Sounds of Somber

Sounds of Somber | Trailer #2

Sounds of Somber | What is it? 

Sounds of Somber is a 2D, side-scrolling, puzzle-platformer game that presents a strong narrative element with a theme of overcoming grief and self-doubt, presenting this within the mind of the player in a unique way. Sounds of Somber uses puzzles, narrative, and interactable items to present the audience with the emotions of the player and how the loss of a loved one has impacted them.

Sounds of Somber was created for the Media Arts and Game Design course called “Team Projects” where students get into groups and create a semester-long project utilizing all of their skills. Our team had five departments with members of varying skill levels - engineering, narrative, art, audio, and marketing. 

To the Top | Leading a Team

In Sounds of Somber, I served as the engineering department’s lead, as well as a pseudo project creative lead. From creating the GitHub to working within Unity, helping the art team with understanding tiled sprites and animations, to helping the narrative team convey where they wanted the story to go in-game, I did my best to help every aspect of this project where I could.

I created code for most aspects of the game, including the dialogue system, the player movement, saving and loading the game, the diary entries, the cutscene system, the interactable system, and almost every puzzle in the game. Aside from this, I worked closely with the art department and the narrative department to provide our team with a functioning pipeline to ensure that every department was on the same page. Helping each team understand where other teams were in the progress of the game was essential in understanding where the project currently was, and I did as much as I could to aid in this process.

Communication and workflow were one of the largest issues in this project that we needed to overcome. No one had ever worked on a project as large as this, with a vision as large as our game had. Ensuring that everyone knew what needed to be done and how to communicate that to other teams (primarily the engineering department in most cases) as well as how to provide other teams with assets and information needed for the game. This was a struggle for me as it was for everyone within the project, but we worked hard to guarantee that we could finish the game and fulfill our goals.

Sounds of Somber | Website

Check out the website made by our marketing team here! 

Sounds of Somber | Download

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