The Sound of GoNNER: Exploring the Intertwined Relationship Between Sound and Game Design

[Music] intertwined relationship between sound and game design if you have a comment or question during a talk please tweet to us at our handle scene a bit later we want we did until after talk but you know you'll be happy for it so also we'll probably do a Q&A afterwards here on your next ribbon my name is Martin and I was a sound designer and producer on the project I have involved a number of indie games and work most notably with my studio we've done among in the sleep and the plan was working on the mosaic I'm going to sleep is the most famous most known as the baby horror game and my name is taro I used to do a bunch of game jams before sort of moving to still gun and like callsign briefly in Sweden where I was working on this bigger project that

we're not talking about today but as a side project to that one I started goner because I needed something to like blow off steam on yeah get into that more later yeah what is Gunnar what is this game that's a tough question it looks sort of like this [Music] yeah so Connor is a platformer shooter with randomized roguelike elements it focuses a lot of the like minute-to-minute running running and gunning and shooting in action aspects of a roguelike game like that it's a cacophonous game it's filled with visually and auditory candy from the first - can you see - pretty much to last the death animation tally

scoreboard where you give up in frustration so making this bad boy it took like 12 months 18 if you count the porting to switch part of that that happened just after after releasing on Steam and it was published by rough very last year we won the idea [Laughter] [Applause] I think but we basically felt that this project was something was really proud of and after the fact we wanted to also explore a bit maybe what made this game work so well and why we're so content with what we had made ourselves in a way so we feel defeated at doing this talk we could have the chance to explore and

analyze a bit wider sounding game clicked as well as it did so for today we'll be exploring our working relationship both professionally and personally and I kind of have related how the game ended up where it is so yeah first things first I used to be so alone before this project it's like I never really worked in group before so I did a bunch of game jams but it was always always just me doing them and you know like that has a lot of both benefits and philosophy to begin with I never collaborated with anyone else before it's like for this project I had to learn how to communicate which here you can sort of see that I'm still struggling with so you know I'm working on it and but the good thing about doing so many game jams is that I did try both apart from programming and animating and did a bunch of old game design and sound design as well so even though that was

always unlike a hobby level I had some previous experience with sound side already I've never been alone I mostly work with a lot of different teams and it's super fun I like it quite a lot and I worked with anything from like medium sized the studios to around you know 15 to 10 people all the way down to project like this where we were essentially most of the part 3 people and through a lot of these different games I've developed quite a lot of different tools for being able to work on a number of them at the same time and one of them is very relevant and we'll talk about to be today because it's relevant for the process of making sounds for a gunner which is what we like to call constraints yes so starting up any project I set up a bunch of constraints for myself and I guess this is pretty common for for creative projects in general and like

those constraints then inform every decision that you make throughout the project since they will be things things like the motto that we had for this particular game was if you can't do it quickly enough there's probably a better way of doing it which sort of means that like since this was a side project from this bigger project that I was talking about everything I did for this one had to be really quick because it was like a late-night project for me and that that model kept like until throughout the whole project so everything we did was because of that and so like friends new to further on the only constraints that I set up like everything was placeholders I just actually had one line of code that would call everything sound related in the whole game so like every time you heard sound in the game it's because of this one line because I thought it was changing it later so who

cares what it looks like right now right but it just never ended up being changed yeah we actually we were gonna look at F mode or Y so doing some fun sort of middleware function but we kind of never got around to it and it sounded good so it was sort of yeah it kind of works like don't flog a dead goat has to say Norway and another one of these constraints was these like wobbly graphics that the game are built upon and this also came from like I draw these animations in absolutely max half an hour so if I couldn't draw a thing in less than half an hour I would like scrap that idea and try to draw something else right a good example of that is like this you have a big friend on a hill in the game that was supposed to be a friend living in a house but I couldn't draw a house quickly enough so I turned it into a wave so that's Sally yeah yeah I uh worked for a number of

