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At the Global Game Jam I met two programmers who challenged themselves to make a game in the PICO-8 engine, I like challenge so I joined in.
This year’s theme was “make me laugh.” After some brainstorming we decided to build a frogger-style game where you play as a chicken. The goal for the game was to be a simple, fun and cheeky game. I was in charge of all audio, and had to implement everything using only the 8-bit synth in the engine as it could not play samples.
During the 48hour jam I added music, sound effects, sprites, levels and even some code. I also discussed design decisions with the team. Our team consisted of two programmers and one sound designer, so I contributed all audio and we all contributed towards the game’s art and design.
To create the dialogue for the talking chicken, I used what I learned in my UE synthesis project and applied it to the 8-bit engine. First I experimented with different ways to make a short chicken-y sound. I found that using a normal synth while making the frequencies somewhat noisy and random, made for a more organic sound.
After creating the chicken’s voice sound, I made three sets of these assets with differing length. I then used the engine’s programming language to code a state machine that would play back the different samples until told to stop. I explained how to make use of this system to the programmers on the team and together we implemented these sounds. This resulted in a fun talking chicken sound using the native functions of PICO-8.
During the game jam I wanted to add some music to the game. Due to time constraints I didn’t have time to write anything. So I took part of the Frog Leg Rag and coded it into the engine. I still had to rewrite the song slightly because of technical limitations, however I made sure to keep the most important notes. This resulted in a fun and catchy tune during playtime. Given that the game has multiple levels, It would have been nice to add more music to encapsulate the different areas. however that was not within scope for a 48 hour game jam.
