion for helping the music and art community through this work. While I am composing music for my project, I also believe that using this project can help amplify more composers and my fellow friends and colleagues as I continue to grow this game.
#1) Rhythm-Based Action RPG
Yes, I am an RPG fan. I grew up on them and will probably never stop playing them. That being said, I always felt that many of the RPGs in games did music dirty (or at least music classes or characters that had music as their main strength - yes, I’m looking at you FF3 bard… ). The cool thing about this game is it'‘s completely tempo driven, meaning that attacks happen on beat rhythmically. However, it’s not completely rhythm locked, as the characters can run around and avoid attacks from enemies and initiate techniques on the dime without needing that rhythm locked in. Only normal attacks will have that lock. As time goes on, this system will further expand with potential sub-division capabilities. All of the weapons will have notes associated with the scale the battle pieces are in so the sound design and music feel dynamic and interesting to listen to while in combat.
#2) Cutscenes
What is a narrative driven game without cutscenes. I had such a tough time wrapping my head around Unity’s timeline system, but after wrestling with it actually started to click and it feels pretty intuitive. I have successfully began the process of implementing pretty simple cutscenes (mainly dialogue boxes, basically movement, music, etc). As the game continues to expand I want to add more features to the cutscenes so that they feel much for active and alive!
#3) DYnamic lighting and Visual Effects
This is fairly self-explanatory, but Unity hosts a lot of cool features that allow for dynamic light, fog, aerosol density, and many more features. The really great benefit to this is that they can also be scripted so hopefully things can feel more natural in the world moving forward. I also began playing around with the Shader Graphs and Unity’s particle system to create more impactful attacks, blending both 2D sprites and 3D systems together.
#4) Music Implementation
Of course the world felt a little too quiet for me after awhile so I ended up testing an Audio system within the game having written music for certain sections so I don’t go insane working on this!! I actually started writing a boss theme (sneak peak). While the artwork in 2.5D can feel a bit more on the adorable side, the story has a LOT more depth to it so hopefully you can feel that sentiment.
#4) Dynamic dialogue
Some quests and dialogue will have branching which can lead to different results depending on how you answer or progress through the story. While I didn’t want to have a ton of branching (since most of the story is linear) I wanted to introduce this concept as this could create unique situations that can add flare to the game.
Future goals…
With all of that to say, in the future I will be planning a kickstarter (hopefully by the end of the year but can’t necessarily promise it will be ready by then) so that more collaboration can happen. I really do believe in helping through my work and to support people in their journeys as creatives and professionals. While so far everything has been done on my own as a solo dev, life isn’t supposed to be lonely, even through endeavors such as this.
Some things that I want to bring to fruition through this project:
Support composers and musicians by having them featured in certain dungeons, bosses, etc. (as this is a music ARPG after all!)
Support music education through the funds raised through this project (a portion of the money will go to music education, school districts, and/or specific students who have a drive and passion for music)
Feature a few of my private piano/composition students by having them as guest selections on the OST.
Essentially, I want to get the community involved and to support music and to bring to light it’s many intricate beauties and challenges. That is something that I will forever stand for with this work.
Anyways, if you made it to the end, I really appreciate it and I hope you’re looking forward to more! I’m excited to continue sharing my progress and I hope you are too!