constraints I think the most important one that gutted sort of define this game was I was basically working mostly off of the synth which I'll had around for violin was not really happy as a compositional tool but I wanted to limit myself to using exclusiveness for making sounds and it basically meant that the way I work with games usually is I I put a constraint that I'd like to call frames were it sort of like the philosophical what the sound sort of means in this game what it's all tells you like if a door opens what sort of feeling should the door have in the context of the game and for the pure sound respective is the frame basically means that if you imagine this screen over there as being the 2d plane of every possible sound that exists because of you know physics limits what you can hear then a frame would be like a small part of that which is placed somewhere rather not arbitrary and will I mean

experimenting whenever a sound kind of ends up within that frame this is the right sound for that game because it's sort of predetermined in a way and it enables me to experience a lot so well this is a specific project I was focusing mostly on the sounds synthesizer can make and it was fun we'll get back to the process of that but we also had a different kind of frame which is the philosophy of implementation basically we decided pretty early that realism it's not really our strong suits I don't know how to make conscious sounds so we kind of decided that we could rather go for whatever felt good sound didn't have to be the right sound to fit on anything you just have to be sort of like imagine type having like a hand of popcorn and you take like one popcorn it feels really good you kind of want to have another bit so you take another bit and so the context

of the sound was more does it feel placing do I want to hear another rather than does this we replicate the sound of double-barrel shotgun from 1922 you know good manners at least for this game it was pretty funny so make it candy was the kind of thing that I've always kind of want to do stuff to make it kind of kids little school animation style also another limitation which is pretty strict for and this is the reason why even started on this game was I really don't like footsteps it's the most boring thing that I know really it's the way this game works as you can see here yeah I didn't have a better animation for it but you can sort of hear it when the drop that falls down on that thing like you can see the world is maybe made around the character means that instead of the indication of movement coming from the character moving itself it's the sound of the world building around

you and conceptually I found that in really interesting and got super hype stuff on working on this game that was like the last little bit of constraint that's more like a pet peeve than anything else but it's fun so constraints first was actually a super good thing because we could make billions of sounds like already before while you guys were sitting - wait - you're a stork I was sitting with this and playing around a bit and like it's sort of very quickly turned into this is this is pretty much the process of me making sounds for this game is I'm sitting here and just kind of putting in random sounds from the synth and then I play through them randomly and record where I play through and I take out whatever I like in the end and sort of to finish the product with it it sounds something like this sounds you hear right now and if you

listen closely enough chicken here the double-barreled shotgun in there so basically I mean the op1 made it like a super narrow aesthetic but I could work really fast and we had this huge pile of sound within a pretty short month or two because for every five cents we would need I would make a hundred so we would have a basically a billions of sound with that came a lot of freedom to work within the bells of the constraints it's sort of felt in a way that because like the aesthetic was so predetermined we couldn't really make sounds that were really wrong because it's like the one really clear frame for that yeah and it's felt like we were playing with one of those boxes where you kind of recognized put in shapes but you know we basically had all squares and all of square holes so it was just like no matter what you put what it sort of faded or at least were the basis of something we could use yeah and we both have really fast ways

of working like me from from coming from game jams obviously like everything I do have to be real quick so the way I've learned to me game jams is very how I learned to make games is very quick and iterative and this quickly discarding of things that doesn't work and quickly just harboring of things that sort of work and Martin having worked on so many different projects he has to be able to like jump in between projects very quickly sit down and then work for a couple minutes on this thing and then jump into something else so all the constraints and all the like processes we came up with for this project was always with that in mind I was talking about earlier that it was a side project from the beginning and like that sort of feeling kept through the whole project where everything we did was just to try to make the iteration as quick as possible hmm and that's became sort of a process and we sort of had we sort of had the good luck of being funded and getting help

from a publisher roar fury and basically being a small team and having a very low living cost us all was dead and it was a very low risk for everyone involved and it enabled us really like a low-pressure development us we had a low burn rate and it also named us not to kind of have the focus on or other aspects like marketing business which none of us have a lot of experience in and we don't really feel that we were that good in it either and we realized that this is a luxury that of course not everyone has and so it was worth mentioning that first for us it has really worked and made this project work the way it did yeah because of these like conditions we had these cushions to keep Connor from being like it was like a game jam for the whole production of it which was more than years like it was like a year-long game jam which sort of resembles pre-production and other Morton like classical ways of looking at

