Overview:
Custodial Conundrum was created by a team of UT Austin students during the Spring 2020 semester as a part of the GDAD Capstone course. Custodial Conundrum is a casual stealth game, attempting to create a more friendly and comedic game inside a genre heavily saturated with dark, mature, and violent entries. The player takes the place of the janitor of the Magic Academy as he tries to sneak his way through the school and learn both magic and the secrets that lay beneath.
The game can be downloaded from itch.io at this link:
Music:
As the janitor progresses through the game, I wanted to slowly switch my instrumentation and styles between a couple of inspirations.
The first represents the humble beginnings and medieval time settings that the janitor starts in. These tracks are supposed to follow the music of Medieval times, with the modes, basic percussion, and repeating melodies.
As the janitor learns more magic, the soundtrack begins to take on a more "magical" sound. The instrumentation starts to add in more traditional "magical" orchestral sounds, such as pitched percussion and celestas. The music begins to become darker and more mysterious as the janitor closes in on the secrets of the school.
Sound Design:
Each sound is hand crafted, either through foley, concatenative synthesis, or re-sampling. We found that using Unity Audio was sufficient for integration, instead of middleware. I was able to use C# scripts to create any randomness or functionality I needed.
All the "magic" sounds were re-sampled by using a set of chime samples from 99 Sounds.
Voices for characters: including the students, teachers, and ghost mouse, were all created through concatenate synthesis. I cut various speech noises into syllables and used the algorithms to jumble and splice them into more satisfying patterns.
Footsteps, fire crackling, the water bucket, and more physical sounds were all foley-ed using my Zoom H5n recorder.
