So Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is another game that instantly sprang to mind when James told me about Taphobos. Amnesia was developed by The Chinese Room, the incredible company behind Dear Esther, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and more. The studio is known for it’s incredible composition accompaniment, by composer Jessica Curry, who I was lucky enough to interview for my dissertation.

The sound design on Amnesia was done largely by Samuel Justice, an English sound designer and co-founder of SweetJustice sound. He has worked on numerous games, such as the Battlefield series (whilst he was at EA DICE in Sweden), Dear Esther, Batman: Arkham Origins, SOMA, COD: Advanced Warfare, and many more. His work is fantastic, sonically brilliant and uses many interesting techniques to great effect. I’m particularly a fan of his work on SOMA – and I may well explore the sound of this game in a separate post, as it is definitely relevant to Taphobos.

The sound of Amnesia is very specific. It is almost heavy, thick and dense in many places. From what I understand, Justice worked on the sound single-handedly – and I’m also aware the game is renowned for the extremely low budget that the sound was created with, same for the music. This implication meant that Justice had to innovate in many areas to maintain a high standard. Justice has also talked about his intention to blend the lines between the game sound and reality, creating a world of ‘warped realism’. I like this focus on immersion, and as this is something Taphobos also aims to do (with the coffin), I’ll try to take cues from Justice in this area.

In this clip, the player actually explores a church, not too dissimilar to the one i’m designing for in Taphobos. This space is an ideal reference point for when I’m creating sounds, and there are elements i’ll take from this for my own creation. I love the huge space as the character enters the huge hall, but i’m not too keen on the lack of space when in the smaller areas – although this makes sense, I think a lot of the sounds in the smaller areas would diffuse into the reverb in the larger areas. When I implement my sounds into Taphobos I think i’ll mix in more reverb – maybe at a distance – from the larger reverb areas. I also really like the ambient tone, almost like a presence in the room. I also really like the occasionally weird sounds mix into the ambience, again using justice’s idea of blurring reality and insanity.

The two main elements to evaluate – the footsteps and the ambience – are both done really well. Again, I think more variation in the samples used for the footsteps would be beneficial – and again this is probably due to sound file budget limitations, as I mentioned in a previous post. The ambience is perfect – and pretty much exactly what i’m looking to re-create; a low, ominous rumble, small ‘one-shots’ with interesting content to add some life to the sound (myself and james discussed rat scuttling or faint wind in the background) and a lovely air to the space. It’s likely mixed into an overall reverb, along with the footsteps and other character sounds.

(LO2)