Tranzfuser 2019

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Milksop Games - EGX & Tranzfuser 2019

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After months of hard work, I got to attend EGX 2019 with Milksop Games at the London ExCeL Centre, and see Heads ‘n’ Tails on display at the big Tranzfuser stand!

I’ve visited EGX numerous times in the past as a regular attendee, but it was an altogether more special and unique occasion to actually take part in the event alongside an exhibiting team.

It was an incredibly rewarding experience to see members of the public playing Heads ‘n’ Tails. Watching people enjoying themselves and having a fun time playing a game that I designed audio content for were deeply gratifying, affirming and fulfilling moments I’ll always proudly remember.

Milksop Games on the Tranzfuser stand! It was so cool to see people come up and want to have a play on Heads ‘n’ Tails. The team noticed that players who played the game with the headphones on tended to get higher scores than those who didn’t, which was great to hear! Looks like all that time recording different goblin voice emotes paid off!

Lee helping a player to set their new high score on the leaderboard. Nicely done!

(Most of) the Milksop Games crew! From the left to right: Me (Audio Designer), Eli De Carteret (Level Designer), Cat Wiltshire (Prop Artist), Lee Stockton (Environment Artist), Alan Horton (Technical Designer) and Jasmine Streatfield (3D Character Modeller & Rigger). Big virtual shout-outs too to Laura Flinders (Environment Artist) our Italian teammates, Samuele Bandini (Concept Artist) and Diana Ulloa (Animator).

Heads ‘n’ Tails has been such a fun and enriching project to work on. I’m extremely grateful to the Milksop Games team for giving me the opportunity to come on board the project as Audio Designer. Working alongside such a talented team to help bring their vision for the game to life, and get to work so closely with all the different design disciplines was an exciting, challenging and inspiring journey from start to finish.

Heads ‘n’ Tails: Mythical Pet Shop is now live on the Milksop Games itch.io page, so you can check it out for yourself (and hear the various daft goblin sounds I designed first-hand!)

Post-EGX Updates & Game Coverage

Youtubers TheGrumpyBrit and BlindsideUK checked out Heads ‘n’ Tails: Mythical Pet Shop as part of their Tranzfuser coverage of EGX 2019. It was great to hear they enjoyed playing the game (and thought our pet designs were adorable!), but apologies for the stress!

We were lucky enough to get Jupiter Hadley to check the game out, and got some great (and fair) feedback in her write-up on Indie Games Plus:

Heads ‘n’ Tails: Mythical Pet Shop also got featured on Tranzfuser’s EGX video livestream. where Eli, Laura and Cat chat to the presenter and walk him through the gameplay on the Ice level.

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Milksop Games - Tranzfuser 2019

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I’m working with the lovely folks at Milksop Games (@MilksopGames) as Audio Designer on their Tranzfuser project Heads ‘n’ Tails!

https://futureworks.ac.uk/news/2019/08/futureworks-students-chosen-for-tranzfuser/

I’m absolutely thrilled to be able to do sound design for their game, which is an isometric fantasy pet shop management experience for PC and Android. The main gameplay loop involves caring for three different types of magical animals across multiple elemental themed levels, while also attending to customer’s needs and requests. To get a high score, the player has to carefully manage their costs (by selecting the right items for pets and customers quickly and efficiently) and maintain a high reputation (by attending to the pets’ needs quickly and efficiently). These values act as score multipliers at the end of each level, so players who can keep a cool head when everything’s getting frantic with pet and customer requests will be able to rocket up the leaderboards!

I joined the team in the last week of June, and the first major sprint week of the project. The Tranzfuser period lasts for 10 sprints, running from June 24th to September 1st. At the time of writing we’re currently on Sprint 5, about a third of the way through the project. At this point, the team are busy compiling a white-box test as a proof of concept piece.

On the audio side of things, so far I’ve designed ambient audio cues for each level, a musical theme for the main menu, a collection of UI sounds for gameplay menu navigation, and the dialogue emotes for the goblin customer NPCs.

With the development time left on the project, I need to record the remaining dialogue and sound effects for the pets creatures, complete sounds for the various player-controlled incidental sounds and finish the music for the gameplay levels and the score screen leaderboards.

As you can see, there’s a lot of things to do and not a lot of time to do them all in! As time is of the essence, I thought I’d make this a quick post to record what’s going on and where I’m currently up to in the Tranzfuser process.

Time to get back to making sounds…as fast as humanly possible!