Simran Whitham - Sound Design for 'The Stages'

Alongside my core Game and Interactive Audio studies, I had the opportunity to provide sound design help to my friend Simran Whitham with his Unreal 4 game 'The Stages' during my first year studying at Futureworks. The Stages is a first-person platforming game in which the player has to pause the flow of time (using a fancy-schmancy time glove) to navigate otherwise impassable obstacles.

When thinking about how to create interesting sound assets for the time stop mechanic for The Stages, I was heavily inspired by the excellent sound design found in Remedy Entertainment's Quantum Break; a game centred around the concept of time travel. I wanted to come up with something similar to the tinkly, crystalline glass sounds used in Quantum Break to signify the distortion and manipulation of the flow of time. 

Below is the collection of sound effects and variations I put together for The Stages:

I created these audio assets through a combination of recording my own original sounds and editing together and manipulating a couple of pre-existing audio samples. Here's some more detail on each specific sound:

Time Stop

To achieve the core time stop effect, I reversed a glass breaking sample to get a nice glassy 'woosh' effect, and combined it with a reversed lightbulb pop sound to give it a percussive finish.

Glass breaking sample: GN2013, 'Breaking Glass Stereo' freesound.org/people/GN2013/sounds/199906/

Lightbulb pop sample: jorickhoofd, 'Exploding Lightbulb 2' freesound.org/people/jorickhoofd/sounds/179264/

Time Stop (Delay)

For this variant, I added a low rumble to the crescendo of the glass sample to give the effect a bit more of a dramatic, unsettling feel. I also added a tape delay to the glass and pop sounds to give the treble elements an eerie decay.

Wood Footsteps

I recorded these footstep sounds on the wooden floor of Futureworks' Custom Pre studio live room. I enjoy the percussive trebly clack to the these footsteps, but the mic also picked up a lot of trouser rustling noises from my jeans. Need to wear quieter trousers next time!

Carpet Footsteps

These sounds were recorded on the carpeted floor of the Custom Pre studio control room. Struggled to eliminate the background hum from this one; managed to get most of it out with some surgical EQ-ing, but lost some of the detail and top-end in the process.

Cube Tossers

I took part in the Futureworks game jam (held from the 17th-19th October 2016, during the Semester 1 Development Week of my first year studying Game and Interactive Audio) and helped make Cube Tossers with fellow students Thomas Kennedy and Callum Wyness.

We had two and a half days to come up with something playable in Unreal Engine 4 based on the theme of 'ten seconds'. Together, we came up with a simple timed cube throwing game. The games rules were, as you might well imagine, pretty simple: get the cube into the goal within ten seconds.

Each of us designed three of the nine levels in the game, and TK and Callum handled the bulk of the design and scripting duties. My main contribution to the project (apart from making the three dumbest levels in the game) was the creation of the following 10-seconds of aural agony that served as the game's soundtrack. Feast your ears on the audio abomination that is 'Boxing Clever':

As you can hear, it's pretty basic stuff. However, I think it suited the rudimentary nature of the game pretty well. Yes, the music is annoying, but despite its crudeness, I feel it's appropriate to the game's themes of speed, urgency and mounting panic. Stylistically, I was going for a similar feel to the stressful drowning music that played in the Mega Drive Sonic games.