One of the first problems I encountered in this project was not being able to access a laptop in the first week of my project, this prevented from playing through the game and making spotting notes for the music in the game. To solve this issue I found a gameplay video of the level I was composing for online and made my own spotting notes through that, this worked very well and did not negatively impact my project at all. As just watching people play through the level alone was enough to make my own spotting notes. This was an unforeseen problem as I assumed I would be able to organise to take a laptop on the day, this was very unprofessional as I should have looked into this matter before hand. Therefore in future I will make sure to my plans are organised and not based on assumptions.
One problem I encountered when composing my own music was that when I composed a melody it drew too much attention to its self, the melody also became too repetitive making it tedious for the player to listen to. Furthermore the melody conflicted with the gameplay of the level and negatively impact the gameplay experience for the player. To fix this issue I removed the melody from the gameplay and instead made the music more harmonica based, as harmonic music tends to sound more ambient and stay in the background of the listeners ears.
A big problem I encountered this problem was writing for MIDI brass on Logic, as the stock Logic brass sounds very thin and artificial furthermore taking emotional impact away from the music. Making the brass sound realistic for the stinger was very important as this instrumental was almost entirely made up of brass, to fix this issue I transported the MIDI data from the brass stinger onto my home laptop which contained the Spitfire Symphony Orchestra plug-in. This made the brass sound much more powerful and realistic. I then bounced this audio file and imported into my original Logic project file.
Another mistake I made for lack of detailed planning was under estimating how many musical tracks I had to make for the level, as I planned to manage my time to compose three tracks during my final project. However there happened to be 4 different tracks I had to compose for, this made it harder to plan my college sessions when composing. To fix this issue I sat down and re-planned how I was going to manage my time composing, the solution to this issue was to catch up on my written work during the easter holidays and spend all my time in college getting a head of my practical work to write the stinger and combat music block.
In my original plan for the project I was going to program my music directly into the game throughout the project and then release a gameplay capture of the footage, however around week 6 in the project I attempted to learn how to programme my music into the game. But then after looking at computer programming I decided very steep leaning curve and learning to do this would take too much time and potentially negatively impact the quality of the music I was composing, as I wouldn’t have time to improve it. To fix this problem I instead thought to record some gameplay footage of the game and then arrange my music to fit over the gameplay as intended. However another issue that stemmed from this was that the college laptop ran the ‘Wwise Adventure Game’ too slow to capture any high quality footage. The solution to this problem was for my someone else to play it as a favour and record the gameplay, then sending it over to me via email. This solution worked very well as the music could be mixed to blend with the gameplay furthermore making it sound as if it was programmed into the video game it’s self.
One final issue I encountered when working on this project was an editing mistake in the final credits sequence for my final showcase, the editing mistake in this credits page was that Lewis was credited twice on screen on two separate occasions, this makes the editing look sloppy and unprofessional if not fixed. Therefore to fix this issue I put two copies of the credits movie in iMovie and then trimmed the second credit page out of the video, furthermore erasing the mistake from the film and stopping the audience from witnessing the mistake during the final showcase.
One issue I encountered towards the end of the project was that I did not not have the video file I required for the release of my project on YouTube, this is because my tutor Lewis had hold of it from the final showcase. I contacted him to try and obtain this file for my release, however due to him being off of work hours he did not reply. To solve this issue I uploaded a post on my social media explaining why my release has been delayed and when the can expect the next release date to be. Here below is a photo of the post I uploaded.
During this final project I did not run into any major issues, however the minor issues I did encounter I tackled and solved with my own initiative. There was however one issue that I needed help with to be solved, this issue was recording gameplay on a laptop. As I did not have access to a laptop that could run through the game efficiently, therefore I had to depend on my tutor to record the gameplay on his own laptop. However if I could not find anyone to do this I would download gameplay of the level via Youtube, however this would not be ideal as other peoples music would be over the gameplay which would make me have to mute all the video’s audio. During this project there was many unforeseen issues which I had to solve independently to progress my project. One minor unforeseen issue was the credits screen mentioning Lewis twice, this made the presentation look lazy. Therefore I independently fixed this issue using my iMovie editing skills. One issue I anticipated for this project was the MIDI brass sounding too weak to use as a stinger, this made the music sound very artificial and MIDI. Therefore to solve this issue I exported the MIDI files to my BBCSO plug-in at home and then bounced the fill into and audio strip which I imported into the Logic project at college.