Creating a Horror Score on a Shoestring Budget

[Music] thank you hi everyone and welcome to creating a horror score on a shoestring budget I'm Spencer vanbrick I'm the composer for the game evil none and in this lightning talk Gina's danowitz and I will be sharing our experience working on this indie horror game we'll be talking about some of the creative and logistical decisions we made during development so first for anyone who hasn't played it Evil 9 is a stealth horror game developed by caplarians the game is first person and the player is tasked with solving a series of puzzles in order to escape and abandon orphanage of course there's a terrifying nun that's there to chase you the entire time it was released in 2018 for Android and iOS and it has since become quite popular with over 20 million players so we hope that you'll all get something useful and interesting out of this so let's Dive In

foreign first the takeaways you'll walk away from this talk with a better understanding of how to spot a non-linear score in the horror genre how to choose a musical palette that is both terrifying and low cost and you'll walk away with some tools for developer communication which is always essential on any score so I want to start by talking about the very first step that we took on evil none and that is spotting if you're familiar with film scoring spotting is when the composer and director decide on when and how music will be added to each scene so before we go any further I want to show you a quick example of a film that I think very effectively scares the crap out of its audiences the film is The Conjuring and we use this scene in particular as a template to kind of decide how the music should work in evil none so check it out

thank you uh Baron Baron [Music]

all right man he walks a crooked miles [Music] okay so taking this example as an effective template for spotting what did we learn well the first thing you probably noticed that most of the scene is actually silent musically so this is crucial for building tension silence is scary because it gives players room to imagine something much scarier than what they're actually about to experience try watching that same scene again but from the moment the Crooked Man appears it's actually a lot less scary without the build up silence also happens to be very cheap

which is right in line with our goal of coming in under budget so our next point is structure the structure in this scene is very Loosely sort of a silent build plus a chaos plus a denuma or a falling action so what we wanted to do was to take this structure and mirror it in evil none so an evil nun it looked more like our sound effects and Ambience so musical silence plus a stinger a chaotic stinger and then a loop that could be faded out as the player as the player's distance to the evil nun increases so as the player is running away from the evil now the loop could be faded out if necessary and that constitutes the majority of gameplay so here's what it sounds like foreign

so that's obviously a super short excerpt but you can hear how it's all working together so the next big question we had to ask ourselves was what instruments do we use for us we chose our instrumentation based on a few key factors the number one being budget so full Orchestra at least Live recorded was out the orchestra you heard in the example was all samples and basically this narrows it down to solo instruments only so for those solo instruments we had to ask ourselves which instruments are the most flexible does it have multiple methods of making sound how flexible is the Timbre does it have a wide range basically the more options the better um third we wanted instruments that could take effect processing well adding plugins can drastically expand the tambrol palette so remember with horror games instruments don't really have to

sound natural at all in fact it can be scarier when the Sound Source is unclear but some instruments take Distortion and modulation effects better than others which is why it's important to choose the right instruments up front before recording and finally it's really important to remember remember that you're collaborating with people not instruments this means you need to search your network for the person or people that can not only play their instruments well but can deliver on time record themselves professionally take Direction Possibly play multiple instruments which will save you money and improvise which we'll get to so in the end we uh hired two people to play three instruments violin saxophone and clarinet we also used a prepared piano which I played and recorded myself so here are a couple sound examples of the prepared piano so these are just very simple scrapes and screeches we took off the top of the

piano and played some microphones inside we also added things like chains for this second example it's really effective because the piano is so large it kind of adds its own Reverb to it plus it costs nothing because I just went down to a local community college and and recorded and played it myself so it was totally free so next I want to talk a little bit about improvisation so improvisation or aliatory is a staple of the horror genre so I always make time to let my collaborators run wild and deliver takes of whatever they think sounds cool often I'll give them a directive like play like you're being chased by a demonic clown and that will return some amazing results but when I have a specific effect in mind I'll deliver sheet music that looks something like this so this is the exact sheet music that I used for the Stinger that plays right when the nun spots you the players recorded overdubs of each of these with

