Daughter Death

Do a game jam, they said. It’ll be fun, they said.

I’ve been writing music since I was twelve, but I didn’t learn to draw until well into adulthood. As a child I’d absorbed the message that just like playing music or singing or acting, drawing was something you could either Do or Not Do. I could Do music. I did not have what it takes to Do art. Oh well.

What bullshit.

A few years ago I decided I was going to learn to draw. I’d never at any point in my life so far been remotely good at it. I’d spent some time hanging out with my friend and excellent artist Harriet complementing her on her drawing skills and how good she was at it and wow and etc. until she got (rightly) fed up and told me that she never been good at drawing as a child. One day, she decided she would learn to draw, and since then has been drawing pretty much constantly, so yeah, she was pretty good at it now. And so I decided that I would learn to draw and that I would probably be terrible at it and never get any good at it but that was okay because the journey would be fun.

Well, Harriet set up a little art club and she taught me to draw. Not “do what you feel”, but how to look at a 2D sketch critically and systematically build and change it so that it looked closer to what I was actually seeing instead of what I thought I was seeing. And since then I have continued to practice and have since learned to draw not just in pencils and to paint and slowly, slowly, I have learnt to Do Art. The stuff I do is light years away from professional but I don’t care. I think what I paint is pretty decent and little inner child me is sitting there saying “Wow. You did that. Wow.”

A few years ago I was sitting outside a church in central Cambridge drawing it when an old lady came up to me and said “Wow! You have a real talent there, you’re so lucky!” I mumbled my thanks but I was laughing inside. Because what I was thinking was that I have no “natural” talent. I was never any good at this and ten years of art classes at school failed to teach me anything except that I was no good at drawing. But I found a good teacher who taught me the way I needed to learn and I decided not to care that I would be bad at it and I just practiced a lot and now I can draw.” I’m not saying that natural talent doesn’t help or matter, but it’s not the only thing that matters, and just sinking in the hours gets you a long way towards being competent at something. The key is to want to put in those hours. Everyone starts out being crap. The trick is not to care.

When I started to learn to draw, Harriet told me this little story, which has stayed with me since:

Once upon a time there was an emperor who wanted a drawing of a flower so he found the best artist in the land and commissioned the artist to draw them the perfect flower. Months went by and the emperor heard nothing. Finally, he got fed up and went to visit the artist in their studio. The artist went to their canvas and drew the perfect flower and handed it to the emperor. The emperor said “This is perfect, just what I wanted! But what have you been doing all these months?” The artist went to the cupboard and opened it. Out of the cupboard tumbled hundreds upon hundreds of drawings of flowers.

It is better to learn by doing something hundreds of times imperfectly than to spend a hundred times longer trying to do something perfectly once. Enter the game jam.

The game jam as a concept is the equivalent of the artist’s draw-a-pose-a-minute. You get together with other insane like-minded people and try to make a computer game in 48 hours. This year, I had a go at the Global Game Jam, a world-wide event where sites all over the world host groups of game developers. At 5pm local time on Friday, a theme gets handed to you and off you go. You have until Sunday afternoon to finish making your game, at which point you usually all get together and play each other’s games. This year’s theme was “Home”.

For reasons known only to adrenaline and caffeine, we made a point-and-click/mini-platformer story about Death’s daughter who is helping her dad with the family business by assisting souls lost in purgatory to move on. As well as devving (read: bossing people about and having loud opinions) I wrote the music for the game, which was really why I was there. Also pitching in with frantic odd jobs, like drawing the inventory items and proof-reading and bug testing and so-on. Our 48-hour masterpiece can be played here:

I got excited about having the opportunity to write an adaptive soundtrack, because all the previous games I have worked on didn’t really require it. An adaptive soundtrack is one that changes as you move from place to place or from scene to scene depending on what’s going on. For Daughter Death, there are four main scenes: The starting area with Death, the tree room, the lava room and the lake room. I wrote a base layer for the starting area, and each additional room adds an additional layer. Since you can play the three rooms in any order, this was like doing some crazy 4-dimensional puzzle as all the layers had to work with each of the others and by themselves, and the starting layer had to be interesting enough to stand alone yet when all three room layers are added on, the music shouldn’t be too crowded. Add in a ~10 hour time limit, and things got pretty intense, making a greatly fun challenge to sink my teeth into. I settled for a xylophone-based theme for the starting area, a harp for the leaf room, a flute for the lake room and strings for the lava room. Once you complete all the rooms, you return to the starting area and room layers cut out, leaving you with just the original starting track. It was, ahem, fun to code in but we got there in the end and definitely did not bodge any hacky code together to make things work at any point.

At the top of this post is a track comprised of various layer combinations for your listening pleasure.

Enjoy!