Belly & Brain, The Game. Week 7.
You have to be pretty important to have your own theme, right? It’s usually the reserve of movie stars, WWE actors and all the guests of the former Friday Night with Jonathan Ross show. Befitting their extremely important role as World Ambassadors of Food and the front-men of Just-Eat, Belly & Brain now have their own theme tune. Thankfully, it’s not a delightful ditty by those 4 jolly men from his show, even though they’re probably now out of work and, I suspect, quite affordable.
Normally when I commission music for a game, I ask the musician to produce a clutch of short audio ’sketches’. These are then listened to and the best one is chosen. Often this can be a fraught procedure if the music doesn’t really match the character of the game. It’s a terrible thing to tell a musician you don’t like their work. Being highly strung it can go one of two ways; either they cry, run off and write a song about how cruel the world is, or they can go all rock-star on you and smash the place up. I mean, would you tell someone like Eminem that their work sucks? Nah, probably not…
Either way, I wasn’t risking it, so I contacted an old friend from the games industry who has a number of titles under his belt that you may have heard of, including Grand Theft Auto, GTA 2, GTA 3- Vice City (which won a Bafta for use of audio, by the way). That’s right, we don’t just hire any old mother-string-plucker to bring this game to life, we hire the best! At any rate, we hope that you like it as it makes us all smile when we listen to it – and that’s what video game music should do!
So Week 7, huh? Who’d have thought that it would take so long to make best game in the world. I’d have thought that we’d have pretty much nailed it by now. And we’re getting close. Pretty much ALL the game features are in now, and we’re just populating the game world with a whole load of levels for you. We’re not talking maybe 10 or 20 levels here. We’re aiming to release the game with more than 100 levels at launch. Each level will be snack-sized, so you can blast through a few on the way to work in the tube, or bus (not the car though, eh). Every level will be a work of art. There’s not just a single way of completing the level – there’s loads, and each way will be fun and rewarding. You will be encouraged to get creative with your use of food. Getting the best score on each level is key though, since you will be able to show off to your friends via Facebook and compare your high-scores! So far, we have about 30-40 levels in place, and we’re polishing, polishing, polishing to make it all as fun and playable as we possibly can.
Here’s a few screenshots of some levels from the Italy campaign to whet your appetite:
We've all been there, right? Trapped in a cave with a funnel of cheese above you, but blocked by a big, glass brick?
Ah, smash the glass with a bunker-busting carrot to free the cheese! Of course...
That not weird enough for ya? Well how to liberate a giant volcano full of burgers? With a melon-bomb of course!
Superman had an icy Fortress of Solitude. Belly has one too of course, for the weekend when he dons his cape and uses his powers of mass consumption to save the world...
A couple of well-placed shots will make this fortress a little less super. Belly's still smiling, however...is that a good sign?
That’s it for this week. Next week, we’ll probably have expended the very final vestiges of our creative spirit following the production of some 100 more levels. Hope to see you then to let you know how it’s going!
Tom & Stewart
