Finally, with all of this context, I could decide what I wanted to actually do with the audio. In order to navigate the maze, the player would have a "device" that would send out a ping searching for walls, which would travel out and then return after making contact with a wall. The further away a wall was, the longer the ping would take to return, thus signalling to the player that there was more space to travel in that direction, essentially allowing the player to traverse the maze using echolocation. Logistically, then, I worked out that I wanted a time buffer between each 7.5 second window, so I reduced my time for each cell down to 6 seconds (the buffer silence filling the other 1.5 seconds). Then, I determined that the ping would travel one cell every 0.5 seconds, and would go out, hit a wall, then travel back before the return ping was heard. This meant that within 6 seconds I had twelve 0.5-second intervals to work with, meaning that at any given point, the player could not be more than 6 cells away from a wall in any direction. While it was still technically a new restriction, this felt incredibly reasonable to me given that I had decided on an 8x8 grid, and a winding maze was unlikely to have any singular corridor that was seven or more squares long. 

With this structure, the "controls" became clear. Per the restriction that the project must be presented in Reaper, the only control they would have is where in the track is being heard. Thus, players needed to be able to navigate through the maze by only clicking through different points in the timeline. Now, while this wasn't the cleanest or most polished control scheme, I thought it would suffice given our restrictions. I determined that traveling north and south would have the player jump up or down a minute in the timeline, while moving left and right would have the player click forward or backward 7.5 seconds. That gives four-directional movement control, and really that's all that is needed for this setup.

Before I could get to work digitizing this, though, I wanted to lock in a maze and put all the context in front of me for how this would work. I played around with a couple different layouts before finding one that I liked, and then laid out an example for what a sound played at a specific square.

Now, this organization was helpful for me calculating each channel for each cell spacially, but I knew I would benefit from a third display for the same information when it came time for track assembly, so I took the information above and formatted it into a different chart, this time organized by channel action over time. This layout would allow me to easily piece together each channel one channel at a time, as opposed to working on all four channels simultaneously, cell by cell, which seemed a lot more frenzied and disorganized. 

The final actual piece of design that I wanted to do was to have the environmental sounds grow louder and louder as the player got closer to the "source". Of course, I hadn't determined an official source, but I figured it was easy enough to say that the two guards (purple and red) lived in the corners of the maze, while the fairy forest originated from the exit at 7A. Of course, the problem this posed practically was that when generating sounds, I had previously been on the hook to generate a maximum of 25 different sounds (distance 1-6 with no ambience, distance 1-6 with each type of ambience, and one sound for if players accidentally stepped into a wall), but with this change in volume, that number would balloon quite a bit. I would need to generate individual clips for, in some cases, each channel of each cell within areas that had ambience. 

I decided, ultimately, that this wouldn't add on too much more time to my fabrication, and it was worth it because without the guidance of stimuli growing louder or quieter, players would be led to make semi-arbitrary decisions as to their movements, and I had hoped that once players grasped the mechanics, they would fall into a flow state that could be supported by this dynamic ambient sound. With that, though, I again needed to be really careful with my organization so that everything was set to play in the right place at the right time. I went back and recolored both of my organizational charts, weighting the strength of the color based on how close it was to its source. 

Because of all of the organizational work up top at every single stage in the process, the construction step was an absolute breeze. I simply opened a Logic file and dragged in each sound file where it needed to go, one after another, ensuring that they were placed at the right sound markers. I knew when I needed to grab a special sound because of how it was colored in Figure 3, and I knew exactly where to find it because of my labeling in Figure 4. Pretty quickly, I had four tracks that were exactly eight minutes long, exported and labelled. 

The very last thing was that I made a new tab in the spreadsheet that I had been working in as a "read me" file for setup, where I gave the one paragraph lore dump, as well as setup instructions and addressing some things to note that could help play go a bit more smoothly. 

To view the entire spreadsheet, click here!

Bringing this project to be presented, it quickly became clear that I had ventured the furthest out into the weird with my project, but once I explained it, my classmates became quickly invested in solving the maze. I was a bit nervous because I had been completely unable to playtest the game due to not having access to a space with 4.1 audio between finishing it and the presentation, but I trusted in my organization and it went really well! At the end of my presentation, my professor suggested that the game would be a great installation in an experimental audio space on campus.

I'm overall very very happy with how this project turned out. I had a lot of fun working under constraints that were very different than I am used to in the game design space, and I think that because I needed to get a little bit occult with the design, it turned out to be a really unique project that I'm pretty proud of.

There are two small things that irk me a little bit about it: the first is that because of the restraint of it being playable within Reaper, an unfortunate side effect is that the player can always see the audio visualizer of the tracks, and thus has some small way to "see" their way through the maze. I looked for ways to hide the audio visualizer but couldn't find one, so just had to leave it, unfortunately. The other thing that I would want to change is that I think it would be really cool to have some kind of hotkey or joystick that responds to inputs to automatically jump to different points in the audio track, because I feel like not needing to think about the mechanical input of moving from one place to another within an audio track could allow for a little bit more of a flowstate. On the other hand, though, while these two critiques put more polish and refinement on the project, I think they do detract a little bit from the jankiness of it, and move it more toward normalcy, which I think makes it a bit less charming overall. 

If you would like to view all the project files, or set it up yourself, here is the link to the files!