“Against the Tide”, a game jam project

This month I participated in the Brackey’s Game Jam 2024.2. It was an exciting and kind of stressful endeavour, but I had fun. I participated as a sound designer, and also ended up doing the music for it, all in 7 days.

This jam’s theme was Calm before the storm, and after a slightly chaotic brainstorming period, the team settled on a concept for the game. Just to get a basic idea, here’s a description:

A 2D procedural roguelike with combat, loot, and angry crabs. During the DAY PHASE explore the beach, find loot, and prepare for trouble. During the NIGHT PHASE survive the onslaught of enemies driven out of the ocean by deadly storms.

Our game ended up being called Against the Tide.

To make communication easier, I made a page in Notion documenting and organising my work, and offering basic implementation instructions to the developers (who were not familiar with middleware).

Implementation

WWise didn’t seem feasible as middleware for technical reasons, so I decided to add FMOD to the project to get things rolling. I hadn’t used it before, but thankfully, it’s pretty intuitive and if I wondered how to do something, the answers were easy to find, so I got a hang of it quickly.

After composing a list of sounds and assets, I made the list of events available to the rest of the team, but ended up implementing them myself. This wasn’t a problem. Even though haven’t coded in C# before, my experience as a web developer got me where I needed to be.

The sounds

During the game, the upcoming storm is the biggest threat, so I wanted to make sure the sound would give a strong indicator of how close the storm was. I also just love rich ambiances, so it was a nice challenge for me to get it right.

I was worried that the ambience would end up too much like white noise, covering basically all frequencies and not leaving a lot of space in the mix for other elements like music. That’s why I focused on the sounds of individual waves, while having a generic base layer of noise that I could attenuate or remove if it wasn’t necessary or if it was in the way.

To create the atmosphere, I set up the following layers and created sounds for them:

1. A base layer of generic beach noise (this was a recording from my library, I cut out the actual wave sounds from this)
2. Small, lapping waves
3. Larger, rolling waves
4. Sea birds
5. Storm rumbles

I made heavy use of FMOD’s scatterer instrument here, which was a lovely way of filling up the space; waves came and went, some distant, some closer, and occasionally sea birds would make sounds.

An important part of the ambience was how it responded to the upcoming storm, I set up a parameter in FMOD for the “presence” of the storm, which meant that as the storm got closer, the water became more unruly (wave frequency and the volume increased) and the sky goes from quiet to rumbling to filled with thunder. As the storm comes closer, birds might seek shelter and might be heard less.

The end result is a relaxing beach atmosphere that gets more threatening as the storm approaches!

For the character, I recorded vocal samples for the different interactions. A day later I recorded sounds for the enemies; digging crabs with sharp claws.

We had some bigger plans for the music in the game, but we found out on the last day that our team’s composer had some personal stuff pop up during the week, and had to drop out. I jumped in and made some a track for the game. I have made music in the past, but never really on this type of deadline, that was something new 😅.

The stylistic pass

Inspired by the process of Bear and Breakfast, I wanted to make sure all sounds went through the same effects chain that would give the sounds a cohesive and stylised sound. This was partially to match my typically realistic sounds with the lo-fi visuals of the game. This chain consisted of a multiband compressor and a patch in Kilohearts Snap Heap. Among other things, it uses non-linear filters to roll off some frequencies and introduce some saturation.

I used LKC Render Blocks to help me batch render out all my sounds in one go.

Not reaching the finish line

Unfortunately, the game our team ended up submitting was far from finished; my sounds weren’t merged in yet, as were the animations, and part of the essential gameplay was still undeveloped by the time the deadline ended.

I’m hoping we will soon be able to share a working version with the world that contains the work that the team put into it. I’ll be sure to update this post when we do. For now though, here’s a video showcasing some of the art assets together with my sounds and music.

Thanks to the team and Brackey’s for giving me a good excuse to do some sound design in a team. I’ll definitely join another game jam in the future!