​  When it came to making Freeze-E Frosty's we knew we needed to have a vibrant soundtrack that will capture the feeling of the game. At the beginning we didn't know how we were even going to start on a soundtrack. Luckily for us the very talented Mike Coons joined the team.

​   Mike Coons brought along with him over 25 years of composing experience. He however had never worked on a game before. Mike is an extremely talented guy. He composes all of his music and he plays just about every instrument I can imagine.
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​   Over the period of a few months I shared with Mike some of the best soundtracks in gaming. I wanted the game to have a soundtrack that was retro with possibly some chiptune sounds. I sent him links to just about every game I could imagine. Bomberman, Mario, Contra, Crash Bandicoot were just a few games I sent him as reference. Mike came by weekly to demo his latest tracks. Below is a breakdown of the songs in the game.

​   For reference I told Mike that we were kind of going for a very 1950's malt shop kind of vibe. I described it as something that would be played through a jukebox. When it came to the tone and the vibe he certainly matched what we as a team was looking for.  

   He filled in the track with some light piano and guitar that came together to form a very relaxed Jazz sound that perfectly reflected Frosty as a character. The piano to me fits well with the feel of the game, the song sounds relaxed but the piano is something of a warning that things might get a bit tense.

​   The track that he came up with captured the mood exactly. He kept the piano but added in some horns and gave it a pulsing rhythm. It is one of my favorite songs he composed for us. It has a very moody feel to it without being overbearing. 

   Mike really knocked this one right out of the park. He really made a track that not only paid homage to one of the classics but it stands on it's own. I remember running play tests of the level and having people come up to me asking if they can get a copy of this song. It was pretty much at this point I knew Mike was capable of working with the guidelines I gave him and excel.

​   The track below is what he came up with. It had the Jurassic Park influence but it lacked the magic of previous tracks. I am not saying that it wasn't good, because it was good. It just didn't fit the mood of the boss battle. We ended up using this track for another area in the game known as the "Trophy Room". We scrapped the Jurassic Park idea and decided to go in another direction with it.

  ​Mike headed back to the mixing board and came up with two different songs. The first was a very slow and grim. The second was a much more fast paced song. We originally were going to go with the faster paced track but we realized that before the boss fight is a short intro/tutorial and in between phases of the boss fights we had lulls in the combat so we needed something, we couldn't simply have no music for that part. Mike mixed both tracks together to make what became the track below. It builds up slowly and turns into a much more fast paced song. We looped the first half of the song for the start of the level and for the parts in between the rounds.

   Mike produced a lot of content for us, so much in fact that a few tracks didn't make it into the main game. Everything he came up with was fantastic. He took whatever mix of ideas we had in our heads and turned it into music. Below are two tracks that are not in the main game but were added as Easter eggs in the games main menu.

​  Ice Cream adventure was going to be the song for the first level but it was taken out in favor of "Cold as Ice Jazz". We liked the song, it reminded us of Crash Bandicoot. We instead planned on using it for a level that would come after the boss battle. Early on we thought we might want to continue the project.

​  8-Bit boogie was a great song that was also a contender for the first level song. I personally love the chip tune sound it has. This song is really upbeat, it properly reflects the tone of the game but we wanted a song that would suit Frosty's character.

​  When it came to implementing the music into the levels I found that using the matinees in Kismet allowed me the perfect level of control over the music in game. I was able to link it to switches and actions in a way to accommodate for just about any situation.

​   The music was easily implemented into all of the levels. The only level that really had some problems was the boss fight. I had to make sure that the first half of the boss fight music played at the start of the level and to transition into the speedier battler music once the boss showed up. 

   Things in the boss fight became pretty complex. I had to break the music into three music phases, one for each phase in the boss fight. I also had to have phases for each transition from round to round. In the end I was able to get the matinees to play the appropriate music when necessary. The whole thing came out spectacular, the music in the boss fight was flawless.

