Sound, action, reaction. K.A.S.E.'s sound design.
- 23 feb 2016
- 3 Min. de lectura
We often talk about gameplay and graphics in video game, but what about the music and sound effects? Do you ever stop and listen to what a game has to offer sound wise ? Have you ever played a game with the sound muted, and felt like something important was missing from your overall experience ?
Well that’s to avoid this kind of flaw that I’m here! As the lead sound designer on K.A.S.E, i’m going to be talking about our sound design and how it is going to evolve is the months to come. Grab your headphones and watch your cubes(for all we know, you might end up with several ones at the end of this article…), because we are going on a sound escape !
image de Klink et du soleil
Our minimalistic world is designed to make the player feel alone, in a vast empty world, that he is going to fill with his constructions and breath life into his cubes with sounds. My main inspirations were :
Audiosurf and Thumper : A Rhythm Violence. Both are set in a virtual world and use abstract futuristic sounds.
Deus Ex and Grow Home. In Deus Ex, musics are designed to evolve and react with the player’s actions. Combined with Grow Home’s vertical progression, they allowed me to think about how our ambiance was going to change.
Hotline Miami. The use of Synth-Wave in our prototype was suitable. It reminds the player of this virtual world, and fits our gameplay mechanics animations, with its wobbling sounds and vibrations.
Using FMOD as a sound engine, i designed an ambiance that evolved as the player gets higher and higher (in the game, not in real life…). When you are on the ground, a droning computer sound can be heard, making you feel like the ground you are stepping on is alive (in a robotic kind of way). It fades away when you start climbing your way to the skies, and is replaced by strange music notes, that i designed, and played by the engine itself, so that the melody is randomly generated, as long as you stay at a certain altitude. After that, music cues in. A slow paced synth riff that brings you that feeling that you reached a important point in the game. This riff is then followed by, what i call cyber wind. A noisy, pixellated wind sound that mimics mountain wind, but in a virtual way (you have to hear it to understand what i’m talking about, it’s really hard to explain).
Our feedback sounds are designed around that Synth-Wave style I was talking about two paragraphs before. I wanted something abstract, that represents what you are doing to the cubes : expanding, increasing in size, pushing and duplicating. I wanted to use this music style for its vibrating/wavy sounds, and its relation to virtual worlds (like Tron…). I got lucky that we stepped in that direction because it was something i really wanted to try in a game, and in my opinion, it worked great.
Now, we are still discussing what feature we are going to add to transform our toy into a game, but for our sound design, we want longer soundtracks so that they will evolve in a smoother way. We might hire a composer to create better music tracks (sadly, i’m not a composer, i’m a sound designer… *wink*). I also want to experiment with binaural sounds. It will bring a deeper immersion into our world. Finally, i want to add more personality to our robot friend Klink, by designing a pool of sounds that will make him sound unique (in a way, BB8 is… *wink again*).
That’s all for now, if you have questions concerning our sound design, or sound design in general, don’t hesitate to ask them on our facebook or twitter page.
Peace out !
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