it but this was like pre-production for all of the production and this was very comfortable to me since I thought it was always working on placeholder and since like if what you're doing this placeholder it doesn't really matter how you do it so you just do it quickly rather than well and then like if if I wouldn't have been that free like if I didn't think it was a placeholder I would probably have become more hesitant to experiments like I did and I think that goes for all of us it's also good to know what we never really had in history story to begin with like we didn't have any core of the game all done the actual genre of sort of like a platform shooter so everything because of this sort of just feeling of jamming on it just kind of grew organically out of experimenting what felt right there done we never had like this this is the master document of what this game is all

the ways became quite profound and deep game for us that came out of frustrations and getting that happened along the way so in a sense we kind of explore the concept of Dragon produced an actual product so you could say so it's an example we have a few different ways we worked yeah so this one is a bit weird like this is maybe the staple of our process so every Friday we would have this little challenge to work with ourselves like can we come up with something that totally breaks this game because we're working so so strictly within frames all the time is it possible to like break these frames for how we're designing this game so every Friday we would try to come up with an idea that could potentially break it something that is like stupid enough to to to do that and we call these Friday's the [ __ ] you Friday's or 5th for short so like things that came out of that

that was really cool was like the actually that was really shitty was the poop head that just turns everything in the game Brown everything sort of sounds like yeah everything sounds like yeah nothing good and and it's probably like the worst example of what ends up in the game in the sense that it it sort of faded so we put it in but we both felt that this is a very shitty thing to play a game but then again we had all the things that really kind of defined the game for later and in the beginning kind of making more masks a heads because heads give you abilities we had something called foot pad and it's basically whenever you would jump it would also kind of start somersault in your rounds enabling me to do 6 trick shots and I have a lot of fun yeah we that instantly you can kind of shoot yourself up in the air with a shotgun or or do like yes

last minute saves and it was that's a good example versus the pupal which wasn't the best example all right but yeah this this is kind of like another example which is basically what we decided to call the loop so data was basically super good at he has a knack for a lot of things so the loop is basically as a during an editing of each other whereas he would select and find things that we are made or where I would come up with an idea a suggestion and and quite often it could have worked really well in the context and kind of came out of the blue especially with the sound when they do kind of chose things you know he will hear basically had a part of curating like the huge hoards of sounds we had and it would also make it interest more easier for me to look at the sounds in retrospect seeing it as like okay so this is a cool sound that I didn't know we could use for that because it was

called 1922 shotgun but we're using it for jump sound but it's fine you know it's a within the context of our tweet well yeah and so like this is sort of what the loop looks like first like so the example one is I made some kind of content Martin sees the new content and it makes like a hundred sounds on honest over one and twenty minutes he throws two sons with me and I will sort of try to throw the sound same as placeholder on the game wherever I see fit and then I come in and get feedback and sort of iterates and it will be consistency that whatever he did or put in the game like a third was kind of thrown away and we need to work more on I thought it was pretty good I can work on iterated to make it something good and I thought it would be like we just basically mentioned that the third would be something that you would find like it

not like a little nuggets most of the poop that was just like the right kind of sounds that it that I wouldn't have been able to see so that was a very interesting and a liberating thing for me because I was just you know when you when you make something yourself get very tight on it and it's actually nice to have something someone see it from a distance and be able to like pick up stuff like that the other example just basically no let's let's show an example of it in so like an example of this in the works is when I may decide the snake and McCune would make a bunch of sounds for the snake but none of them really fit with how the animation looks like you can see when he jumps into the snake in it expose you so I would take just five random sounds that were made for something else and sort of mash them up and see what fit until I found something that we're together with an animation yeah then he would remove a third of that and in the

second example is basically we have all these sounds I want I'm pleased to have this son because I love it can you please use it for something and it was nicely for this somewhere or we may usually made something that would go with it like the second world which is like janky robots are mostly made around this ideas because we had a lot of rusty weird sounds I kind of informed this decision of how the enemy's tree would react and stuff which meant really happy actually and one of X F was done it's what we called chicken legs and chicken legs view decided he should have these cool sounds that sounds like a little bit of panicked Russell when he gets gets hurt and he starts running around and he will spawn like exclamation marks and they will blow up you can kind of see it here I have to jump on the other guy yeah yeah and you know diddle he's

