Spaces Of Play

We already gave you some looks behind the scenes of the development process of Spirits. Today, we’d like to show you some screenshots from the actual game.

Mattias and me attended No More Sweden in Skövde last weekend. The game jam is in it’s third year and this time people where encouraged to give presentations about current projects or things they care about. I really liked the new format – it was great to see what everyone is working on. We gave two talks as well: Mattias shared the game design process of Spirits and I talked a bit about Promotion for Indies (see slide above). The whole game jam including the talks was also live-streamed and can still be watched online if you missed it. We also uploaded some pictures on Flickr.

Between working on the Spirits high-score backend and preparing a demo video for Sense Of Wonder Night, we also managed to make a simple prototypish music puzzle game for the jam, which Martin Jonasson is playing on the photo above. And it won the second place in the Most Interesting Use of Sound/Music category.

Thanks everyone for a great weekend and hope to see you next year!

My friend Andreas asked me in 2006 if I‘d like to compose the music for Understanding Games. At that time I had little experience in producing soundtracks for video games. Even so, the collaboration for this project worked really well and I ended up doing the sound design for two further projects; Mr. Bounce and The Black Forest.

In 2010 I got contacted by Mattias from Spaces Of Play. He asked me if I‘d like to produce the music and sound effects for a new Lemmings-like iPhone game he was working on. I said yes right away.

Our workflow with Spirits looked something like this: Mattias and Marek told me about the ideas they had in mind and gave me some examples to listen to. They also had some first graphical sketches about the game.

We agreed on doing some kind of contemporary instrumental classical score for the game. That sounds a bit diffuse, doesn‘t it? To be more precise, we wanted to create a poetical, melancholic, and slightly spooky atmosphere using orchestral sounds.

Still not clear enough? I know from my own experience that talking about music and atmosphere in music can often be very difficult and unsatisfying. There is a high risk for misunderstanding in talking about music and agreeing on a musical characteristics during the composition process can become tedious. Because of these problems it‘s very pleasant for a Sound Designer if the client trusts his work and judgment. With Spirits I was lucky to receive this kind of trust.

I started to sketch out melodies and harmony patterns on the piano and refined them in Steinberg Cubase 4. For the instrumentation I used the vast (over 33 GB) Komplete 5 library from Native Instruments which allowed me to fine-tune the characteristics of the instruments in a very intuitive way.

Marek provided me with videos of specific scenes in the game which made my work feel like composing for a silent movie: I‘m the conductor and together with the orchestra I‘m watching the scenes and spontaneously set them to music.

I decided to assign the “drummer” in my virtual orchestra for a major part of the sound effects. Every action in the game should be made audible by the sound of a percussion instrument that best matches the characteristic of the action. For example when building a bridge out of leaves, the player can hear the leaves rustling. This sound is created by a rattle shaking. I used a similar approach to sound design with musical instruments in Krystian Majewski‘s Trauma.

I regularly uploaded my music patterns to Basecamp so the other team members could review them and give feedback. Mattias would put the sounds into the game so we could play-test how well the music and sound effects fit. After several iterations we ended up with three nine-minute tracks each consisting of three varied parts which slowly build up.

For the mixing of the tracks I used the UAD-2 Solo Neve DSP card which features an excellent emulation of the Neve 88RS Channel Strip and Neve 33609/SE Compressor. For the mastering of the sounds I went to the studio of Andreas Schorpp in Karlsruhe where he works with high class analog equipment which allows for a much better result compared to home-recording equipment.

Martin Straka works as a sound designer since 2005 and lives in Karlsruhe, Germany. You can listen to his work at his website or follow him on Twitter. Many of his video game soundtracks are also available on Bandcamp.

Watch me paint an art asset for Spirits in this 8 min video. For the very first time you can also hear our game soundtrack in this video. It’s composed by Martin Straka.

»Spirits« is an action-strategy game where you help a tribe of leaf-shaped spirits to reach their final destination. To do this you manipulate the wind or build and destroy elements of the levels. This blog post will explain the decisions and thoughts that lead to the final art style of Spirits, and how this process also influenced parts of the game design.

At our first meeting Mattias showed me an early prototype he had designed. The general idea was a Lemmings-like game with ants walking on leaves and sticks. We both liked the natural setting but wanted to have a more fairy-tale like atmosphere and character. At that time I was still illustrating Andreas’ experimental game series The Black Forest which has a very abstract representation of a ghost as an avatar. It was just a rectangle with two dots as eyes. Initially I wanted to make this abstract character more lively, but it didn’t fit the concept of The Black Forest. Instead I took my ideas and applied them on Spirits.