​   Freeze-E Frosty's went on to win Game Wizards Game of the Year at Art Institutes of Santa Monica that year. Mike didn't have any experience working with games but he didn't let that stop him from taking the challenge. I was happy to work closely with him to perfect the soundtrack and in the end his weekly visits was something the entire team rallied around. If it wasn't for him Freeze-E Frosty's would have been a much different game. The soundtrack stands as the best soundtrack Game Wizards has ever heard.

   Do you have questions, comments or concerns? Email us at deepdigitaldesign@gmail.com
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- Danny Q
@Dannylv100​
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​  During the nine month production cycle of Freeze-E Frosty's there were many levels that ended up on the cutting room floor. These levels are referred to by me as the "Lost Levels". 

​ This area was intended to come at a later point in the game. At this point of production the dash mechanic was not even in the game and the only abilities the player could use was jumping and the Freezing.

   This level was one of my favorites. It was a level that would truly challenge the player. Death was a constant threat and only the most skilled player would make it out unscathed. If the player was to make one wrong move they could fall straight into the icicles that would kill them instantly. Icicles weren't just on the floor, they were also on the ceilings and walls. 

​   The level starts off with the player coming across a locked door. The only way for the player to open the door is to freeze the exposed electrical wires hanging conveniently overhead. The next room has a single platform and an ice block. To get the platform to move the player is supposed to once again freeze the exposed wires overhead. Once the platform is moving the player can smash through the ice block and get to the next platform. The process of carefully traversing the platforms while freezing electrical wiring made the pacing of this map very slow and a bit tedious.

   The main problem with this level was that it had too many cheap deaths. During early play tests we realized that most players give up once something becomes too hard. This began a debate about a level being challenging vs cheap. To avoid the possibility of being cheap I made sure to include checkpoints in every area where death is a possibility. Ultimately this level got cut early on in production. Another reason was because it didn't fit anywhere in the games story.

   During the production cycle we felt that we had to vary up the level design. One idea that we came up with was splitting up the level into a branching paths. I designed a level with two paths to take, the high road and the low road. The objective of this level was to reach the cooling vats and stop the factory from having an ice cream meltdown. 
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​  The high road is a much shorter path but it is also a lot harder. The high road is full of dangers such as out of control conveyor belts, fire,steam and icicles. The Low road has very few real dangers and death here is unlikely. The low road babies the player until they reach their goal. The downside of the low road is that it takes a lot longer to get to the elevator to reach the goal.

   The problem with this setup is that it lacked balance. What I mean is that we had to ensure that both areas were awesome and played well. The time it would of took to polish two massive areas like this would have been ridiculous. At this stage of development we were also trying to include collectible items. The problem with this is that no matter what route you took you would miss the collectible in the other area. The Other big problem was communicating to the player that the high road was more difficult compared to the low road. We could of easily stopped the game here and had a on screen visual that told the player but we felt that it would be inconsistent with our overall design. 

​  This idea was sort of pitched to me by Tony Sanchez, one of the environmental artist on our team. He came up with the idea that some of the ice cream had melted and the player would have to escape from an avalanche/flood of melted ice cream. I recalled there being an Episode of the cartoon series "Doug" where there is a meltdown at the local ice cream factory. Doug has the ice cream hit the cooling fans so it can chopped up into smaller servings. So from that odd combination of disjointed thoughts this level was born. 

​  At this point in development we had the dash ability implemented and we had the main story beats down for the game. This level was going to happen a bit after the factory starts melting down. When the player reaches this area there was going to be a quick cutscene where we see a wall of pistachio ice cream come barreling down this hallway wiping out droves of workers in its path. The player would then utilize a combination of quick jumps and dashes to avoid being drowned in ice cream. The player would have to dash down the hallway avoiding various hazards and reach a service elevator that would take them to safety just as the ice cream avalanche would smash into the cooling fan.

   This level got cut because it demanded a lot of work from an art perspective. After some story changes, it didn't fit with the games overall narrative unfortunately. By the time we sat down and discussed the block out we realized that the scope of the game had changed and this idea wasn't going to worth the time to create the assets and polish the design. It just didn't have a place in the game anymore. 

