A little update
Adam began life back in 2015 as a little 2D narrative/exploration game. Right now we're in the beginnings of taking this concept and fleshing it out into a full game.
Building upon the tone, aesthetic and narrative themes brought about in the initial prototype. However we're moving over to 3D to take advantage of things real-time lighting and more dynamic environments.
Below you can read about the initial development of the prototype and more about adam in it's current state as we progress.
{ adam } is our second full game as a studio. We’re very early into developing it, but we’ve been able to put together a short demo for game expos and alike. We’ve been getting a bunch of rad feedback, which has been incredible! We’ve also had a lot of inquires about Adam’s art style so I figured I’d take the time to break it down a little bit here!
{ the first floor of Adam’s house }We kept { adam } black and white for one main reason. Working in black and white means tone, shape and lighting are your key tools for building the world. It also most definitely lends itself to Adam’s overtly bleak tone as well! (Although we’ll be bringing in small amounts of colour to punctuate aspects of the narrative)
The top-down/Isomeric view was a very early design choice. We figured working in this view would be fun challenge in terms of creating a strong and lasting atmosphere within the constraints of a top-down view. Plus the clean geometric layout of the rooms contrasted with thedirty grunge of everything else is a fun little mix and match!
{ Asset from Adam’s ground floor }We’re playing up to our talents by working mostly in 2D. But it’s been exiting working 3D modeling and photography into Adam’s 2D hand drawn elements. By building aspects of the game in 3D it allows us real freedom with whats possible, especially when composing images for Adam to take a closer look at
{ Close up view of the record player. Displayed when Adam interacts with the table }We’re rendering layouts and outputting images from blender, then in Photoshop we can process images and bring in extra elements and style out the lighting as well as export things into flash, then output em again as sprites and pngs for us to use in unity. Lots of fun mixed media going on!
We’re knee deep into the writing process for { adam } right now as well working on music and audio, and we’ll soon be exploring the steam green-light process. But we’re looking forward to keeping ya’ll up to date on Adam’s progress as and when we have fun stuff to show!
You can read a little more about { adam } and check out some game play footage
here
October 20, 2015
Richard Jackson has been doing some stellar work
on the music and sound design for { adam }.
We asked him to share some of the secrets behind his technique and what goes into his thought process . . .
{ adam } is my first venture into the video game music genre, and what a game to start with! With the initial spec of “minimal lonely haunting piano themes” to go off, it’s grown into a real study of false stability and repetition - plus the game’s black and white artwork implied a perfect opportunity to stick with the black and white keys of my weapon of choice!
To go about this, I made a musical scale that is ‘roughly’ major, but never quite fits perfectly - a knight’s move away from diatonic harmony. It’s built up of groupings of 5 notes of a whole-tone scale, then the next grouping starting a semitone up from the last (which strictly means that both transpositions of a whole tone scale are used within the same octave). Since this is shifted on the way up compared to the way down, this means that, with one exception (‘A’), no note is played in both directions, giving an even more shadowy sense of ‘almost-but-not-quite’ tonality. To compliment the ‘complexity’ of this, the music then just floats up and down this scale, which gives an almost ‘nursery-rhyme-like’ feel to the idea:
To underpin this constant melody, it felt natural to have chords underneath, so I found some notes that maintained that same sense of pseudo-familiarity - typically, when there’s a ‘logical’ method to making one side of the music, I like to go with an ‘intuitive’ side to fill in the other, so that both the logic and the instinct work hand-in-hand. Here’s the first section of the menu music:
GROUND FLOOR 01As can be heard in the
, the music is still focused around solo piano, now with some more sfx coming into play. While there are some organic ‘house’ sounds (creaking floorboards, the hum of lights…) a few of the sounds are also built from the ‘inside’ of a piano, which is definitely going to start taking more prominence as the game continues. Again, as a first experience into game audio (and ‘accurate’ sound design in general) it’s been fascinating learning about how the real sound of something (say, a punch) doesn’t sound real enough (which I guess goes into ideas such as hyperreality) but you can warp a piano to sound like a door closing - of course, which ones are and aren’t made from a piano you’ll just have to work out!
As this was the first piece of music after the menu loop, with it’s rigid melodic structure, I wanted the very first note to be one that wouldn’t fit into that world - so, as the top note of the menu was an F#, it felt only right to start this on a G, which feels like a subtle end to the cycle. It’s little things that might not be noticed by anyone else but they keep me happy!
In general the main melodic material is loosely based around the two inversions of a whole tone scales being separated by an octave, and jumping around the available notes, almost like a tonal game of hopscotch. The overall structure is much more relaxed, much more improvised, just with a few key signposts in mind. Another element that I wanted to play around with is the idea that as you’re in a game, you’re expecting the audio to loop, so by repeating sections and then moving off into different directions (like a warped rondo) to again lend to the sense of distorted stability that’s being created by the game right from the get go.
You can check out the music in its entirety in the
gameplay demo here
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I really love the feel of it though, especially paired with the mystery of the narrative. You've definitely got something special going on here 
