Part of You is a comedy puzzle adventure game about finding your lost identity. The game is heavily inspired by the old school LucasArts point and click games from the 90s. My personal role on the team was a lot of different things: programmer, project manager, puzzle designer, & social media person. It’s been one of my favorite projects I’ve gotten to work on, turning somebody else’s vision into a reality, all while sprinkling my own flourishes throughout the identity of the project.
The core mechanic of the game is copying, pasting, and rearranging facial features from all the different characters to solve puzzles and alter their moods. As development went on, the focus of the game became taking this core idea and expanding it, giving players opportunities to use the tools and facial features in a variety of different ways to give players more freedom and new types of puzzles for them to solve. At it’s core though, the game is about players having fun with the toys that allow them to make goofy faces and interact with everything in the world, giving them a sense of discovery and ownership of the world. We really wanted the player to think “What if…” in every aspect of the game while still staying true to our adventure game roots.
At it’s core, the driving philosophy of Part of You was simple: make the toy fun. Inspired largely by the point and click adventure games made by Humongous Entertainment, the goal was to have every inch of the world be a new element players could interact with. Using their tools in unexpected ways and really making the small play environment we had come alive, jam packed with toys for players to have fun with and laugh about. Every time we came up with a toy we would design it for a variety of different use cases, from the most casual interactions to the more hardcore min-maxers.
BUILDING A PLAYGROUND
GETTING RID OF BARRIERS
As we worked on the game, we wanted to make sure that our thinking about adventure games wasn’t only rooted in the past. Conventions about what players are willing to put up with have changed wildly, in the last 20 years, most gamers have come to expect a little more guidance on the worlds they are diving into. Long gone are the days of needing to keep a pad of paper and a pen next to your keyboard as you traverse large unexplored worlds. Because so many of our key inspirations came from a time when this was still the expectation, we had to take extra special care to make sure players had enough guidance and didn’t feel abandoned by our game.
Dynamic Music System
One of the most important parts of making worlds come alive is sound. Things feel eerily static without a fair amount of background noise. Part of what we wanted to do with part of you was give each distinct area in part of you a specific vibe. In order to do this, one of the key things we wanted was each area to have its own soundtrack, some looping tunes that persisted, even when the player was not there to make it feel alive on its own, rather than just a set that came to life when the player walked in. In order to make this happen we identified a few things that felt important to make this happen:
When players left each zone, music had to feel like it kept playing, even after the player had left. On their return, songs should not start from the beginning.
Music had to be fun to listen to for more than 15 minutes. Players were spending long periods of time in individual zones and we didn’t want our music to get repetitive.
Music had to blend nicely from area to area, but still be very distinct in it’s transitions, attenuation from distance and single sound emitters were not gonna cut it if we wanted to keep each zone’s identity distinct.
We had almost no budget and no music skills, whatever we did needed to be cheap.
Let’s talk about budget…
To put it bluntly, we didn’t have much money to work on this game. Without a publisher and much savings built up, the challenge of building part of you became a question of how we could turn a little into a lot. When negotiating our contract with our composer, we had enough money for about 1 minute of music for every area, but not a whole lot more, meaning we had to get really creative with how we used the music in order for it to not sound super repetitive.
On the right you will hear one of the tracks we received for our OST.
While this music nails the atmosphere we were going for there are a few issues with the music here. For starters, looping it would result in weird starts and stops. Because the music is structured with a bit of an intro, looping it as is would not meet our first goal of the music feeling endless and looping seamlessly. The other issue with the music here is that, once you exclude the intro from it, it is really about 90 seconds of music, which no matter what is going to feel repetitive if the player stays there for 15 minutes.
Chopping it up
The solution to the above problem was a little bit of randomization and a little bit of technical scheming. The plan was to chop up each of the songs we go into each of it’s musical parts, isolating the A section from the B section and so forth for every song form until we had a bunch of short, loop-able clips. In addition to separating out each of the song’s sections, we also separated out the instruments into their component stems, allowing for further flexibility when mixing and matching our music.
The next step was to start putting the songs back together. In order to make this work musically, we had to graph out which sections of each song were compatible with each other; which instruments played nicely with each other and which formed more dissonance. After these things were grouped together, the bundles of things that could be independent were given their own randomization, allowing different parts to play over the top of each other. This, in combination with muting certain parts randomly also created more possible musical moments for each soundscape. The overall experience was a lot more diversity in music.
Pitfalls and clipping
To the audio people who are reading this and knowing where this is going feel free to say told ya so now. Unsurprisingly, when you do this much chopping up of sound files and attempt to loop them, there are going to be problems, in our case the problems were popping, clipping, and timing issues from looping a bunch of things at the same time. There were 2 key solutions we used to make this all work.
The first of the fixes we implemented was to fix the clipping. In order to do that, rather than directly looping audio files, we built a crossfader that allowed the next audio clip to load in and start playing before the last clip finished. This mitigated a lot of the clipping that was being caused by gaps in the audio.
The other important fix had to do with timing. Even though all the parts were theoretically the same length and could be on their own timers, tying them all to one singular timer ended up solving some of the weird gaps that were occurring causing the parts of the song to get further and further out of sync over time. This was a mistake. Tying them to one singular part, the drums or main melody in most cases allowed and having the looping fire from that part reaching the end of it’s audio file ended up working significantly better and caused the tracks to stay much more in sync.
The Final Product
With all of the above work, I want to give a peek at what it all sounds like working together as intended. Below is a small sample of how it all plays out.