Turpentine
Team Size: 9
Development: September 2009 – April 2010
Primary Role: Lead Designer
Secondary Role: Sound Designer
Turpentine is a side-scrolling Flash Platforming game that is heavily influenced by its story and its art style. The player takes the role of Jeremy, otherwise known as “The Patient”, a young man who is in his first year of college. Jeremy is court ordered to attend therapy sessions, and in an attempt to connect with him, the psychiatrist attempts to establish a relationship with him by having him walk her through his artwork, which Jeremy’s girlfriend had gathered. The character plays through four levels, each representing a different age in his life, further punctuated by the use of different media to portray that art. To this end, this game required some amazingly skilled and versatile artists utilizing a mixture of crayons, colored pencils, ink, paint, and Photoshop skills.
The game also features fully voiced cutscenes with over one hundred lines of dialogue, detailing the patient’s past and the events that led him to his current situation. Through the use of flashbacks, the players can learn about the protagonist’s struggle with his father and drug problems.
This was an odd project for me, because the group recruited my help shortly after they finished their prototyping.
As lead designer, my responsibilities were as followed:
- Maintaining the vision of the design throughout the production cycle
- Updating design documentation as necessary
- Making all executive design decisions
- Editing the script to make it sound more organic
- Test each build of the game comprehensively and inform engineers immediately of any bugs
- Communicate with other leads whenever there appeared to be an issue with the project
Additionally, as sound designer I was responsible for the following:
- Creating the music for the game
- Gathering and, if necessary, editing sound effects utilizing available resources
- Recording the voices as well as identifying actors and actresses for each role
As this was both my most recent work and the largest team I’d been on, this may have given me the most insight on a project yet. I quickly learned that maintaining communication with everyone in the group is of vital importance, and made it a goal to ensure that everyone knew what their roles were. In this regard, I assumed the role of an unofficial co-producer. I was also certain to help this project in whatever I could, which is why I decided to be the game’s sound designer. This was my first time doing anything sound related. I utilized Acid Xpress to create the game’s music, and used Acid Xpress and Audacity to edit sound effects so they would better fit the game.
I’ve listed the music from the game below:
