I’ve got an exciting new game to talk about. After I got back from Germany, I went straight into the game jam event from RVA game jams, Spooky Jam. In this post, I will be talking about the game and how I made certain sounds for the game. I will also be talking about some challenges I faced for this jam. If you’re a regular on my site, you know the drill. Let’s get into it!
Jam Day
For this game jam, we were tasked to make a spooky game to celebrate the Halloween season! Before this jam started, I was able to group up with a team of programmers and artists. They had seen that I do music and were interested in having me work on their team.
So, with our team decided, we met up with everyone else in RVA Game Jams at Toy Lair. This place was a very interesting mix of a spooky dungeon and a toy box. Anyway, our team came together and we pretty much just talked about what makes a game scary and some of our favorite games.
After some discussions, our team settled on a first-person, point-and-click, room escape game. In this game, you are tasked to escape a facility alive. You do get some story about what happened, but you aren’t quite sure what’s going on due to memory loss. After that, we got to work on the game.
Music
For horror games, the sound is absolutely critical to get right. Sound is what makes things spooky and unsettling when you combine it with the rest of the artwork and gameplay.
For the music in the game, I employed a couple of techniques. Since our game was set in a room where you had access to a terminal, I decided to use ole’ reliable, the CMI Fairlight synth.
I probably mentioned it in previous posts, but I really do like this synth for that dark, cold sound. Not only did this fit the terminal theme, but I really wanted to create a spooky ambience with it. With this synth, I created the base synth drone, along with sprinkling in some string sounds that played periodically.
After I had that, I felt like the ambiance was missing a little…something. What I ended up doing was I found a recording of a construction site on freesound (CC0 license), and used Audacity’s Paulstretch tool. Audacity was a software I used heavily very early in my audio career, and my favorite tool on it was the Paulstretch. I just remembered it either gave sound a creepy vibe or an ethereal sound. When I applied this to the construction sound, it was even better than I could’ve imagined.
After stretching, I chopped up the best parts of the recording and pieced them together in a coherent-sounding ambience. I wanted not only to convey your anxiety in this facility, but also to have strange sounds that could paint the picture of something happening beyond the walls of the game world. I was also very happy that with the way I spliced the recordings, it also kinda sounds like heavy breathing from the character you are playing as. That also really added to the tension of the ambience nicely.
Sound Effects
The one aspect of this project I am very proud of is the SFX. I want to specifically talk about 2 of them I made, one designed to make players jump out of their seat, and the other to tell a story happening behind the walls.
The first one, we will call the horror stinger. This sound plays whenever a player gets caught by an endgame scenario ( I won’t say what, play the game to see ;).
I forgot to mention this previously, but we did not complete this jam game during our weekend deadline. The scope of this project became too much to handle. As you are reading this, we did end up finishing it in the end!
I mention this because I was first tasked to make the horror stinger when I was on the bus going towards the showcase! I initially told my team that I would not be able to make these SFX, and they said that was fine. As I was sitting on the bus, it just kept gnawing at me that I should try to do it.
I downloaded 2 apps on my phone, n-Track Studio and Super Sound. One is a free DAW, the other is a free audio editor. For the horror stinger, I found a creepy sound and an impact sound, both from freesound’s CC0 license library. I was able to combine the 2 and sent the finished sound to my team. They were surprised that I was able to make something that sounds great on my phone!
After the showcase, we continued to work on the game. The sound I made on the phone was good, but it was a bit of a slow burn. I really wanted to make it pop so that the players get scared. To achieve this, I grabbed the sound I made initially and layered in a couple of CMI synth layers on top of it. One synth layer I ran through some heavy distortion and delay banks to make it very screeching. The other layer is short, wind/whisper-like sounds. That layer in particular really helped to add a skin-crawling element to it. The resulting sound even made me jump out of my seat when play testing the game! Here is what the distortion chain looked like in FL distructor.
The last SFX is the one I’m most proud of, and spoiler warning ahead if you want to experience this game for yourself. Be sure to scroll down to the bottom of the page for the link to the game!
This last SFX happens in-game when the monster in the game achieves a way to interact with the security forces in the facility. The player never ends up seeing this happen, but the SFX I made was meant to paint that picture in your head.
For this SFX, I used Freesound once again. I grabbed a recording someone made using footage from the USA’s armed forces shooting guns. I then grabbed a female scream recording from Soundly’s free sound library. For this scream recording, I pitched it down a bit and changed the formant of the recording to make it sound more masculine. Finally, I grabbed the horror stinger sound and looped it a bit to represent the monster. I then combined all of this, while chopping the gun sounds, to convey he story of the security forces shooting at the monster, but overall succumbing to the monster.
The resulting sound I fed all to the same room reverb, a lowpass filter (to simulate sound through a wall), and added FL distructor. The preset I used for the distructor was called “backgroundizer”, which makes it sound like it belongs in the background. I heavily modified this preset until I got a sound I was satisfied with. Here is what that ended up looking like.
Implementation
The last thing I did with the SFX was to implement them. Just like in the previous game I worked on, most of the basic audio systems were implemented when I got around to doing some final touch-ups.
Besides various audio mixing and routing, I coded some of the dynamic systems I wanted from the game, mostly automatic fade-outs of audio when the game would end. I also added a small line of code that would play the monster battle SFX I created. There was some line of code already when that certain condition was met, so all I had to do was just stick an audio play function in there. All of this was done in Godot with GDScript.
Conclusion
This game, overall, was a lot of fun to work on! I really do enjoy the horror genre, and it was a real treat to be a part of this project. I was able to not only do my audio creation but also continue to work on my skills as an audio implementer! We did face many challenges, especially not finishing on time, but I am proud that we kept going and saw this project through despite all of that.
I want to thank my teammates; you were all awesome to work with!
You can play the game on our Itch page! Be prepared to be spooked! As always, feel free to reach out to me for any questions.
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