Before I could start designing the character, we had to decide on the proportions of the characters and the game world. How big should the character be in terms of pixels? Due to technical limitations of the iPhone we initially decided to use a sprite sheet of 512 × 512 pixels. The bigger the character would be, the fewer frames I could use for the character animation. But if I made the character too small the game would loose atmosphere and important details.

I sketched some sizes and we decided on 48 × 48 pixels which looked and felt good. But I proceeded to paint all the character states in 72 × 72 pixels, since it was only slightly more work and gave us more flexibility in case we changed our mind. However, after a while this still felt limiting and we decided to allocate even more graphics memory to the main character.

Already early on, I tried to capture a spooky atmosphere in the sketches. I drew the overall light situation quite dark with a point light source from behind and a weak bounce light hitting the front. This means most of the area beneath the ground is an even dark color, which draws the players attention to the ground surface where the spirits walk.

Later on we added a strongly blurred and colorful background to make the atmosphere feel less dark and more mystical, but the overall style of Spirits is still based on these early sketches and this lightning setup.

After the style and the proportions were roughly set, I began to sketch some more characters. I had the idea that the characters could be sleepwalking. This would explain why they would always wander heedlessly in one direction. At first this seemed great, but after trying it out it felt too artificial and not the direction we wanted to keep working in.

Another idea was born out of my love for insects. There are these amazing insects which mimic leaves and sticks for camouflage. Since the spirits inhabit the forest, I thought about the possibility that they could have adopted to the forest environment and therefore look more like leaves. I sketched this idea down quickly (see the lower right corner).

We further developed this idea and ended up with a character with a big leaf as a head, without arms but having legs. Because of the general ghostlike look of the sketches the character seemed like a spirit, which rises from a fallen leaf. This is what it ultimately became for us.

The character design influenced an important aspect of the game design. We knew from the beginning that we wanted to have a more dynamic component in the game, which influenced the spirits in some way. We were thinking about fluids and gas at first, but the leaf-like spirit character inspired us to use wind instead.

As mentioned before we wanted the atmosphere to feel less dark, so color was added to the backgrounds. I wanted the light to appear as if the viewer looks into the sunset through a dense forest. The viewer wouldn’t see direct sunlight, only bounce light, illuminated fog and trees.

I made a quick sketch to figure out the color values. The bounce light in the foreground was reduced in strength to emphasize the effect of looking directly into the sunset.

Then I made the same thing again with abstract shapes and without distracting details.

The strong orange color in the background makes the overall atmosphere friendly but the dark blue (no it’s not black!) ground color keeps the spooky and dark touch to it. We liked this approach and so we decided to go with it.

Below you can see the final art style we are using for Spirits.

Andreas and Mattias on the way to the coffee break – Photo from Official GDC under Creative Commons

Mattias and me went to GDC last week. It was an intense week with a crazy amount of things going on every day. We met old and new friends. We got very competitive and physical with Copenhagen Game Collective’s B.U.T.T.O.N.. Steph Thirion showed his new game Faraway at the Gamma IV party. Grapefrukt’s awesome one-button RPG Glorg almost made it into the Gamma selection. Krystian Majewski’s game Trauma was nominated at the IGF in three categories, one of them for Excellence in Audio due to our very own sound wiz Martin. Cactus won the Nuovo Award with Tuning and gave a memorable speech around minute 31. Chris Hecker told you to finish your game and was worried about scandinavian kids drinking too much. Ryan from the CO-OP show demanded equal media coverage for all games in his excellent rant. Eskil Steenberg explained why procedural is not randomness. Jonathan Blow did a tech talk about the implementation of the rewind feature in Braid. Semi Secret software announced Flixel for iPhone in their Canabalt postmortem. Superbrother’s Sword & Sworcery looked amazing. Moo business cards with different motifs were the new thing.

Thanks everyone for a great week in San Francisco!

Spirits is our second game we are working on here at Spaces Of Play. While our first game Mr. Bounce was ported over from Flash, Spirits will be an original game design specifically developed for the iPhone and iPod touch.

We are a small team of four people working on the game. You can read more about our backgrounds on the About page. We will post updates of the game development progress here on the blog and on Twitter. We will also try to share some Behind-the-scenes knowledge that we think might be interesting to other developers.

If you happen to be in San Francisco at the GDC next week and would like to try out a preview build of our game, please drop us a mail and we’ll be happy to meet you there.

Welcome and Have Fun!