0033. All Systems Go (GMTK2024) + Tower Up Game

I participated in the GMTK2024 Gamejam with the topic “built to Scale”. We entered with our game Tower Up, a vampire-survivors-like game, where you operate a small robot that works hard to scale up a tower while constantly being attacked by crabs and other enemies (the itch.io page has a far better description). We achieved overall place 3184 of 7626 and place 2032 in enjoyment!

For this game, I focused myself on making sound effects and music. While it wasn’t my first time making music for a game, this was the first time I actually tried to do some SFX for a game. So, in the game, you can enjoy:

• sounds of me making dying sounds (when an enemy is hit)
• sounds of keys against metal bowls (when the robot is hit)
• some small chords with reverb all the way (when buying upgrades)
• annoying seventh intervals (when the battery is nearly empty)
• some wooshes (power-ups)

While making sound effects was a lot of fun, I at some point had a bassline in mind that didn’t want to leave my head and that is how “All Systems Go” started. I then added a beat and just started jamming with my keyboard to it until I had a decent enough lead and recorded it¹.

Originally, I had multiple versions of this song, which I then put into a Godot AudioStreamInteractive, that then progressed through the parts and looped the right ones, so I wouldn’t have to “compose out” everything and the engine does the work. 5 minutes before the deadline we learned that this feature was broken (the music lagged, it was no fun to listen to and kinda destroyed our gaming experience). Luckily, the game jam got a one hour extension, so I re-rendered all the music that was originally dynamic into one big piece for each track and repeated the sections that needed repeating. Not as cool, as originally planned, but working was better than broken. This version didn’t work well for the blog post (as it was pretty long), so I, again, re-rendered the project, added some fading out and here we are.

When I first proposed to put the track from this post into the game, it was deemed to be “too energetic”, especially if you only have a few enemies around. So I sat down again and made a second version that is now playing for the first few tower sizes: It’s basically the same song, but the bassline is way way less jumpy and this version only contains the first lead, not its progression.