At Winter’s End
Output: 8 songs (with dynamic variations bringing the total up to 20), 25 sound effects
Timeframe: 9 weeks
Team size: 9
For this project, I had to answer the question of what does a cozy soundtrack sound like? What does an intimate soundtrack sound like? An organic soundtrack? My answer took me to a few key points I maintained across the entire soundtrack:
Small ensembles of instrumentation
Understated production
Minimal, tasteful use of synthesizers
A dynamic soundtrack builds a bridge between the player and the world
This all shows clearly in the resulting soundtrack. Arrangements are thin, and most instruments don’t even have compression on them. Every main day song also has 3 variations that correspond to different regions of the map: a Shallow Mix, a Vistas Mix, and a Deep Mix. The changes between each mix are relatively simple, but the in-game effect is dramatic.
Here are the 3 mixes of the game’s shortest main day song, “Wistful Drizzle,” to give a sense of how the system works.
…And here are some of my other favorites!
A couple other odds and ends for the project
I designed and recorded many of the game’s sound effects, my personal favorite being this beauty:
I was one of the central designers on the game’s dice mechanics.
I had to answer both high-level philosophical and nitty-gritty questions about the system. How should your choices affect what die faces you get? How many rerolls should you get? How do you make the changing of dice faces feel like growing up? How many dice should you start with? What should your dice start with on the faces
Using a dice simulator made by one of the team’s programmers, I slowly tweaked and refined everything from the starting dice values to the thresholds needed for every route on every check to the odds of each type of upgrade, and the algorithm for how those faces are determined.
I also:
Copyedited the game’s script for clarity and technical errors
Playtested the game for bugs, including discovering… this
The words of one of our programmers, upon me discovering you can get the backgrounds to disappear and the game to functionally softlock.