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⭐ Forensic Friday 57: A Composer Joins the Team!

The biggest news this week is that a new composer has joined the team! A very talented one at that. Perhaps too talented! We feel like we’ll have to step up our coding skills too! In all seriousness, imposter syndrome is always an expected thing when you start to work with other people on a project. Other than that terrific news, we have been hard at work closing some of the last features needed to complete the core gameplay loop (again). As annoying as it is, the new AI system effectively demanded a rewrite of any system centred around NPCs. But sometimes you have to take two steps back and 3 steps forward to progress. Anyways, keeping this short and sweet, let’s get onto the most interesting topic of this week. The composer!

A Sample from our New Composer #

When looking for a composer to collaborate with, we asked many to compose a short rough sample of a “Main Theme” for the game. Many delivered, but Can Erdogan delivered more, and blew the competition out of the water, with what was still a rough mix. Listen below.

Amazing sample! Sounds like it would be perfect for our Early Access trailer. Hopefully, over the coming months, we get to share some more outstanding work from Can. It is a very exciting prospect having a quality composer on the team, and will for sure be invaluable in making Containcorp an amazing product and fulfilling its vision.

His comments about the track:

There are some improvements that I want to work on the track like, for example, the guitars on there are just a DI recording (which means you plug the guitar directly into your audio interface). I want to re-record the guitar with an amplifier and microphones. And of course, I have to sit down and mix the music, which can take a couple of days.

And a little introduction he wrote:

Hey everyone,

My name is Can (it’s sort of pronounced like John in Turkish). I am a composer for video games and media. I’ve been a musician from a young age which later on developed into me studying MA in Music, and focusing more on video game music.

I’ve been composing lots of different styles of music over the years for various projects. But I really wanted to get involved with a project where I can be more experimental and stylistically bold. I feel like the music of ContainCorp would really benefit from that approach. And I feel like the style and narrative of the game calls for so much musical expression. I’m excited to get on board, learn more about the project and start working on the music.

Best, Can

All the nice things out of the way, it’s now onto the feature side of things…

Research System at an End #

The research system is reaching the end of its time as an unborn feature baby, and will soon be finished. At least the main underlying code for the research system will be done. It is always a motivating time when features reach this maturity stage. Though more often than not, we end up rewriting, reworking and reiterating on features, as a natural tenet of game design. Though this system is among the first that has been implemented post-AI refactor, so is in a better place to avoid rewrites, which is great!

By the next Forensic Friday, the research screen should be done. The last major feature added to it was the ability to assign Researchers and Category C to research. All that is left is adding actual research progression, and a system to manage unlocks of content like blocks and effects. These are all trivial tasks, but the latter depends on the experimentation system being completed. This is quite close, however!

Adding Researchers to research screen using new NPC search modal window

The Experiment System is 50% of the way to completion #

The experiment system is very close to being finished too. The only outstanding features are executing experiments, acquiring research points from labs, and all the UI menus associated with that. UI-wise, the new menu additions you can expect are an anomaly menu which allows you to assign anomalies to containment cells and a contextual UI for objects in the world. All of these are relatively simple to get done, they just need to get done! Experiments will likely be finished by the next Forensic Friday, worst case, 2 Forensic Fridays down the line. Pretty soon then!

Adding NPCs to experiment proposal

Some Polishing Changes #

It’s always nice to spend some hours of the week on polishing. It helps get out of the mind-draining hole that game development can be sometimes… So below is a collection of things that have been polished over the week:

Cleaner looking notifications

Smoother Camera!

New Company Landing Page #

In other more business-sided, and boring news… we have a proper landing page for out company. Its at the root of this site infact. Anyways, that’s all to say about that!

Patreon #

We also are considering paying more attention to our patreon, which we haven’t rly been doing justice! That is all to say about that too!

Case Closed #

Anyways, with what was quite an interesting Forensic Friday, on the music end at least, it’s time to close the case file. Expect us to move onto BATCH 2 of development by the end of the month latest! BATCH 2 involves implementing facility raids and controllable guards, pretty neat! One thing I started to think about is that we have exactly 12 feature branches to complete. With only one developer, we can finish one batch every month at the slowest pace. That’s pretty good all things considered. It means that by this time next year (12 months), we will have practically finished the game (alpha 0.1 at least), given we don’t take any more hiatuses! Anyways, just food for thought. Thanks for reading.

Case Closed.
The Team
Plasmarc Studios