Alexander Wong
Technical Sound Designer /
Game Developer
Tempoland
Tempoland
2D, Rhythm, Platformer
Role
Lead Game Designer
Engine/Language
Custom / XML
Project Duration
30 Weeks
Digipen Game Awards 2017 : Second Best Audio
About
Tempoland is a platformer game in which objects in the game move according to the rhythm.
Each level has their own individual soundtrack and levels were designed with beats and melodies in mind.
Game Design
The main intent for the players is to understand the patterns of platforming puzzles by linking them to the variations of the music. The objects will move and react to the beat or melody of the instruments they are "assigned" to.
The game has a minor pseudo-synaesthesia effect to it, in a sense that you would be able to "see" melodies and rhythm via the various obstacles placed in the game.
This is so that players can play the game with the image of the obstacles being “pushed” by musical elements.
Our wish is that with these musical elements pushing the obstacles, players would enter a different state of mind when approaching the game’s obstacles where they use the musical elements to “observe” puzzles and hazards.
Work Summary
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Prototyping Mechanic in Unity before moving to team's custom made engine
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Level Design
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Sound and Music Design
Music Design for a Rhythmic Platformer
Originally, the game had "emitters" on each individual object that worked as long as they entered the screen. This had some awkward musical pacing issues. We shifted the whole "modular" track design to each level segment being one particular loop at a time. Which means our track is cut into multiple 8 bar portions.
These trigger zones had about 3-5 seconds of moving without having to interact with any musical element. This was done to have the loop swapping at specific points(either at the end of the 4th bar or 8th bar) to create natural level progression.
Major Hurdles
We had major problems syncing items to beats in our engine. This was because we did not take into account the game frame rate initially. These led to objects in the game having major timing offsets.
Further into the production, the student made engine was getting better over time. So initial issues we had such as lack of prefab spawning and transforming objects in the editor were gone in the last 8 weeks of production. Before that we had to input all transform values in XML before testing it in the game.