Hi! I’m Alan, the Creative Director here at Secret Sorcery, and I’m super excited to introduce our next dev blog. In this one, we focus on the sound and music in the game! This particular subject is close to my heart having spent many years as Audio Director at Evolution Studios, so forgive me for indulging in a little extra care and attention with the introduction to this post.
Early on in the project, we knew we wanted to do something special with the sound and music in our debut VR title, Tethered, so we turned to Kenny Young, a veteran of creative sound design and an inspirational musical talent. I’ve known Kenny for many years, often admiring his excellent work on games like LittleBigPlanet and in particular Tearaway but, disappointingly, our professional paths had never really crossed. With Tethered being our first foray into VR game development, we were hyper aware of the possibilities for immersion that the medium presented to us and because of that I knew that audio was going to play a huge part in ensuring that the sense of immersion possible with VR was realised.
Beautiful Soundtrack
I really wanted our game had to have a rich, evocative and beautiful soundtrack that used lots of interesting and unusual instrumentation. As well as this I desperately wanted the music to be seamlessly woven together with the game’s sound design. Done properly, this marriage between music and sound would create an audio presentation that was both powerfully emotive and informative for the player at the same time. From the very first discussion we had with Kenny about it on Skype, I knew our precious little game would be in very capable and caring hands. His deep understanding of game audio coupled with his inspirational creativity when it comes to music – not to mention his enthusiasm for the project when we showed him an early demo - meant that we got off to an incredibly exciting start.
So, now that we’ve wrapped up with the score and the sound for the game, we’ve realized that there’s just so much to talk about in terms of audio and music for the project, so in this week’s blog, Kenny discusses in detail some of the challenges involved in producing a soundscape that perfectly fits the world of Tethered and manages to use a huge variety of instrumentations, all perfectly woven together with the sound to create a magical, wonderful experience when you step into our game.