TURN !

A story of TURN part 3

“Wait for me near the docks, I’ll meet you when I know more.” Obviously, she really treated him like a child. She could at least have told him a little more, like why they had come here, what they were looking for, except a good nasty cold. Well, she already should have been here for more than half an hour now, I must find what exactly is going on, she may be in danger.

Kurt shook his legs to bring back the circulation after such a long motionless waiting. Then he plunged into the old port meanders.
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In a game like in a movie, music is a part of the atmosphere. For TURN we asked David Soltany to put his skills at work, since he is the composer we’ve been working with on other games at Creative Patterns and we were very pleased of this cooperation.

Today we will speak about TURN’s music with David who kindly answered our questions.

- How long have you been working on music for video games?

- I started officially in 2007 with Creative Patterns when I worked on the sound design of Fashion Designer and Gourmet Chef.  So 2010 is my 3rd year as a composer / sound designer in the video game industry.

- In general, do the game designers order you something very specific or do they trust your experience and let you make real creations?

- In the beginning, I had to prove myself, that’s quite normal. So I followed the recommendations to the letter with more or less success. Since then, I often had free hands to compose and create musics and sounds, according to the confidence the studio put in me.

- What were your inspirations to create TURN’s musical universe?

- The inspirations are largely visual. Indeed, each world represents a specific musical universe, and thus an appropriate choice of instruments. For example in an ice world the instruments must evoke the crystal, ice and water. I had to use percussive sounds like the glockenspiel, the celesta, vibraphone, and atmospheric sounds to stick better to the setting.
Another example is the New York Harbor, I had to combine metal sounds to match with the background. Pipelines, processed organic sounds (anvils, waves, bells) may be reminiscent of a maritime atmosphere. An sort of theme is played continuously to create a very urban atmosphere.

- What are the main constraints that you met on TURN?

- The only real constraint was to avoid having a real redundancy when the atmosphere buckles. This is rather difficult because the theme can’t really exceed a minute, yet the player is led sometimes to stay several minutes on a level. If you have a too powerful theme you risk to tire the ears while remaining “fuzzy” allows a repetition that does not shock. The best example is the atmosphere of New York Harbor.

- Are you a gamer?

- I’m actually a video games player, though obviously less than I was before. But I’ve always been very picky about the content. I have been working 4 years in a video game store as a salesman and that allowed me to test a large number of games. It gave me the opportunity to judge the talent of art direction in a game, and especially music. Some big productions (Metal Gear, Lineage 2 for example) use composers who usually work for Hollywood, and the result is very impressive.
But I happened to be very disappointed in other games, musically speaking, (City of Heroes, Zelda Twilight Princess, among others) or because the sound quality is not really there (Zelda) or because the Music is very poor (City of Heroes)

Thanks to David for his explanations and here is one of his videos for an overview of his breadth of talent.

David Soltany – Invasion

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A Story of TURN Part 2

“A job like any other ones” is precisely what Camila dreamed of at that time.

Hidden behind a container, she was watching a conversation between two dockworkers. She could almost be taken for a traditional office employee with her strict lady’s suit, apart from the old faded gabardine she wore on top of it.
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A story of TURN part 1

When I think that Camila told me this time it was a cushy task… I should have listened to what my mother said, never trust what goes out from a lipsticked mouth… And that bloody rain keeps falling… I must look like an old wet dog…

Kurt glanced around, grumbling. His tall ungainly silhouette huddled under the porch of an old Thai restaurant was giving away a veil of steam. In the diffuse and dirty light of an old street-lamp, he looked like a ghost waiting impatiently for the storm to pass back, so that he could go on haunting the old city streets.
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Bathed in sweat and startled at the slightest cry of wild animals, I was walking fearfully amid the humid jungle in search of the strange indigenous living here. I had been warned to be careful, but I just had to find something interesting to study if I wanted to keep my job.

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Sly look and cunning gait, David Lichtle is the devil incarnate. One of my proofs is his red hair that he sometimes hides under a hat to avoid be sentenced to be burnt at the stake. He is inseparable from his confederate Maxime Praud, but nobody knows yet which one leads the other, or if they are accomplice in their pernicious acts.

I have a theory about this, that David would control Maxime through red hair he had implanted in his beard. But others argue that Maxime is the brain of the duo … this seems unlikely, given their actions … I mean that they have a brain … hum …

And yet they were able to demonstrate a boundless ingenuity when it came to concoct Kurt and Camila ever-harder obstacles. I managed to have a quick look at their evil plans, and I can tell you it is really chilling.

It will take a great dose of spirit to our two heroes to manage to defeat the devious traps they have set up. Many unfortunates have tried and did not come out in one piece, and those who left physically unhurt have never mentally recovered…

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- You yeti? You happy?

- Yeah, me happy. I would like to take this time to yell out about something!

- Uh …

- It is not because one is hairy that he is necessarily an idiot.

- You not idiot …

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Investigation Report No. 23,666:

I write these few lines with what remains of my blood … I do not even know what really motivates me, surely a touch of hope for future generations. I’ve just came back from my mission concerning the subject IM23. And the first thing I must say is that we were right from the beginning …

The woman, whose real name is Isabelle Menegatti, however, did not look suspicious. I realized my mistake only when my torso was plowed by her trained fighter cats. She is behind all. She is the head. She is the dark…

I should have guessed. Her little old lady look, with the dead animals bodies she wraps around her neck as trophy. Perhaps very soon it will be mine that will be used as a scarf. How can anyone be so cruel?

She has sponsored the whole thing, I’m sure about it. The crazy cat lady was not what we expected. Actually she is the brain of the party, because indeed there is one, although we doubted that by their acts. She is responsible for Kurt and Camila’s torments, she misled us, she makes a fool of us, she is playing with us.

Forgive me, I was not strong enough for her … But I doubt that someone would be one day. Good luck…

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Our hero has spent his Christmas holidays on Pandora, planet of the Na’vi. Here is a souvenir of his stay in Avatar’s world.

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A game’s mechanics are powered by a gameplay engine. This piece of code takes care of handling all the logic behind the scenes to make the game behave like it should. With the 1.1 update of TURN Episode 1 comes a new gameplay engine, rewritten from scratch.

In this third post (you can read the first and second posts), I’ll talk about pyTurn, our level-testing tool and the final integration of the gameplay engine in the iPhone and DSi versions of the game.

Rewriting the game in 2 weeks

Being done with the rules, left to do was rewriting the game engine. I decided to write a PC version of the gameplay engine using the Python language and PySFML library, which allow for quick prototyping. By doing that, I hoped to get the new behaviour working quickly, and to provide the level designers with a tool they could use to test and fix their levels.

It proved to be a good idea. Once done with the core gameplay mechanics, thanks to those tools, I was able to implement a bunch of helper functionality like displaying the input history, switching level themes and saving and loading replays of a level. This last one allowed us to have a proof that each level was actually possible to complete. Each time a correction had to be done on the game engine, all we had to do was to check that previously-recorded level replays still worked.

Porting it over to the iPhone and DSi

The gameplay engine written in Python cannot be used as-is on the iPhone or Nintendo DSi (mainly for performance considerations). I had to rewrite the engine in C++, a language allowing finer-grained control on performance at the cost of a more time-consuming development.

In order not to waste effort, I took this opportunity to fully separate the game’s logic (the game rules we defined) from anything specific to a particular console (rendering, sounds, user interaction). Rewriting the engine took a little longer because of this, but by sharing the same code on the two consoles, we’ll have less bugs and avoid duplicating work.

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