8.- MUSIC
Music and ambient sound
The main title music and the final scene music were made by me. I’m so sorry : D
In that line of having fun with making the game in a relaxed attitude, I thought that it would be great to do the music myself. I had a professional and good musician working with me in the other original project “Syd Fox: Scotland Yard Detective From Outer Xpace”, but as this was projected as a quick and “stupid” game, I preferred to give it my personal touch also with music, no matter if it was bad.
The intro music was made by recording my voice and making some tune changes in the “Audacity” sound edit tool. I use only voices, hand claps and mouth whistles, because I thought it was more in line with the naive look and feel of the game.
The final flute music (tin whistle music in fact) was recorded in an improvised single shot, some few hours before the deadline, trying to give the final scene some epic and sad feel. The sound was edited by adding a bit of echo. I like to play tin whistle to relax and think, but I have no idea how to read music and don’t know many songs; I like to just improvise and enjoy the sound.
Tin whistle is a little metal flute typical from Celtic regions, like Ireland, UK, France, and the north of Spain, where I am. People starting to play bagpipe use them to learn the basics, at least in my little village.
It was in fact a very funny process. Although I was really, really getting out of time to finish the game, I decided that I wanted it there as an important element to set the feeling of the game.
The music was only for the intro and end, as for playing people sometimes find music annoying. For that part the option I like is very subtle music, or some ambient sounds, like the one I finally used.
Types of music and sounds
In cinema music can be classified in diegetic and extradiegetic categories, difficult words to just distinguish between the music that is played for the spectator and that the characters in that fiction world are not listening to (the extradiegetic one, like the music that is played when the woman and the man fall in love and kiss), and the music that is part of that fiction world which the characters are listening to (the diegetic one, for example a man hearing music in the bathroom where he is shaving, that could even lead him to start to hum the tune).
This is also valid for general sounds, for example with a tick-tock clock sound, depending on a real clock in the scene being the source of the sound, or just an effect added in edition as a background sound for some shots where the creators want to emphasize the passing of time and a situation against the clock.
This game has an intro and end tune that are extradiegetic sounds, but during gameplay it has some sounds that fall in the diegetic category: Some birds tweeting in the outside scenes, and some fireplace sounds in the inner ones.
This music is diegetic not only because it is related to what you are seeing, but also because you can type commands searching for those birds. The response of the game will be,“those birds can’t be seen”, but the fact that the game gives responses to that makes the sounds part of the game. At some point I thought about adding an extra alternative puzzle involving birds, but finally I preferred not to do it due to available time and to avoid confusing players thinking they could cross the moat using birds to fly. However, I still feel that the bird concept could fit well somehow with all the background concepts, in the line of representing freedom, and that perhaps I misused it.
Let’s come back to the music. Seeing the music from the perspective of this game using comic language, one can ask if a comic can still be a comic if it has music.
MORE ABOUT DIEGETICS
But all this stuff about diegetic and extradiegetic things is not only a matter of music, of course. In literature, you can talk about a text having a diegetic or extradiegetic narrator. What is that voice so common in parser games that says “You are in X place. You can see A and B here”?
What Gent Stickman proposes as an “output text” is a reality without a narrator. What you see is what is there.
A discourse exists between Gent Stickman and you: He shows you what he has with him when you ask for the inventory, he looks at you with some anger when you ask him to drop the apple, and looks at you with the pride of child thinking, “you will not eat it” when he is eating the apple.
We could think that Gent Stickman is breaking the fourth wall when he does this kind of thing, but did really that wall exist at all here?
Its reality is not a “box” where something is taking place.
He is not acting, like a film is a representation of things that could be real. In Gent Stickman what you see is the reality.