Sound Design Documentation - AlexisBliesener/Bewitched GitHub Wiki

Overview

This document serves to give a look at the main thought process and inspiration behind the sound design of Bewitched. This covers both sound effects and music and will give the reader a better understanding of the style and thematic elements of this game's audio.

Sound Effects and Ambience

4 Main Goals:

• Realism

  • Bewitched aims to achieve a high degree of realism to its audio. While some games take a more retro or cartoonish approach to sound design, our audio instead focuses on creating immersive and believable sound effects despite the fantastical nature of our world.
  • This is done through a heavy use of live samples and field recording instead of synthesized sound effects as well as a focus on high-fidelity audio.

• Responsiveness

  • It is integral that players are given proper feedback when a change happens in the game world, and audio cues are very important for achieving this. Sound effects are carefully designed to be impactful and attention-grabbing while not being overwhelming to the player.
  • This is done through careful implementation and a well-balanced mix. Mixing is also occasionally adjusted at runtime through snapshots.

• Emotional Appeal

  • The world of Bewitched is dark, foreboding, and very hostile, and the game's sound design should reflect this. Enemy sound effects should be aggressive and monstrous while ambience should be eerie and chilling.
  • This will be done through careful selection of samples and plugins to create very evocative and unsettling audio.

• Consistent Theming

  • One of my main focuses in designing audio for this game is making sure there are recurring elements in related sound effects. This not only helps the player make associations between related changes in-game but also further bolsters the game's style and identity.
  • For example, I plan to have many magical abilities in the game make heavy use of the human voice in different interesting ways. The Witch's possession sound effects as well as her blink feature processed vocal samples.

Inspirations:

• Hollow Knight for its immersive yet realistic sound design as well as its extremely lush background ambience.
• Dead Cells: for its usage of the human voice in some sound effects like the scroll pickup.
• Darkest Dungeon: for its eerie sound design, notably when out of combat.

Music

Emotional Goal:

• Unsettling
• Sinister
• High-Energy during combat or the entire track
• Tense

Instrumentation

• The music for Bewitched will predominantly use acoustic instruments found in Western Classical Music. It is quite common for soundtracks of fantasy games to use orchestral instruments and it also happens to be my preferred style for writing music.
• Choir will be heavily featured to further drive home the significance of the human voice in the sound design of Bewitched.
• Most tracks will also prominently feature percussion to create a sense of intensity in the music.

Compositional Style

• Slow-Building Tension: My goal for each track is to have a persisting feeling of tension that either builds slowly to a climax or constantly persists for the entire track. This is to make the player feel on-edge and giving each level a sense of danger.
• Discordant Drones: Certain tracks will have underlying drones holding dissonant intervals. This creates a sense of unease for the listener which reinforces the hostility of the player's surroundings.
• Strong Rhythmic Pulse: Each track should have a strong rhythm created by percussion instruments or other ostenato lines. Some tracks may have a strong rhythmic pulse for its entirety, and some might transition between heavy percussion and more loose, ambient sections.

Inspirations (currently mostly for tracks I have planned but not started)

• The music of Steve Reich, particularly Drumming and Eight Lines
• The music of Elden Ring, particularly Great Underground Rivers for its use of dissonance
• Lux Aeterna by Gyorgi Ligeti
• The OST of Hellish Quart for its percussion