Our game lets you play judge in a world between the passed and the afterlife to judge spirits based on past memories. But as the mystery about your bossly figure plays out, this might not be the only end to a new beginning…
I worked in a team of 6 talented people to realise the crazy idea of "being a judge of a spirits morality". As the jam progressed the idea got more iterations and more refined to the point that we finally solved the question of "why would someone actually want to play this game".
My job as a sound artist meant composing and mixing several sounds and musical scores to be played in the background of the game. The idea of different musical tracks playing as the player hovered a spirit over the underworld and paradise was established early on so I had lots of variety to compose. The earliest versions of the theme (which now is sped up and used as the underworld theme) was very dark and heavy on the drums. I kind of stepped away from this idea as it contradicted the wholesome atmosphere of the games graphical presentation, which got me to create the song now used as the heaven theme that is actually the complete opposite.
Most of the instruments I used such as: the eery piano, the drumkit, the background choirs and the sharp brass trumpets, are picked from several modules of Spitfire audio, which offer a great variety of free high-quality audio samples. What I would do is picture the context of the song, be it heaven, hell or an in between shift boss confrontation and create something that I call a "sound scape" of different instruments and ambiance that would fit this theme. I would let them play sort of random chord-progressions and scales and progressively sculpt them to a more coherent and interesting listening experience.
Creating the main theme was the hardest part of the jam and took most of my time producing, I had never composed music of this kind of jazzy genre before, so every bar of music was a learning proces. I started out with a really groovy bass riff that I wanted to use as the main structure of the song. Although this bass line got altered a lot in throughout the proces, it still mostly resembles the initial idea. From there I added the drums, piano, brass trumpets and the background choirs in that order. But the song was still missing a climax, a point that it would build up towards. So I tried many different instruments, but ultimately found the vibraphone to be best suited for a 4 bar solo, just before the song would come to a close. Although just filling this solo with random notes in scale and later add harmonics, I find the end result very catchy.
Previous iterations of the theme were really busy with instruments fighting over each other to claim the foreground of the song, so I had to cut a lot of parts to give the track more room to breathe. Creating progression throughout the track was something that suddenly just clicked when creating the drum fills that segue into the next verses.
What about you?
Are you a sound designer and want to share your experience working on this game jam, or are you interested to pick up sound design in future? Leave a comment and share your experience, I would love to hear your story!
Check out the OST I created for our current Brackey's game jam submission Final Verdict here: