Hello everyone,

We're back again with another blog, this time talking all about the various suites of music that were composed for the game. I'm Sam, Wix's artist, and while I'm not responsible for most of the game's tracks, my contributions do include the Level Editor theme and the Sewers theme, as well as the music you'll hear in our release trailer.

When we first started discussing how we wanted Jumphobia to sound, I remember strongly suggesting that we look into the sound design of Oddworld: Abe's Oddysey - a Playstation classic that I'm sure some of you will be familiar with. I could already see similarities between Abe's Oddysey and our rough build of Homeward Bound - both were side-scrolling platformers with an emphasis on puzzles, precision and patience (that's a lot of P's!) and they also both featured a grimy, dystopian setting.

The Oddworld game also featured a style of music called leitmotif, which is where it seems as if the sounds of the actual surrounding environment are coming together to form the music, giving it a very organic feel. We passed this on to our composer, Becky, who we've worked with on many of our games, and left her to do her thing!

After a while, we got to hear a few of the tracks she'd produced, starting with the Outlands, Scrapyard and title themes. At the request of Simon, the music style had been heavily influenced by the band Bicep, and had a hypnotic rhythmic style that combined both clean and grungy, electronic and acoustic impressions, as dichotomous as that may sound! I myself was getting strong Mirror's Edge vibes from these tracks, which was aesthetically one of my favourite games of all time, so I was very happy!

Later on in the development, I decided it'd be fun to make a sixth, secret hub world for people to discover after the story mode had been completed, and a sewer area was what first jumped to mind. So, over the next few weeks, I got to it, creating everything we'd need to make this possible, including the background music. While the majority of the game's tracks were composed in a far more professional setting, I on the other hand was restricted to the humble Garageband - a great Macintosh application in its own right, but hardly the industry standard! I tried to keep the feeling of the music inkeeping with the other tracks, and also stayed true to the "leitmotif" idea from earlier, incorporating the sounds of various drips, cranks and clangs throughout. The result is what you can hear in-game, and I think it fits rather well!

During this time, Simon had been branching out and searching for inspiration in titles similar to the game we were making, playing things like Ori and Mario Maker. From this, we came to the decision that we'd ideally like the music in each of our levels to change intensity in accordance with how much was going on around the player. And so, the next frontier of Jumphobia development began! This meant going back to every single song in the game, and picking them each apart into 3 different levels of intensity: a low, medium and high. While it was a painstaking process, it definitely pays off in-game and helps to enforce certain moods for each room in each given level, giving it either a chill, light feeling, or a more stressful and serious one, where you'd need to have your guard up from start to finish.

The end result is a varied yet admirably cohesive score, providing the highest highs and the lowest lows required to get the player fully immersed in the worlds we've created. Sound design can either make or break a game - I think a lot of people underestimate the impact it can have on an audience over time. The overall goal is to keep it complimentary to what going on on-screen, so as not to overpower the whole experience. If there's even one tiny sound in there that annoys the listener, it's going to be an annoyance EVERY time they hear it, not just the first few. I hope you've enjoyed this little look into the behind the scenes of the dev cycle, and we hope to see your levels popping up in Level World from time to time! See you on the other side!

Check the game out for yourself here, and be sure to add it to your wishlist!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1781380/Jumphobia_Homeward_Bound/

Sam
Lead Artist @ Wix Games

Hello everyone,

When making or playing any video game, the amount of fun you’ll have often comes from how well balanced the difficulty is. Whether you are playing a shooter where you can choose the level of difficulty, or a platformer where it is tailored and presented to you. Finding the balance between laughably easy, challenging, or outright unfair is something many games fail to perfect, but in most cases you want to be aiming for somewhere in the middle. When you factor in scaling difficulties, new mechanics, exploits or overpowered abilities, finding that balance becomes harder and harder to achieve.

When designing and testing Jumphobia: Homeward Bound, going about setting the difficulty had its fair share of problems. As a platform style game there are no difficulty settings, but each level is made in such a way to attempt to teach a player new skills whilst remaining engaging and challenging. As a player learns new skills and techniques the difficulty naturally gets slowly harder.

The first major problem we had whilst creating this game, is that we simply got too good at it. Spending several hours a day testing levels and concepts made each developer a lot more skilled than we gave ourselves credit for. When finally getting a new player to test out the level design, it was much to our surprise when told it was too difficult when we could complete the level with our eyes closed. Deciding what should be made easier and what should be made harder is no easy task and is mostly subject to the player's skill level.

Conversely, sometimes the problem isn't the difficulty directly, but understanding the right way to go, or the correct way to go about completing a challenge or obstacle. To overcome these issues simply requires good level design (and a lot of testing with new players of course). Nothing is more disheartening than laying out a path for the player to take, only for the very first tester to do the exact opposite of what you intended.

After reading all this you might be wondering how we managed to get the difficulty for this game right, if at all! The truth is we can’t be 100% sure until it’s released and more people have played it, but what we do know is that getting the difficulty right pays off. We believe we have put together a game with a difficulty that is easy to play but difficult to master, and players of all skill levels should be able to participate but also have a margin for improvement. These are some of the core ideals that make a game, like this one, fun.

But don’t take my word for it, check it out for yourself here and be sure to add it to your wishlist
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1781380/Jumphobia_Homeward_Bound/

Max Brown
Lead Programmer @ Wix Games