Game 4: Truth or safety

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Conducting research on the subject of the game development process as well as the roles and careers which exist in this space, I came across a clarification of the requirements from staff working in the Audio department of a game studio.

 

"There are many workers that contribute to a game’s development with roles ranging from adding sounds to the game, handle the studio’s business concerns, and test the game for bugs. Audio workers. Workers in the audio department develop, record, and process all of the game’s sounds, including music, dialogue, and all other noises, both real and fictitious. Occupations include audio designers, audio engineers, audio programmers, composers, and musicians."

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Some smaller-scale studios, due to resource and time restraints, may choose to merge the responsibilities of the aforementioned audio worker into one occupation making them responsible for designing the audio for the game, implementing the audio as well as composing the music and finding musicians to record music if need be. For this project, the developers of the game requested that I act within this capacity of a multi-faceted audio worker, being tasked with creating street recordings for their game Truth or Safety. Below are a few recordings I took with my Blue Snowball condenser USB mic out in the streets of Liverpool.

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Handheld position with microphone on boom arm recording onto Logic Pro x on Macbook

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Fixed position with microphone on boom arm on chair recording onto Logic Pro x on Macbook

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The Game Developer also wanted to add a feature where the player can put headphones on to dull out noises so I recreated the files and added a low-pass filter to each file as to give the developer the option to switch the file to a low pass version when the player takes the headphones off or puts them on. 

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The game, set in Hungary during the present day, has you work for the Huvonian news agency as you review articles to release to the public. Your choices impact the cities opinion and influence and you must choose to deny or approve an article's publication to do this. A critique on the act of censorship. The game itself is inspired by "papers please", a game about a totalitarian state which, similarly, seeks to control its citizens through censorship. It also matches its pixelated art style and I said to myself I would additionally follow suite in my composition. 

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I began my composition by thinking about a bass line. I wanted the composition to be simplistic and mysterious so opted for a basic bass line in one of Logic's presets. I then altered the ADSR within the Sampler plugin to my liking and started building the track around the bassline. I opted for a relaxed drum beat with delays on the snare as to fill the soundscape without adding complexion. then found some voice files from character AIs online like Hatsune Miku and Oliver. I sampled their voices to form a synthesizer pattern before opting for a different one in the second verse, which featured an automated Low-pass filter sweep as well as some random off key sounds from a soundbank named "summer nights" which i pitch corrected.

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The simplistic nature of the composition matches the style of early pixelated games which had limited RAM capacity and storage to store and play media files.

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"Games were available on cartridges, and the storage space for these games (for saved games, etc.) was on the cartridges themselves. Most games required mere megabytes of space." (UofMassA, 2014)

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The smaller the size, the simpler the voices of the instruments in tracks had to be with heavy compression occurring in order to confine the file size to the available space. Here I didn't choose to use the 8-bit crusher plugin but instead opted for the simplistic midi patterns of early video game music but went with higher-quality samples to give the impression of a modern but retro game. 

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The experience of composing and producing the sound for this project has given me insight into the benefits of being a multi-faceted audio worker in the games industry. Small studios will appreciate a jack-of-all-trades individual who can utilize many audio skills for the game's advantage and learning this has helped me adjust my approach to having my services enlisted in future game projects.