1. Introduction In this production report, I'll go through all the decisions that led to the development of the story, the music, and the sound design, as well as its implementation into Unity Engine with Fmode.
2. Narrative Castaneda's "The Teaching of Don Juan" (1998), was the source of inspiration for the "Sciaman" and had a significant impact on all of the dialogues. Other sources of influence included Professor Corrado Malanga's research into regressive hypnosis and Joseph Campbell's book "The hero with a thousand faces." According to Campbell (page 23), the traditional route of the mythological adventure of the hero is reflected in the rites of passage, which consist of three stages: separation, initiation, and return. So while I was planning my game's narrative, I wanted to incorporate this sequence. The professor and hypnotist from Italy, Corrado Malanga, was instrumental in establishing the first component of the pattern: the journey into the unknown begins with the protagonist becoming hypnotised and then going on an adventure. The first encounter with the Sciaman represents the initiation. I decided to keep the pattern open-ended for the "return" component. In Norse mythology, land spirits are referred to as Landvaettir. Accordingly, the game has three natural spirits.
2.1 Cut scenes
This game's storyline is often communicated via cutscenes.
Setting up the cameras for the cut sequences was one of the most challenging components of production since there is no preview for camera movement.
Concurrently, this was a really valuable tool for compensating for my lack of coding knowledge.
Fig. 1 (Campbell, pg 23)
3. Music Production and Sound design Creating opportunities for the deployment of sounds was the most critical aspect of this assignment. Because of the way I organised the village, the player is required to go along a predetermined path in order to get all of the hearts. This was done on purpose. I have strategically positioned Colliders along this path in order to activate certain sections of the soundtrack. This enabled me to adjust the section of the music soundtrack that was related to the scenario, and it allowed the tension to build up until the very end. For that reason, I employed a horizontal adaptive music system (GQ Audio, 2021). I used Logic to compose the music, and the plugins that I relied on the most were Arcade, Phase Plant, Sound Toys Effect Rack, Valhalla Vintage Reverb, IK Multimedia Classic Clipper and Glue Compressor, Gullfoss, Oxford Inflator, and Infiltrator for the sound effects. For the dialogues, I used C2 compression and Rvox compressor.
3.1 Foley Each and every sound in this game was recorded by myself. I recorded all of the Foley effects for Viking Village over the course of two distinct sessions. I implemented many instances of "multi instruments" for each frequency range of a certain element in an attempt to render the sound design as realistic as possible. I explored this method and discovered that randomising a vast number of little sounds with no discernable pattern produced a more genuine, natural sound.
3.2 Dialogues
The subsequent two sessions consisted of recording dialogues.
Except for the "psychologist," all of the game's characters are interpreted by people from SAE. Even though I already knew how I wanted the characters to sound, I offered them the flexibility to explore their own interpretations of the characters' voices.
Consequently, I ended up recording almost every one of my classmates.
3.3 Fmode
Fmode has proven to be a valuable implementation resource for me.
Snapshots are a useful feature of Fmode.
Snapshots were used in a variety of ways, including for volume automation, to enhance the dialogue of a specific character, and to recreate the natural reverberation of the environment, in the case of the choir at the beginning of the game, outside of the village, and the party in the middle of the village.
I made extensive use of the stock plugins of Fmode for mixing and also for mastering maintaining -23 LUFS as the target loudness level (Miles, 2016).