From the beginning, one of the main ideas was that the ship should be perceived as almost a living thing. After all, the ship cannot function without the Homunculus inserted into the Central Computer Cradle. It is the heart and the brain of our ship!
Also, most of the actions in the game must be performed manually (fixing the hull breaches, trimming the engine, charging the thruster boosters, fixing the circuit breakers etc.), which makes us less vulnerable to being hacked by Hollows.
This synergy between technology and biology (widely adopted by Metem) is an important and distinctive element of our game and its identity.
In order to support and emphasize that idea, we wanted the sound to be not only sci-fi, but also in a sense primal and animalistic.
To achieve this, besides the typical sounds of machines and sci-fi technology, we often use various animal sounds in the sound creation process, and sometimes even support the sound effects with our own voice.
Let’s start with the sound for Engine Trim Points
For those of you who haven’t played our game yet - Trim Points appear all over the ship during the game and players use them to recalibrate the ship’s engines. Simply said - those are debuffs to the propulsion system. If you accumulate too many of them, the ship’s speed will be severely reduced. Usually I work on the sound when at least some visuals (models, animations) or gameplay prototypes are done, but in this case I started with just the gameplay design ideas provided by one of our designers. The idea was clear enough (handles used by players to fix/calibrate the ship), so I could start working on the sound palette - the sounds I want to have at hand later, when I know a bit more about the thing that needs the sound. At this stage I pick the interesting and fitting sounds from the sample library, record some sounds myself, create some sounds from scratch using synthesizers or experiment a bit with the sound processing (effects) that I want to use later. It doesn’t mean I never do those things later in the process - I often do, but it helps to have something prepared in advance. When the models and animations were ready, I could proceed - I knew how long the animation would be, so I could pick and edit the sounds that worked and felt best for the particular valves and levers. It is also very important to define exactly how a player can interact with the object. This determines how I need to structure the sound, so it can be implemented properly and so it feels best during the interaction. Here are some questions that needed to be answered for the Engine Trim Points:- Will the whole animation play when the button is clicked? (in our case - no)
- Will the animation play only when the button is pressed? (yes!)
- What happens when you release the button during animation? (animation reverses)
- What happens when you click the button again during the reverse? (the animation continues from the point when the button was clicked)
- Does the animation have some kind of auto-completion point? (yes, it auto-completes)
- upports communicating to the player, that the interaction takes place
- Communicates to the player that the interaction is successful and finished
- Also stops the Interaction sound, if the player resumed the interaction/animation after releasing the button during the animation