perfect to me perfect the thing is during the production we basically started really becoming each other's heroes in a way like I would actually at some point recommending digital it's just a game I really like the sound design for and it was like are you [ __ ] me that was my game and we basically grew to kind of know and appreciate each other's tastes and and the ways of working that kind of fed of each other and the best thing is I could work on the game design and throw ideas and try out things because I knew that whatever data would choose out of that like if you chose one of thousand ideas it would be a perfect idea and I always believe like there's a correct way of doing everything so Martin obviously knows the correct way of doing sound design because he's like the god of sunshine which meant that I could do whatever it's true

so with that meant like I could do basically what I wanted with the sound design because every did something wrong then he would like pick up on that and remove it before we actually released game which means that I could do a bunch of not even like blue-eyed things that would that fit the game for what it is mmm and I think it's worth mentioning the potato sitting and actually implementing things and trying and failing I think for you doesn't work too much with game audio so it's what basically is the most important thing about sound for games is basically realizing that the implementation is extremely important and you could have the best sounds in the world but if you don't actually put me in correctly and if they don't kind of make sense in generating the way someone plays and informing the play what happens it's sort of everything all for nothing yeah you might say so it was a very helpful thing to kind of be able to play around the deep limitation and not having to do it myself again because tennis we kind

of had to I could casados it over and say like this works this is a few rides which doing this and yeah we can't try and failed all the way but we kept on trying to try to impress each other but it wasn't all good because you know you know actually burnt out the election yeah turns out like jamming takes a toll when you we always thought like the so from the beginning we thought the game was gonna be like a month more and whenever that month ended we added a month to do that line you probably know how this goes everyone right which meant that I was game jamming or rather like crunching for a year and that's not too good in your health and it was also like a big part of the way we were jamming off of each other where we always tried to like impress and surprise each other that's really hard if you don't even know what's expected of you like like I was and also like I was trying to sort of be a producer on the team but I

wasn't a very good producer because every team is different than Dido had of course a few needs that are sort of neglected see and it sort of it sort of ended up with us being very fond of each other but we didn't still share the tough things all the time which led to this pressure on the double that made him burn um I think it's worth though that when you're analyzing a process and presenting it for others it's not always that valuable as if of course what workforce wouldn't necessarily work for other people and it's not really exact science so we can look at this and we don't really know what would that happen if we done anything differently but in our experience this is kind of what we did that we want to keep doing forward complete trust is nice like it's super nice to work with someone and he just they would catch you if you fall they would catch a bullet for you they would they would take your stupid ideas and make them beautiful and give you a pat on the head and tell you everything is

fine but it was super it was super beautiful that and it's it's definitely one of the better work relationships that we ever been in and that's really fed into the whole creative process of working together yeah like having explicit constraints mean that you can be as crazy as you want with the decisions that you make because you have something that informs you if you're still within the frame of what you're doing yeah and we have a few things we would have liked that differently and staking outs we should have want to be better at communicating in the future we want to actually take care of children instead of just being tough and cool you also want to share feelings and when things aren't going that well actually help you a little bit and also actually fat a little bit ahead you know have have kind of that milestones that we actually enforce and even if we don't have to follow them all the way at least you can have the perspective so we are better than facing ourselves and for you

we kind of recommend trying out these things that we found out working pretty well the first thing is hierarchy is [ __ ] like it's at least it's all school so you can try to work on it and try just because you do sound design or just because you're a game designer or just because you do marketing in a game doesn't mean that you can't think with something else and that again is based on trust and it's a beautiful thing on everyone and the team feels they can contribute and everything really yeah once again like have some sort of plan maybe and so actually like trust loop like trust each other like sieve and see what happens if you leave something completely to the other person at least when you have this like typed collaboration like we do like the leaving something to your partner and seeing what happens if you leave them completely with that it's really cool like yeah try that out and if nothing else like do some [ __ ] you Friday's yes

yeah but this is actually the most important takeaway with turkey Fridays that we found it that's it's nice to not be super serious about your game all the time so try to actually actively destroy your game where does this sound it could be fun at the worst at the best maybe give you some ideas that you never thought of otherwise yeah that's worse thank you so much you [Applause]