Soundscapes from a Distant Planet: the Audio in ROSETTA PRIME

Sound design is sometimes overlooked in the rush of a game jam. For 20 Second Game Jam however, the limited scope allowed us to fine tune audio and make it serve the atmosphere we created for Rosetta Prime. In this post, I will share the way the audio was created for the game.

If you haven’t yet played the game, check it outbefore reading the rest of this post as the rest will contain spoilers (especially in the videos).

Disclaimer: I am not a sound designer/engineer. I am simply aiming to provide the reader some background on the way we have proceed and some lessons learnt. If you are an audio specialist and noticed things that do not make sense leave a comment, I’d be glad to learn more!

Layering the Audio

In Rosetta Prime, the audio elements are grouped in three main layers:

• UI and player action feedback: this includes all the beeps and sound effects you hear in response to action. We tried to keep these sounds in the trebles (higher frequencies)
• Ambient or environmental sounds: they provide hints about what is going on in the game. We kept this in the bass (lower frequencies)
• Music: this only applies to the title and end screens and is meant to convey the tone of the game (it cover a broader spectrum, although it avoid the higher frequencies occupies by UI sounds)

Feedback to Player Actions

The first sound we designed are those related to actions the players directly made. This includes the sound of pictures taken, of UI interaction as well as the typewriter effect. All of these are beeps with an added white noise when snapshots are taken that are reminiscent of the grain shader used on top of pictures. A loose inspiration for these are the scans and UI sounds of the Metroid Prime series.

All these sounds are in the key of E phrygian, a key that sets a mysterious and dark sound. The typewriter effect takes random notes from this key but a greater probability is given to E, F and B. Not every single character emits a sound, depending on the typewriter speed sounds might be emitted every two or three characters. Typewriter sounds are also sent to a custom audio bus and its volume toned down. This is important because it’s easy for this effect to become annoying.

Ambient Sounds

Sounds guide the player through the game, hinting that a secret might be located where they are located. For this, we used Godot’s 2D AudioListener and 2D AudioStreams located at points of interest. The sounds themselves are simply chords played by a synth for each of the four zones of the game. They follow a chord progression (once again in E phrygian) so that they sound related to each other when you move from one location to another.

The sound does not play only at the moment when a picture will result in a Major Finding but also when the picture will result in added data in the endscreen that will help the player find the solution in a subsequent run. These sounds are directly inspired by the sound quantum objectsmake in Outer Wilds.

Wind Sound

In between player action sound and ambience is the wind sound that plays during the game. This sound accelerates when the player moves left and right providing feedback but also contributes to the vibe of the planet being somewhat inhospitable. 

This effect is an happy accident. Initially different wind or environmental sounds were supposed to be in place for each biome but this simple trick just seemed hit two birds with one stone and simplified our sound design substantially.

A Very Short Soundtrack

For the title and endgame screens we decided to have a simple trak playing in the background below the beeps produced by the UI.

From the general tone of the game. Rosetta Prime is about exploring a distant planet and unraveling its mysteries. As such, this track tried to convey that meditative and slightly worrying tone. It is heavily inspired by the atmosphere of Metroid (like this or this) and orchestration of some of the Nomai themes from Outer Wilds. 

Once again, none of us are sound engineers nor professional music composer. As such, we would welcome any feedback on the result and any thoughts about of to design audio for games.