Hello! My name is Danny and I'm the sound designer / composer for Team Jelly Games!
One of the biggest challenges in making the sound design successful was managing one thing:
Noise. This is not just the volume itself, but the frequency of sounds that would potentially be heard over and over again within a very short time.
Mitobit is very fast-paced and given the arcade gameplay style, it's easy for sounds to be repetitive and annoying. The sound of a mitobit eating a carrot is cute until 15 mitobits are all eating one after the other. The sound of a mitobit being picked up is charming, until you've picked up a mitobit for the 20th time in the same level within 30 seconds of playing. I was able to solve this by making these sounds extremely short in length, narrow in frequency, and shortening any harshness in the highs with some EQ.
The original mitobit creature sound was actually the sound of a squeaky toy and I got from Zapsplat.com, but it was way too high in frequency. In other words, it started to sound like nails on a chalkboard. My favorite thing about the creation of the mitobit creature sound is the fact that it was an accidental discovery when I was working on the Mitobit title theme song. I was playing around with the pitch slider on my Launch Key Mini, using the Touché Factory Preset : Funkys - "Duke" and I was like: "This is it!". The title theme song gave Mitobit its sonic identity and it was the north star for all of the music after.
As much as I enjoyed the sound design and implementation process, what I actually enjoyed the most was making the music! There's mitobit DNA in every song, but I wanted every song to be very distinct from one another. Each song is based on the characters that our game designer Cole created. I used each character description to inform the style and mood of each song. I explored more genres and styles of music in 7 songs than in any other project I've worked on. From Cuban dance, to anime song, to lounge jazz and many more. One of the songs was actually inspired by the visuals of Reptar from Rugrats, destroying buildings in a TV cereal commercial. I'm curious as to what else I could have come up with, but overall, I'm satisfied with everything that I've made.
One of the earliest tracks we have revealed for Mitobit. This song plays for a certain child, and is the one modelled after Reptar!
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Speaking of Reptar, today's Mitobit shares their temperament.
This is the yellow Mitobit! The biggest species in the group, they know that nobody can stand up to them. Every now and then, they'll decide to find a Mitobit of a different species and bully them. When they do, red indicators will appear over both their and the victims head. If you spot this, you'll have to seperate the two manually, or else the mistreated Mitobits' needs will start rapidly depleting. -- And that's all for today's Squish! Thank you for reading as always. If you enjoyed this little behind the scenes, be sure to Wishlist. It's the easiest way to keep up with the project and be notified about it's release. Thank you!
Team Jelly Games