​  This level came a bit late in development. The idea came from our project lead Juan Valencia. He felt that we didn't have enough variety in our abilities. He developed an ability that allowed the player to bounce from ledge to ledge in quick succession. This ability was called the "ledge jump".  It was a cool idea but the hard part was getting it into the game so late. This section of the game was supposed to come right after the "Cookie Crumbler" area and before the boss fight.

   The player was going to use the ledge jump to scale some broken platforms and reach the top of this room. Once at the top the player would use the ability to jump over a small fire, reinforcing the skill they just used. Once that is done the player would fall into a mine cart delivery area where every few seconds a mine cart would be shot out from the left side of the room to the right side. To avoid being hit by the mine cart the player would use their new ability to dodge up into the ceiling. 
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​ It all sounds pretty reasonable, in fact I even added a secret room in the ceiling with a collectible item to encourage the player to use the ability for exploring. The biggest problem was that this area of the game would be coming in so late the new ability was only going to be used for this area. The ability would be a one time use thing. To solve that problem Juan asked me to incorporate it into the boss fight, which at this time was in its early prototyping phase.

   I was against incorporating the ledge jump ability into the boss fight because it felt completely shoehorned. Also we would be forcing players to rely on a ability they just learned only minutes before to defeat the boss. It was a recipe for disaster and I am glad we decided to cut the ability and the level.

   ​This level was one of the levels that I came up with early on in the development cycle. The Idea behind this level is that Frosty must navigate a series of doors ( A links to A, B links to B etc) in order to find two switches that will open up a door that will give him a key to open up the exit. Sounds complicated? Well it kind of was. 

This level was created so early. It was made when we were still brainstorming how the game should play. At this point we were focusing on areas that were a bit more focused on puzzles and problem solving rather than just platforming. We decided to gear the game towards platforming rather than puzzles. We wanted to keep the pacing just right. Making the player stop their platforming adventure to search for switches and keys drastically slows the game down and wasn't the direction we wanted to go with.
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​   This is once again a level I put together during our early days. I was asked to come up with a level that had more of a vertical feel to it. What I came up with was a grueling, challenging level that screamed difficult.

   The player starts out descending down a bit, avoiding some deadly steam, breaking through an ice block and attempting to solve a switch puzzle without being impaled on icicles or being melted. The next area was supposed to be a large delivery room style area that was dropping mail down towards the player via conveyor belts. The player was to jump back and forth on the conveyor belts while avoiding anything being dropped on them. If the player were to fall off of one of the conveyor belts they would be killed in a horrible pit of fire. 

​   I don't even know what I was thinking when I was designing the next room. It is one of the hardest levels I ever came up with for this game. In this room the player needs to hop into a mine cart and use their freeze gloves on some exposed wiring in order to power the mine cart. Once the cart is online it will move forward allowing the player to jump to another mine cart. Once again the player must slowly advance to the right. One wrong move and they would fall to their death.

   I didn't make this area any easier. The exit was locked which meant the player head to get to the switch to open the door and jump in a mine cart, power it up enough so that the momentum will then toss the player toward the exit. Yeah executing all that isn't really for the casual gamer. I know some hardcore gamers that wouldn't like doing this. As I said before this was an exercise in balancing out being cheap versus challenging.

   This level got scrapped because we didn't have the time and assets to make this area. Story wise this took place well after the factory blew up. We needed to focus on the first half of the game and not the second. The tutorial area at this time was there but it was very crude and very simple. We passed on this idea and focused on our strengths and polished the first few areas instead. 

​   Just remember that when you design a level you need to make sure that the player is having fun. If the player has a bad experience with your game, they have little reason to come back and play.

 Do you have questions, comments or concerns? Email us at deepdigitaldesign@gmail.com
Follow us on Tumblr, IndieDB, Twitter, Mixcloud,Soundcloud,Twine, instagram and Youtube

- Danny Q
@Dannylv100
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