Submission build audio issues Postmortem from Vase.

What went wrong? We largely had 2 major things that went wrong near on the last day of the jam.

One, we were using .wav audio files that had largely been fine up until that day. So, what changed? Well on the last day of the Jam we were working with audio files that had quadrupled in size so they wouldn’t sound so repetitive and we also added 3 more to finish off our sequencer. So now with our audio roughly 10x larger, we were reaching upwards of 30-40 min load times for first time loads on web. Hardly ideal. I should note at this point that while I have appreciation for high quality audio, I’m still relatively new in terms of common practices for game audio and I’m also not the audio guy for our team. One last thing to note is that I’m one of our developers not the audio guy (I’m pretty sure they already knew what needed to be done). At this point, I took a little bit of time to search for alternative solutions but I also had a few miscellaneous things left to work on. In my quick search for a solution, all of them pretty much resolved to the simplistic but tedious solution of converting to .ogg files for music. Here’s where our second issue comes into play.

Our second issue we had was our last game mechanic that we wanted to get working for the prototype, our riser/drop. While I had the game mechanics implemented into the project, it wasn’t hooked up the audio whatsoever. This left our audio guy with the task of finishing this equipment as well as the task of converting all of the music audio to .ogg files, again not ideal. I spent my time trying to off-burden any workload for him like setting up some of our last bits of SFX but my efforts were pretty minimal in the grand scheme.

Ultimately, we weren’t able to finish on time. The audio guy and I were able to finish 99% of the other tasks with the exception of these last two items into the original submission. Once the deadline came, I was spent and headed to rest. Our audio guy spent an hour finishing up these last two tasks then presumably also went to rest. All in all, I was still very pleased with what we managed to accomplish.

Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.

I’ve attached the original submission and the latest build. You won’t notice the load times since it’s an executable but I can just confirm the load times were insufferable on web.