I would like to preface my presentation of this project with stating a little background information on myself at the time of development of this project. During the time of working, I was struggling heavily with my mental health. Because of this, I do not think that I was as spectacular in this project or to my team members as I could have been.  It was an unfortunate situation but an important lesson to me. I taught me to take care of myself better mentally and professionally. I took the lessons I learned from this project and made sure to not repeat any of them in my following senior design class, becoming the team organizer to help push my team to the finish line. Mental health is very important and should be a priority in everyone's life. 

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     My role was to be the audio and music person for the project. This means that I would develop the soundtrack for our visual novel.My process would start the same for every track. I read the script to get a general feel for the setting and events taking place in these scenes. Afterward, I would look at the background art and do the same. Once finished, I would sit there imagining what would this scene sound like if I were to be playing the game. Then I would launch my DAW of choice, Ableton. I would search for a sound that best fit my imagination. Once I found the sound that I thought would be the main sound of the piece, I would start to record the midi. This would take several different takes of recording and trying out new ideas until I got something close to how I was hearing the music take place in my head. I edited the clips until it was in a state to where I could add more to the texture. I would then repeat the process of finding sounds and editing until it would fit into with the framework. The process would typically go from working on a melody to accompanying drums the to audio effects. My main goal was to make the songs enjoyable and intersting yet able to repeat without sounding repetitive. This way the player would not get annoyed at the music while playing the game

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     The mixing and mastering process was the longest process in my work on the project. It would take several hours to work on one track as I would have to edit the sound levels and send the tracks to the mastering chains. I would go through several working versions of each track and cross-examine the tracks on different audio mediums such as car speakers, headphones, computer speakers, etc... I would do this process until I had a final product that I would upload to our collaborative folder. Our lead programmer would then integrate the tracks into the game.

 

     I have added some screenshots of my work in Ableton. The tracks would be exported as .wav files so that the best quality could be integrated but .mp3 files were also made available pending on limitations. If you have interest in playing the visual novel that we made then please click on the itch.io link above!