some slight variations and I mixed them together and added some fun effects one thing to remember when you deliver aliatoric sheet music to a musician is it's really important to be crystal clear on what you want the music needs to be readable and you need to do your research on what the Norms are for techniques that extend the tambral range of the instrument or extended techniques for example uh this triangle note head right here is universally accepted to mean play the highest note possible so make sure you understand what symbols you're using so as not to confuse the player I can't stress enough how easy and fun this process is though so if you're not experimenting with your own effects when you work with a musician you're missing out so let's take a listen to what each of these sound like again these play right when the the nun sees you if you can remember back to the video so it's basically the chaos that plays after the silence build up and before the loop so uh this is the first stinger

enough so you can see there's some improvisation on the pitch there's no pitch information written but the rhythm is very specific so each of the overdubs come in line these are sort of a high cluster that glisses down to a low cluster here's Stinger B and here's Stinger C obviously that one contains prepared piano as well also notice that I mixed these really dry and sort of close to the listener compared to the orchestra that comes in next and I did this intentionally so that it would be really uncomfortable and jarring for the player when the nun spots you to come up with your own ideas it's best to check out contemporary aliatoric scores and use them for inspiration and for notation reference this is actually one of my favorite topics but we do have to move on because of time so please don't hesitate to reach out after the talk I have tons of recommendations if you're looking to try

this so the last point that I want to make is that even if you have no budget at all for live musicians there is a lot you can do on your own to get some scary sounds and textures just to be clear I absolutely cannot play the violin but I use it all the time especially in horror scores so I have a few final examples here and I'm going to take a simple raw recording of me playing the violin badly and I'll use just a few plugins to turn it to something dark and scary and kind of musical so these examples outline the trajectory of one single Take on the violin here's the the raw unprocessed recording it's just me scraping the bow across the strings basically muted strings no actual notes whatsoever [Applause] you can hear it's pretty unimpressive so

here's the same recording what I did was I took that recording and I threw it into a sampler and I played it in octave lower so it'll be stretched out as well so you can hear it's already a little more atmospheric darker [Music] then all I did was add a couple of plug-in effects so I added some EQ to clean it up just cut it out some of the low end I added the effects rack from sound toys and all this is is a saturator a little bit of saturation a little bit of Echo and some panning so that part of the signal will just sort of pan through the stereo Spectrum a little bit back and forth and finally a nice big convolution Reverb and what the end result sounds like is this thank you

[Music] [Applause] so to my ear that's something you could easily work with to get attention track or an ambient cue for for any kind of horror game so one more example this one's a bit bigger uh the last example had only one single take of violin this one I overdubbed a bunch of different takes and a couple different kinds of bowing so um here's one raw take where I was actually bowing again no notes whatsoever I'm just bowing the wood of the instrument it's so subtle it's tough to even hear

um then the second one is more of a Sewell ponticello which really what that that means is I I sort of muted the strings and I played closer to the bridge we just did some random tremolo effects there so um what I did with each of these is I recorded a couple extra overdubs and split them into two separate buses so there's three overdubs of the wood and Boeing and then I think a total of seven for the school ponticello stuff um I eq'd them out again just to clean them up a little bit I panned them uh wide across the stereo space but nice and evenly so you can get like a big sound and then the plug-in effects are even simpler than last time there's a little bit of distortion here a little bit of Reverb a convolution Reverb and then these are just shooting off into um some more uh delays as well so just a little bit of Reverb a little bit of distortion and um EQ and panning and the result is this

foreign [Music] [Laughter] the wood especially I think is very atmospheric and it's surprising how realistic the soul ponticello stuff sounds you can overdub that as many times as you want and as long as you're you're mixing it with with Clarity it's going to come out great it even sounds a little bit more intimate than if an orchestra were to play that so that's all I have uh thank you for listening I just want to give a quick shout out to Jeff Penny and Aunt Carrie they were the wonderful musicians that you you heard in those Stingers so Jeff played the Saxon clarinet and ant played the violin so next up Gina will be talking a little bit about sound implementation and and communication with the developer thank

