I’ve been cranking out a bunch of songs lately, on both acoustic and electronic devices. It’s been a blast to be diving into music again. Most of the electronic tunes I’ve been working on were intended to be used for our Sweet Ride video game (which is still in the works), but I’ve already got more than I need for that. So maybe these will appear somewhere else. These tunes are created with hard hitting drums, lots of bass, lo-fi synths, and acoustic toy samples. Here are a few previews of those new tracks:
Bonus, today is #808day (named after the famous 808 drum machine, known for it’s low tuned kickdrum). So it’s a perfect day to share these tracks.
We are still banging away on our Sweet Ride game and I’ve finally started cranking out some song ideas for it, but first I wanted to show you the awesome cassette tape effect we added to the game’s pause screen:
Like I said, I’ve been kicking out some jams for Sweet Ride and I’m really digging them. I started out wanting to go for a more chiptune sound (even more chip sounding than my actual chiptunes), but that just wasn’t working. So I dug up my SK-1 and started sampling some circuit bent electronics, which I re-arranged in Reason into… this stuff. Not sure if it’s electro-pop, or what, but it’s highly reminiscent of my old hip hop production, which also used lots of toy keyboards and circuit bending. 3 of these tracks were made in Reason, one of them was produced entirely on a Gameboy using Nanoloop.
Next up on the game is better level assets (right now we are just using the same wooden boxes for everything) and adding some frictionless physics to the board, which really add to the hard-to-control-floaty-thing feeling.
It’s been a while since I’ve shared some of our progress on Sweet Ride, so here’s a quick update. First off, here’s some recent in game footage:
Some of those recent changes include
New camera angle- we brought the camera closer to the board with a wider field of view. The end result should help emphasis the height of the jump.
Seamless lava and new fireballs- some tweaks to the lava levels
Coin counter works- And it saves your state too
New health meter- more details on that below
In app-purchase and other buttons working
Rats chase you as you roll across a level
New intro animation
The pizza health meter (in the upper left hand corner) was driving me nuts. It looked terrible and was in need of redesign. It was a remnant of an older version of the game, where you were delivering pizza, and the image looked like it wasn’t scaling properly. At the same time, players were saying it wasn’t obvious that collecting donuts in the game would add to your life. So I made the health-meter a donut and it makes the game ten times better. It is “Sweet Ride” after all.
While playtesting our Sweet Ride game, we kept having players ask us why the board didn’t slow down or change direction whenever they turned it. For us the game was always meant to be a silly un-realistic take on skateboard games, but for our players the lack of friction was distracting. So we decided to make it a hoverboard game.
Now I’m just wondering, which ground effect do you like best and why? A, B, or C? These are the undersides of the boards, the tops will just have grip tape (like a normal board). Here’s some recent gameplay footage.
When viewed from the top down (the normal player view), the board will have a glow underneath it like this:
