In early April 2014, Quentin Zervaas and I began our first attempt at making an iOS game — Hexiled. Quentin is a mobile app developer and I am a web designer/developer. Before Hexiled, neither of us had made a game. In case it's useful to any other developers, or of interest to those playing the game, here's the story.
Get Hexiled from the App Store on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch now in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian and Dutch.
With three game modes, all of which could run for varying lengths of time, we had a challenge in adding music that would suit intense and relaxed styles. Escape games are typically fast with a build towards a panic as the clock runs down, Survive games can take from a minute to half an hour with waves of intensity at any point, and Explore games are often 10-30 minutes of casual word hunting.
Ideally we'd have relaxed music for some situations and peaking, intense tracks for others.
While we initially dreamt of some form of dynamic music, on a budget and keen to get something released we needed another plan. The budget constraint meant that versatile tracks which could serve for all modes were our best hope.
We figured that multiple tracks around 5-6 minutes in length could serve as a playlist for Explore mode, and if they each contained a sequence of intense peaks and relaxed troughs, they could potentially be useful in the other modes also. If there was a passage within a track that consisted of 90 seconds building up to a peak, we could use that for any Escape game with a time limit of 90 seconds or less.
After asking friends for recommendations on accessible composers, we trialled a freelancer in Brisbane that Quentin knew -- Dan Herbert. We created a brief that explained our game prototype, the modes and the tone of music we were after, and commissioned an initial track to check whether we were all on the same page. This was around May 27.
Here's the video with out-of-sync audio we sent to Dan:
The style we wanted was without human influence, so avoiding typical human instruments was necessary. This meant ambience and basic beats. In the brief, I mentioned Autechre as one example and Dan also mentioned Clint Mansell's soundtrack for Moon which I've always liked.
By June 1, we had a couple of initial loops that, while simple, showed that Dan had the rough idea. The first track received around June 6 was promising enough that we persisted with some tweaks and a couple of the subsequent tracks were right from the first listen. By June 8 we had three track drafts and by June 20 Dan had sent the full complement of five tracks.
In bringing the tracks properly into Escape mode, we mapped the peaks of each track and Quentin wrote code that would determine the point at which we started a track based on when a playthrough might finish.
We're happy with the results. Those who upgrade the game with the Unlock Everything in-app purchase get access to the soundtrack as DRM-free MP3s suitable to listen outside the game.
If you'd like to hear how the music turned out, install the game and give it a shot!
Or for a preview, check out this old demo video of me playing Survive mode for a minute as sections of Dan's tracks loop through in the background.
In parallel with the commissioning of Hexiled's music, we were also discussing the minutiae of a pricing strategy and how advertising might monetise our game. Read the next chapter.
Get Hexiled from the App Store on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch now in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian and Dutch.