you very much thanks Spencer my name is Gina zadanowicz founder of Serial lab sound so let's jump in and start with the budget challenges first when a game is developed in finance out of pocket the budget's likely to be on the smaller side there are plenty of indie horror games developed on a Slimmer budget such as Five Nights at Freddy's and the forest and rather than relying on realistically rendered Gore Five Nights at Freddy's uses atmosphere and tension to create scares and as Spencer explained there's a lot of ways you can create tension with sound in a game even on a tighter budget so evil 9 was released and marketed prior to our team joining development and the game devs initially used library music and sound effects and then they saw there was a good amount of interest in their game and decided to give it an audio treatment the game uses a free-to-play model so their audio budget came mostly from out of pocket we did hire a voice artist to Mara Ryan for the nuns role and she was great willing to work with us with our non-union budget and really had fun with

it I also recorded my nephew a 10 year old for the boy effort sounds like the screams and the breaths and we were limited with the number of Music Loops we can produce under the budget so we added variety by using stingers and silence and in the end it made for smoother transitions as the game States changed and as Spencer mentioned live musicians can add nice tension element to horror scores by having that ability to produce interesting effects with their instrument that's difficult to uniquely produce with virtual instruments both the sound design and music work together in horror games to create that immersive environment and we avoided the wall-to-wall music approach to save on budget and also to help the Dynamics of the scenes we pushed for moments of musical silence as the developer originally had constant music throughout and we made the sound design a bit more busy than it initially was ambiances were louder in the game to add

to tension when the music wasn't playing and the game has a fine line between music and sound effects as they dance together and and share the spotlight but getting back to how this worked with music if the music were constant and very elevated it'd be difficult to hear the footsteps part of the tension building was hearing the footsteps or the nun singing as she gets closer to the player and then the stingers come in when she's within a certain proximity and that helps take the tension over the top so let's break this down a bit more initially we had the ambience very quiet it was just some room tone that we recorded we wanted the music to be loud and scary but if you remember we used the technique which cut the music out when the player moved outside the nuns detection proximity or distance to the player and two ex we did this to extend the use of The Limited music we had in game and while this was a great way to get more mileage out of our music it made for a very drastic drop in tension so

let's watch an example [Music] thank you so in the end we decided to create a more textured Ambience and boost its volume so it acted like an extension to the music to keep the tension High this was much better but the ambience was still a bit too loud in this

iteration but we ended up bringing that down slightly for the Final Mix so let's take a look at that [Applause] [Music] foreign we also made use of DSP to add more Dynamics to the game's audio bringing the music down in volume and adding a low pass filter while the boy is hiding

inside the closet helps focus on the point of view of the player character we wanted it to sound a bit more realistic in that you would hear his breath more in the closed in space and the sounds outside the closet would be occluded this approach was mainly functional but it also provided a bit of break in the ambience and sound effects so let's have a look at an example in the scene you're going to hear a bit of Ambience come through since there's an opening in the closet there was no Ray casting done in the game to create the occlusion so we had to work with a slight low-pass filter and volume ducking snapshots to make it work we also had to communicate this to the dev through video snapshots or video captures thank you [Applause] [Music]

that is foreign foreign footstep sound effects were important in the game it helps the player know when the nun is close in close proximity and initially we had an issue since there were two floors in game we could hear the nun walking above the player and we tried to have the devs change the three sound settings within within Unity we started a new Unity project since we we weren't doing implementation ourselves and we tested the footsteps while creating proper setting in the inspector window when we took a screen capture of the component window we sent it to the dev so that they can duplicate it duplicate our settings it was still an issue though even with the low-pass filter on the steps after a certain distance in the end the

