Development

Experience in the development of the Aquarium Travels videogame.

The development of this videogame was not easy, it started with a simple concept of a videogame for mobile devices, at the beginning it was going to be a quick development, 4 months, maybe 6.

But with the passing of those first months in development, I expanded the general idea of the project, more levels, more environments. In the first year Aquarium would only have 3 environments and 45 levels, which quickly became too repetitive, I cut the levels repeatedly until I reached the final version that is now the video game with a path of 12 unique and different environments, having only 15 levels, adding the cinematic story, the unique enemies and a carefully modeled interface and custom designed.

The experience was improving significantly over time, as an independent developer and without support or investment on several occasions I had to stop development for weeks or months, this extended the process but also helped to have fresh ideas and the main goal.

When I got bored of programming mechanics and fixing bugs, I started modeling 3d objects and Assets, Animations, composing the environments, and when I got bored of this part, I went back to programming, this is how I managed the workflow during the almost 3 years of development.

While the video game was coming to the end, it looked very good and the gameplay was improving, but something important was missing, the soundtrack, it was difficult to find a composer who could adapt to the type of work needed for the soundtrack of the video game, after many talks, samples and people interested in collaborating in the project I found the Venezuelan composer José Neumann who was the composer of the entire soundtrack of the video game, music which is dynamic according to the situation that happens on screen, a great job.

Experience working for the soundtrack – Aquarium Travels

My experience working for this soundtrack was quite a challenge, it's the first time I compose music for a video game of this genre. At the beginning it was a little difficult to understand or connect with the vision of the project, so I chose to compose something more similar to what you hear in a "casual" game, this can be seen in the Demo of the project. However, after analyzing the environments, I started to take references of more narrative music and that's when I started to connect with the environments, what I really wanted to tell the game when the player sees the environments.

After the release of the Demo, the focus of the soundtrack for the full game I wanted to make it first in a continuation of a casual game, but step by step would go into a more narrative music, more immersive. All this based on the dynamism that soundtracks of games like Star Fox 64 and Balan Wonderworld have, but this time implementing a system of audio layers according to what the player does.

Considering that the game has a story, and a context, all this was a real challenge for me, since my resources were too limited to reach a very realistic audio level, but in the end you get to differentiate between the Gameplay/dynamic music and the cinematic/immersive music, however all having the same style that connects them.

Despite the short development time for the songs, it helped me a lot to start looking for new music development techniques, and in turn improve a lot when composing loops and musical structure for each of them, especially after agreeing to use dynamic music for the game to give a more lively feel to the soundtrack.

Overall, I wanted to make a soundtrack that managed to feel a casual game, but that progressively becomes more immersive and dynamic as the player progresses after unlocking new levels.