EXTRACTED FROM ACTUAL SOUND RECORDINGS AND THE RHYTHM OF HIS FOOTSTEPS. THE RISE AND FALL OF THE BOY’S CHEST IS CONTROLLED BY THE ‘BREATHING’ AUDIO DATA.
“On a global level, a lot went into implementing custom sound transitions between death and respawn in order to maintain immersion through the unloading/reloading process. That attention to the overall experience by embracing death/re-spawn is something I often miss in games. There’s an intangible dynamic between real-world and gameworld time there. Even though my character dies and I go back in game-world time, real-world time still frames my experience, and I easily get annoyed hearing the same line or music cue over again as I die and re-spawn. However, if I quit the game and get back to it after a few days I probably do want to hear those sounds again. Making a distinction between load and re-spawn, and creating unique mix and music transitions for every situation are integral to Inside’s sound design.”
I’d been playing around with a real human skull in the studio in order to create bone-conducted sound. My goal is that, like a siren song, the gloomy, faint echoes of synths will coax the player forward… to whatever end.
INSIDE JOB
Compared with the Limbo development experience Andersen had a much longer and deeper involvement with Inside, working closely with the team over years rather than months. This, combined with the respect Limbo’s plaudits have won him, has opened some significant doors for audio integration. “It’s allowed me to get at the core aesthetically and technically,” said Andersen. “Doing things that are impossible to introduce later in the process, like prototyping game-play where timing and mechanics are hooked on music or clock time, rather than the usual but much more unstable game-time. It’s great for tight integration between music and game-play but a technical challenge… you have to demonstrate it’s worth the effort early on. AT 38
CREATING UNIQUE WORLDS Andersen: “A lot of the things I do are essentially mash-ups or paraphrases — it arises from working with electro-acoustic music for a lot of years. I can take one sound and it doesn’t really matter where it comes from because I’m not using that sound as it is. I might just extract the texture or colour and then use it to transform another sound. It leads to a slightly un-natural but useful quality allowing me to create an audio world that’s generic and yet unique.”