This time the mic takes our composer, Vladislav Zharkov.

Note: some of the features described below were not yet implemented in the playable demo, but will be added to the Steam demo later.

Audio is a crucial element of good media. No matter how impressive your visuals or gameplay are, poor sound design and mixing can bring everything down very quickly. For a stealth action game like SeverLink, sound is especially important both for immersion, world building and gameplay.

When I was first approached by the team to do music and sound design for the game, I instantly knew that I'd be going after the feel of the era, and not the sound of it. 

6th generation games, an aesthetic of which SeverLink is inspired by, already had decent audio quality with better compression, so making everything sound hissy and crunchy wouldn't make much sense.

What defined that era was not just fidelity but also the sound design paradigms. Every action and every event sounded bigger than life, dramatic and very detailed. You'd hit a guy in the face, and your sound card would emit a meaty, bassy impact. You'd blow up an explosive barrel, and it would make your speakers tremble in awe.

With SeverLink, I decided to go for sound effects that are old school in their design, but are still grounded in reality and take full advantage of modern software and hardware. After all, the game is inspired by the aesthetics of the era, yet it utilizes modern technology and gameplay features to bring the vision to life.

For audio playback and immersive effects we are using FMOD, a third party audio middleware that I simply can’t recommend enough. Initially we only used it for dynamic music, opting to handle sound effects using Unreal’s built-in audio system. However, as time went on, certain effects proved to be quite inflexible and tedious to author. Since we already had FMOD fully integrated and set up, it was only logical to delegate it all of the remaining audio.

Both for immersion and gameplay purposes we are using a whole bunch of audio effects. Rooms, hallways, streets, courtyards – all have appropriate reverberations and echoes. Sounds get slightly muffled with distance to simulate air absorption, and become more muffled when obstructed by walls. 

When you use the spy camera gadget, the world starts to sound thin, digital, distorted as if you’re actually watching and listening through the device itself.

One of the most important parts of a stealth game sound design is, of course, audio positioning. What good are all those immersive effects if the player cannot pinpoint where, say, a guard is coming from, or a door has just been opened? 

Aside from diegetic sounds, some gameplay cues are also placed in the world. For example, whenever somebody gets suspicious or notices you, you’ll hear a distinct sound coming from their direction. This helps the player to understand where the threats are without the need to frantically look around.

Early on in the production I decided not to go down the path of nostalgia baiting with endless lo-fi amen breaks, and just like with sound effects, instead to focus on making something that feels like the 00s, but not necessarily sounds like them. 

It’s still a modern, 48 kHz goodness produced and mixed using today’s DAWs. The devil, however, is in the details. Now and then you’ll hear familiar synths, slightly glitching and repeating, getting distorted and warped in a way that reminds you of the era that the game takes place in. Every loop, sample, and synth are carefully chosen to craft a specific mood for a given scene.

There are three musical flavors that work in tandem with the game’s state: calm, tension, and action.

Plays during the exploration and stealth. It underscores the tension, and sets the mood of the location. All gameplay music starts with this variant as it’s the main theme for given mission. It also serves as the foundation for the subsequent themes.

Whenever things get heated, but the alarm hasn’t been sounded, and the bullets are not yet flying, this variant plays. It doesn’t always have to sound intense and ‘scary’, but its main purpose is to set the mood for cleaning up the mess and getting the job done.

This plays when all hell’s let loose. Big beats, cool tunes and themes, fancy sound design - all that goes into the soup. SeverLink is not meant to be played like an action shooter, but if you suddenly find yourself exchanging fire with the foes, might as well give you the beats to dispatch them to.

The Big Katch office level featured in the “Fish in a barrel” mission was the very first part of the game that I got to score. It defined the structure of the gameplay music, levels of intensity, layers, transitions, and so on.

For its stealth theme I went for something simple, something that doesn’t introduce too much tension. It’s an introductory level after all, and the stakes aren’t too high at this point in the story. A cheeky bass line accompanied by all sorts of sound design and percussive elements, and a sneaky strings section to add a little bit of mystery. It’s casual in its nature, with a subtle “corporate espionage” tone to it.

When the player messes around a bit, the tension theme kicks in. Its intro signals “oh crap”, but then it quickly transitions into a technological beat meant to tell the player that it’s time to undo the mess and hide. The beats are introduced, and the percussion is more prominent. At one point it turns into a corporate techno thriller.

The action theme is where the fish hits the fan. The beats are mean and loud, and its sound design is messy. This one’s meant for high octane firefights in an office environment. And if you remain in combat long enough, the soundtrack will use its strings to gently remind the protagonist of his dark and complicated past.

 

SeverLink’s soundtrack inspirations and mood playlists align quite well with my personal influences, such as works by Michael McCann, Jesper Kyd, Amon Tobin, and many others, but at the end of they day, I’m still doing my own thing, and I hope that you will enjoy SeverLink’s soundscapes just as much as I did creating them.