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Backseat Games 1.5.1 - A Sound Makeover

· 2 min read
Mike Homol
Mike Homol
Director of Innovation @ ThreeWill

SHIP LOG: Backseat Games - Store 1.5.1 - live Oct 31

Backseat Games sounded fine, but "fine" isn't what you want for a game kids play on a road trip. Version 1.5.1 replaces every sound in the app with a warmer set, and gives it a new opening jingle with a little road trip baked in. Apple approved it fast, and it went live on Oct 31.

What happened​

  • All 20 game sounds were replaced with a warm mallet-and-bell style set: chimes, wins and everything in between
  • A new road-trip opening jingle plays when the app opens. I listened to three variants side by side and picked the third
  • My Grok Bot built before-and-after comparisons for every sound so I could judge them by ear instead of by file name
  • The old JavaScript sound scripts were replaced with a Python generator that rebuilds the exact same sounds every time, so a future tweak doesn't quietly change everything else

Before and after​

Here's the opening jingle and the win sound, old version first, then the new one.

Opening jingle

Before:

After:

Win

Before:

After:

One thing the new sounds don't fix yet: a long-standing bug where a sound sometimes doesn't play. It's on the backlog.