DRACOMATON

University of California Santa Cruz Senior Capstone 2023

Dracomaton is a top-down roguelike about Eclipse, a small robot who awakens in an abandoned factory filled with corrupted training bots and the bones of ancient Dragon Gods.

Table of Contents

Technical Sound Design

Music

Glitch Form

Conclusion

Technical Sound Design

I designed many of the many of the core audio systems for DRACOMATON, most notably:

The Adaptive Music System
Weapon and Damage Indication Sounds
Effect buses for Pausing, Taking Damage, and the Shroom Form Challenge

Adaptive Music

The soundtrack of the game was a shared effort between me and my audio teammate, Sophie Martin. We collaborated on a music style guide that included parameters for composing for the in-game adaptive music system.

The two different area music tracks have two different styles that crossfade between each other, Combat and Exploration. It's a relatively simple system but very effective given what we needed.

All gameplay music has a slowdown (or "tapestop") effect triggered on player death.

Weapon and Damage Indication

The enemy damage sound is heard by players pretty much constantly, so I wanted it to be dynamic and interesting to listen to over and over. I made each instance of the sound change intensity depending on the amount of damage the attack does. I'll admit, I went a little overkill with it, and it almost definitely had a non-negligible effect on the game's performance if the FMOD Profiler is anything to go by, but I think the effect was worth it to me to experiment with. In the future, I would definitely simplify this down and optimize it better, especially for a more performance intensive game.

The forms and their respective abilities were some of my favorite to design sounds for in the game.

[Talk about specific forms and include game + DAW screenshots/breakdowns?]

Effect Buses

Certain key moments of gameplay will trigger effect buses in FMOD. For example:

Taking damage will apply a low pass to all audio (except the player and UI) to really let the hit sink in.
Pausing also low passes the audio.
The Shroom Form challenge applies a trippy and disorienting delay + filter effect to all audio.

Music

I ended up taking a role as the Audio Lead and managed audio tasks and created a style guide.

One of the big style decisions we made early on with the music was to assign thematic meaning to distortion and bitcrushing. General distortion (tube and clipping) represented the presence of danger, and was mainly utilized in the combat and boss tracks. It came to represent dragons and fireblood within the lore. Bitcrushing represented the decay of technology after the humans were wiped out by the dragons, and was a constant in nearly every track.

I intended the title theme, Eclipse, to be a representation of the main character's feelings as the game progresses. It starts out slow and distorted as Eclipse wakes up, and becomes clearer and clearer over time as they explore the factory and learn more about its past. Each time they die, their sense of self and existence becomes stronger. What they experience slowly becomes a part of them, and the melodies of the different tracks heard throughout the game flutter by in a collage of memories. In a similar manner, these melodies become more and more familiar to the player as they progress.

Morse code translating to "Eclipse" repeats throughout the track, as if something is calling out to them. It stays constant even as the track becomes louder and clearer. Though they never quite understand it, Eclipse feels a deep urge to wake up after years of dormancy; there's something they need to do, and they must do it no matter how many deaths it may take.

I worked on the tracks:

Eclipse
Feeble Flames of a Forgotten Age
Recurse
Sundered Lullaby

This project was my first time releasing a soundtrack on Steam, and I'm very happy with how it turned out in the end!

UI

I helped design and implement the base layout for our UI, which underwent a lot of iteration. Our complex systems required a lot of UI features, so many of our programmers helped out with the implementation of UI. I focused mainly on early conception for the general layout of the UI, and deciding what information should be displayed and where. I implemented the basis for the display of the 3 available form slots, their ability cooldowns, player health, and status effects.

[Show some of the original implementations for UI]

I did some analysis of similar game's UI based on what quadrant of the screen important elements of information were displayed.

Above is my initial concept for the full combat UI screen. The most complex part was the forms display on the bottom right, which had a lot of information and went through the most iteration. This was from back when we had a combo system, so above the forms was a combo meter. The system was later scrapped.

This is how I initially conceptualized the forms to be displayed, with each stacked on top of one another. I wanted there to be a sort of "plug and play" feeling with the forms, so I themed them after USB sticks and displayed the cooldown information on each. The gears to the left were the mods affecting the form.

Below is what the first couple drafts of UI implementation looked like. I mainly focused on programming the forms display, ability cooldowns, and items.

We later added a couple more systems to them that weren't present at the time, namely the battery system (shown on the right). On top of that, we ended up deciding not to display mods on forms during gameplay due to scope, though part of me wishes we did for clarity's sake.

For comparison, below is the final UI. Forms are displayed on top of the ability cooldowns with their battery gauges right next to them.

Glitch Form

I designed and programmed the easter egg form, Glitch Form. The form is accessed in the chaos item room, where you must input a password found at the end of the credits to obtain it. I have a slight obsession with game glitches and their usage in art and speedruns, so many of the abilities I based off of particularly famous glitches.

I aimed to create a silly form that broke the rules of the game and allowed for some very chaotic fun. This form was never going to be possible to balance, which is why it was banished to an easter egg.

Abilities

Random Access Primary - Shoot a projectile randomly chosen from the pool of other form's primary projectiles. Changes which projectile is shot on a set interval.

Projectile Not Responding - Creates a stationary copy of every player-owned projectile on a set interval, leaving a trail of unmoving projectiles across the map. Based on the classic Windows rendering error where windows would "smear" the background when not responding.

Mod Evolutions

Hotswap (Mod Evolution 1) - Critical hits change an enemy from one type to another while preserving their stats. Loosely based off of a quirk with the RAM on old game systems, wherein quickly switching game cartridges while the system was still on would not wipe the memory in RAM.

Wrong Warp (Mod Evolution 2) - Using your secondary will teleport you to the location of your cursor (as long as your cursor is in bounds). Based on the famous glitch used in many game speedruns that allows you to warp to a location normally not accessible through intentional methods.

Conclusion

So far, this has been my favorite game I've ever had the chance to work on, and I'm really glad my teammates feel the same. We just can't leave this game alone, and have released two major content updates since our capstone classes ended in June 2023. In those updates with added 5 new forms, 12 new items, and 6 new enemies.

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