Hey folks! Here we are, back with a fresh Dev Blog! This time we wanted to share with you the creative process of how the music and audio that you’ll be hearing came to be in CLeM. Let's begin with music, that part of video games that can get stuck inside your head for weeks because it tinkers with your feelings somehow. [h2]Narrative Driven Music[/h2] We love adaptive music, and we always try to come up with ways to let the music guide the player through the changing mood of the game. In the pre-production phase of CLeM, we established some key principles that served as the foundation of the whole music composition process. Our aim was for each musical piece to represent each of the different relevant attributes throughout the story. Also, we wanted the music to loop seamlessly between rooms while changing its mood depending on the sensations that the rag-doll is experiencing as it visits the different rooms and environments of the house. This meant that certain rooms and environments had to sound more frightening or mysterious than others. These principles brought us to the creation of a structure for the music tracks, mainly two looping layers. A base layer that sets the tone of each attribute and loops constantly through each portion of the game, and a stem layer that changes as the player roams around the house and adapts the overall sound to the mood of each moment and location. To give you a better idea of this, let us share with you one of many charts that Javi, as narrative director, created in order to guide our music composer, Pau Damià Riera, in the composition process: [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/42079719/d6ab18f9f9c15743959b49ac9a7b64b4a0684a91.png[/img] [i]Visualized Music Composition Charts[/i] As you can see in the chart above, the game starts (bottom left of the chart) in the cellar with some level of dread and mystery. These sensations then decrease as you explore the first floor, and then you encounter friendlier music that becomes lighter and more upbeat as you exit the house to discover the garden area. In contrast, if you visit the east corridor, where the voice is more powerful and inquisitive, the music becomes more oppressive and reaches the highest levels of dread and mystery. To provide you with a clearer insight into the music, we have created a video that allows you to listen to the dynamic changes in the music as it transitions between each room: [previewyoutube=FaV16k1Tt4w;full][/previewyoutube] That's the process we came up with to create a score that really reflects the twisted story behind our lovely and apparently empty house. [h2]Voices in Your Head[/h2] We wanted to make something close and personal out of CLeM from the beginning, so one of the ideas we had, inspired by Ninja Theory’s Hellblade, was to include a system that represented the voices that the rag-doll constantly hears inside their (your!) head. We needed those voices to have a childish sound but also be loaded with intent and a commanding patina. So, we started thinking about who we could rely on for the task at hand. We needed someone who we could talk to frequently, give them directions, and be able to iterate quickly, and who knew the original story and could adapt to the changes that would come with the game's development. And that's when it clicked for us that Mariona, our art director, was the perfect match for it. She had the deepest connection to the story, and luckily enough, her natural voice is slightly high-pitched and could pass as a child with some minor sound tinkering. There were just a couple of minor problems. Mariona had never done any voice acting before (we are not counting her excellent Pikachu impersonation), and her English accent could use some refining. So, we reached out to Adam Levi. He's a close friend of the team and has been in charge of the Psychotic Adventures' English localisations since forever. He was more than happy to coach Mariona to improve her English output, and Pau, our music composer, gave us some pro tips for Javi and Mariona to put together a super professional recording booth inside their bedroom wardrobe. 😀 [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/42079719/d696326d1e4d1bf808496d58b32922c3e389f487.png[/img] [i]Mariona & Adam recording CLeM’s voice inside the bedroom wardrobe[/i] At this point, everything was ready! It just took many months of rehearsing, recording, and waiting for the development to keep up. Then, Javi, doing his narrative director chores, guided Mariona to the desired outcome and selected which assets better fit the mood. Finally, Pau processed the selected cuts to modify the voice until it sounded like a genuinely creepy little smart alchemist girl. Then we put the clips in the actual game and added some visual post-process effects such as lens distortion, color aberration, and bloom to give it that special audiovisual flair, and we were done! A creepy inside-your-head surround voice system was ready to guide you through the CLeM experience. We hope you enjoyed listening to our musical tale. We love sharing these development pieces with you, and we hope they help you ease (or increase?) the hype for CLeM's launch, coming on the 6th of February! Join us on our Discord server as we come closer to the release of CLeM! It's just around the corner! AAAAAh! ❤️