programmers added a script that only allowed footsteps to play When the nun was on the same plane as the player so let's listen to an example of the nuns footsteps and how the music Stingers worked when the player is detected [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music]

thank you in addition to making the creative choices we just discussed we had to manage the minimal resources so we used the asset Canon implementation approach so simply meaning the developer implemented all the sound effects in music if you've used audio middleware such as wise or fmod you're well aware of how much control the audio designer has over the mix the memory footprint Fades and randomization in this case since we didn't have control of middleware we delivered video mockups or sound paintings to demonstrate our Sonic vision and this helped the devs get an idea of the overall use of sound especially how the music Stingers should be working in game and the videos also demonstrated are complete mix what we

had envisioned the loops were all midi but recording Stingers with live instruments and them being the first thing the player hears makes the loops feel a bit similar as if they were recorded with live musicians as well a single overdub of one part of a music track can really change an overall production quality of the asset and it's a good way to get more out of your budget and still have that live sound so let's have a look at some of the sound paintings the first one was our sound painting for the nuns footstep we presented this to the developer to say this is what we envision for how it should work as it's implemented into the game foreign

so that mock-up was done in our Daw the next one is going to be a sound painting for our Music stingers thank you again that was done in our Daw but it was used to present to the developers you know an example of hey this is how we envision these when they should come in when they should play um and sometimes we would show some of the other sound effects in music Incorporated in the scene so that they

get an understanding of what the entire scene should look and sound like foreign as we mentioned the game already had tent music and sound effects in place and the fan base had expectations as to what the game sounded like when we came on board we wanted to change the original music direction to give it more tension when an update with our new music Direction went live fans of the game were uncomfortable with the new Direction and it no longer felt like the evil none game that they were playing so keep in mind that this game already had some streamers playing it and there was 10 million downloads so quite a big fan base so we went back to the music and made some changes so it included some hints of the temp music we had to change our expectations as to what the game should sound like in the end we should have considered the players might already be partial to the existing sound it's always about the player's experience that's what makes Great Sound we discuss sound paintings through

mock-up videos to communicate the implementation process but there was also quite a bit of organization we needed to have in place to avoid communication issues due to time zone and language barriers we had we didn't have any face-to-face meetings we used Google Sheets to lay out assets and organize feedback and reference material um this is an example of how we laid it out it basically we wanted to have as much information as possible and even though we had a column for Dev comments a lot of times they would communicate through email and it proved to be tricky at times there was a lot of back and forth and waiting due to the time zone differences so let's discuss a few tips for organizing feedback from a developer it's important to manage how and where your Dev provides feedback imagine trying to locate feedback in an email when you have five to ten threads with 20 or more replies in each try to set the precedent that one person delivers feedback from the dev side to avoid

having multiple people providing feedback because paths can be crossed confusion ensues if possible it's a good idea to manage how often you receive feedback not only is the game limited on budget but also time and the developers had planned to to release an update as a specific date and with all the new music and sound effects and we were asked to deliver the assets as they were completed so this meant we would receive feedback at different intervals for staggered asset delivery and it became difficult to continue creating new assets from our spreadsheet when we were also expected to start making revisions on the delivered assets so it's a good idea to try to set a specific time frame for delivery and feedback for example it would have been better if we delivered on a Friday and received feedback on a Monday so we had a few days to handle revisions and then didn't have to worry about creating new assets as well as juggling all the feedback and iterations

testing the last thing I'll talk about um there was definitely a good bit of testing once the sounds were implemented we had early Builds on mobile and video capture of gameplay um but it's always helpful to have video capture from the devs because it can ensure that you're seeing all the game mechanics or the games being played the way they envisioned when you test on your own without a full understanding of the gameplay you could miss important elements in the game um so in the end we managed to get most of the app sets implemented based on all the hurdles that we you know jumped over um and you know we did run into a few other issues like Reverb zones and so some of the Reverb zones weren't implemented so some sound effects felt out of place um in the scene but most of those got fixed up with a later update but anyway thank you for listening [Music]

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