Ivan Berlin
Programmer && Musician
Ivan Berlin is a second-year Computer Science and Cognitive Psychology major at Northeastern University who has a passion for programming, composing music, playing and analyzing videogames, and cats.
He is currently exploring how to interweave his wide array of interests by studying - and applying himself to - new programming domains, music genres, music production programs, and game-related software. His witty sense of humor is equally loved and hated by his friends and family.
Duelity
Project Summary
Duelity is, as suggested by its title, a dueling game set in the Wild West centered around the concept of duality. The game tells the tale of Guy and Connor, a wild cowboy and his more reasonable brother. After Guy’s wife and child are taken hostage, Connor helps Guy by trying to negotiate with the captors. Yet, if the negotiations fall through, Guy must duel each captor to get them to give up information on where their boss is hiding out.
Project Role(s)
My role for this jam was to create the game’s music and sound effects. The sound effects mainly covered ambient sounds - such as the wind and wolves howling - as well as gunshots. The soundtrack consists of four different themes that roughly correspond to the different scenarios in the game. There’s a serene yet tense standoff negotiation song; a dueling track for when the negotiations fall through and the duel can’t be put off; a “drunkenly-played” saloon-style song for the duel against Darcy the Drunkard; and a more somber yet epic counterpart to the standard dueling track for the final duel. Much of the music was inspired by Ennio Morricone’s work on classics such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
What I Learned
From listening to Morricone’s soundtracks, watching videos on how to imitate Old-Western film guitars, and experimenting with a plug-in that emulates different era vinyl records, I was able to shape the game into sounding like a modern Wild-Western story. I learned to incorporate instruments such as castanets, flute, and Spanish guitar for tense negotiations; tremolo-heavy old-western guitar, pan flute, horse hoof pattern drums, and old-timey symphonic brass-and-strings for duels. I also learned how difficult it can be to toe the line between comedically bad yet fitting music and genuinely discordant music when trying to compose the song for the duel against Darcy the Drunkard. It features warped, offbeat barside piano that sounds almost like Darcy himself is trying to play, yet it bolsters the context of the interaction more than it sounds off-measure.