Devlog: Audio Lead

Good day reader, this is Anthony from Club Crash to give you another development log. In addition to my roles as Programming Lead and UI Lead, I am also the Sound Design Lead and Vocal Supervisor (tentative).

In this role, I make sure that we have the sound effects and music that we want from our partnership with our team at Berklee College of Music. To fulfill this responsibility, I have been organizing meetings with our team and Berklee’s.

Part of this role is  researching sounds and musical motifs/styles that I think will work with the style and feel we want with our game. I will then bring these ideas to the rest of the Stout development team for their feedback before we talk with our Berklee team about how we can incorporate these ideas. Recently, I have been working on demo ideas for our powerups in the game. For example, the Energy Drink would have the sound of a soda can opening and then some dice rolling. This is to give the feeling that when you take this power-up you drink the energy drink and get so invigorated that you roll for a bonus, like in a tabletop role-playing game.

Alongside the sound design for music and sound effects, I have also taken responsibility for supervising the vocal supervision as I am calling it now. In this role, I will be making the decisions about what we want for voice actors to portray our diverse cast of characters, to make sure that we are conveying our characters respectfully and entertainingly. For now, we are writing character sheets so that I can get vocal references for our actors on which to base character voices. These give the voice actors scenes and monologues to listen to help identify what we are trying to achieve with our voice acting. It could range from something as simple as the inflection we want the voices to have, to how we think their speech patterns should follow. Speech patterns are not intrinsically entwined with vocal mannerisms (such as stuttering ) but follow the speed and rhythm of speech that we want from these characters. 

I cannot wait to see you back for both our next blog post and our launch which is approaching quickly on May 2nd, 2024. That is all I have for now; make sure to check back next week for our next development log. 

And from everyone at Studio Boulder and Club Crash, thank you, and see you next time!