Link to video: Sunday Nights Final
You have no idea how much I have learned during this project alone (on second thought, I'm pretty sure you do). The ability to make a main menu alone made me feel like a badass game developer (I'm definitely not one thought). I learned my limitations from previous projects and I tried to avoid impossible goals, improve what can be improved with the given time limit, and play to my strengths (which are music and songwriting mainly).
I had more passion for this project than of the previous ones (they're still my babies nonetheless lol). Therefore, let me tell you a story;
I used to live in a relatively big apartment in Egypt on my own. It was the peak of my career with a record label and a high position. It was more than what a 23-year-old could dream of, financial independence and way more. But it was still lonely, it was still tight. No matter how big the apartment was I still felt small. It was too echo-y, especially after all my friends leave to go home to their families.
But then I fell in love, and I realized that my partner, my family, and my close friends are what's important. No matter how much I achieve in my career, at the end of the day I come home to an empty house where there's no one I can tell my success to. My partner made my apartment warmer and with less echo. Ironically, you never realize the value of what you have until it's gone. For a few weeks my partner had to stay with his family, I started noticing the sad echo and cold breeze. I distract myself with anything, but it's then when I realized how important these people are to me and how my priorities have shifted.
Hence, on a sad Sunday night on my way back from work, I write the first verse on my phone and hurry home to finish the rest of the song.
I wanted to give the listener the same feeling of when I wrote this song. All the loneliness hit at once as if you're alone in space. But my space has an audio visualizer that interacts with my sound. They have a choice to play the song the way they feel is suitable to their lonely Sunday night.
The controls are the following: (they're also available in the main menu)
you start off by turning on the memories one by one as you look at objects around you in the apartment.
1 = Bass
2 = Pads
3 = Backing vocals
4 = Percussion/Beat
then it's up to you to discover where each instrument lives in the objects in the apartment. Each object/instrument is spatialized for you to find it. When you do you can now turn them off with the following keys: (you don't just turn them off, you destroy them, like how you want to destroy the memories of not being alone)
5 = turns off the bass
6 = turns off the pads
7 = turns off the backing vocals
8 = turns off the percussion/beat
9 = turns off the vocals
and then you can left click with you mouse on the guitar to turn it off
(mouse didn't work on the rest of the objects, so we went with keyboard buttons)
Now there's a secret game inside the game itself (enter it by clicking the letter L)
you are now inside my laptop (or your Sunday night laptop)
input the correct words (hinted in the instruction menu in the main menu) and you'll get an answer for the lyrics of the song.
It may not be the best audio-visual-interactive game out there, but it's pretty (at least to me) and I'm honestly very proud of how far I got here, more mentally than anything else. Thank you for giving me the chance to discover and acquire skills I never thought I'd be exposed to. Thank you also for the amazing support and great philosophical questions that I need to process still.
Google Drive Link: Project Build & Package