Hello listeners! On tonight's show we have a very special feature to share with you - Killer Frequency: Origins of a Slasher!
In 2019, a small group of developers from Team17 came together to take part in a game jam called Adventure Jam. Over the course of the next two weeks, their free time was eaten up creating a short narrative horror experience about a late-night radio host in a town plagued by a killer. Years later, that small game jam project would enter full development as Killer Frequency. In the run-up to Killer Frequency's release, we spoke to members of the team who worked on the game jam version: Kev Carthew (game designer), Phil Brown (game artist and voice of Forrest Nash), and Nikki Piazza (voice of the producer).
Adventure Jam
Kev: "Prior to Killer Frequency, for the past five years me and another designer, Adam had always been taking part in a yearly game jam called Adventure Jam.
"The good thing about Adventure Jam is that unlike other game jams, it doesn't come at you with an abstract concept and say, 'fashion a game from this'. It's always just make the best adventure game that you can in two weeks.
"With that Adventure Jam, we hit upon this concept of being a late night radio DJ. We didn't really know what the game was at that point in time, but we thought that culturally, that is something that most people probably recognise. You know, they've heard those late night talk shows or they've seen variations of those shows in movies.
"The game jam itself was hugely enjoyable and quite stressful to take part in. Even before the game jam starts, we're looking at that date in the calendar, and we're saying, 'well, what's our own personal schedules looking like? Are we free those weekends? Can we dedicate time to it?' Design conversations start probably about a week in advance of the jam, and we're just throwing ideas around. And then very quickly, we're going around within the company, and we're seeing who's up for this."
"Once the two weeks of the game jam actually starts, we had to hit the ground running and we had to stay on it to deliver, and we're asking quite a lot of people because there's no financial reward for doing this. We're just doing it for the hell of it. We're just doing it to try and flex our muscles as games developers and say can we actually meet this challenge within two weeks? Can we make something really cool within two weeks?"
The Setting
Kev: "When I was a kid, it used to all be about going to the VHS video rental store. Your parents would give you one film to rent a week and we didn't have streaming services, so content wasn't really ubiquitous in that way. But I remember I've got really strong memories of being a child and going to those video stores.
"You'd see, like a poster for a film like Fright Night or something. Something that was far too mature for you to be able to rent and watch as a child. But they'll always be a mystique to it. And I remember that soon became part of the narrative for Killer Frequency as well. I think that's why it was set in the 80s. We wanted it to feel like an American B-horror movie."
Phil: "I worked with Adam on forming what the town map would be. And then I had a bit of fun with the names of the streets like, you know, calling things like Killkenny Avenue or Chokesville Terrace. So I had a lot of fun thinking up stupid names like that. The style of map that we put together pretty much carried over to the full release, got cleaned up a bit and obviously developed into a larger map of the town."
The Killer
Kev: "The idea for the Whistling Man definitely came later, and he's a great idea that's been taken on by the main dev team. It's a perfect idea for the medium through which the killings are delivered, because there's an audio motif. That wasn't a part of the game jam version though.
"Due to time constrains, the killer in the game jam wasn't even really a character. In fact, in the very first ideas, it wasn't a slasher. The very first idea we had was, well, maybe there's a zombie outbreak or something like that. Maybe you are hunkered into the radio station while the zombie outbreak is happening. And we thought, well, zombies are everywhere. They've been done to death. So we decided to make a slasher.
"I don't think we really talked about even what the killer looked like. We knew that he was a he, only because it was being voiced by Phil. And we also thought that he would kill people with a knife, as that's something we could represent with audio. You know, like these stupid, bloody over-the-top cries and sounds from the victims."
Game and Narrative Design
Kev: The core game system came down to this idea of taking a call, getting some information for the puzzle, playing a record, figuring out the puzzle and then solving the puzzle.
"Basically in the world outside the radio station, while music's playing, it's almost like time stands still. You can put a record on, explore to your heart's content, take any amount of time to come back, and then unpause the record and take the next part of the call.
"Once we were fairly happy with the idea that that's going to work, and bear in mind we have no time to make a prototype, we had to puzzle it out in our heads, talk about it, and then just hope that it worked in practice.
"That's when we moved onto writing it. We had to think about the scope of it. How many characters, how many calls, what kind of things do we have to rely on to be able to build puzzles? Most of the time, it's dialogue choices, so it's a branching narrative. We did map out a flow chart for the first call, but we just felt that just writing it was as good a substitute for creating that flowchart. So we wrote the dialogue and then spoke to the programmers.
"And the thing about that as well is that you're almost designing the puzzles at the same time that you're writing the dialog, because they're so closely entwined. That all just has to work. We had to write it all in one week, because we knew that we'd need the next week for the voice recording, the audio design, and then getting all that into the game."
Voice Acting and Audio Design
Phil: "I'd done a bit of voiceover stuff for Team17 before, so Kev asked came to me and went through the premise of the game. It immediately hit my interests because it was set in the 80s and was a horror slasher, sort of thriller.
"So I ended up playing Forest Nash, the DJ. I also played caller #3. These callers don't get given names, so we only know him as caller #3, who's the travelling salesman. And I played the killer, when the killer calls to tell them that he knows that Forrest is trying to help the callers.
"It was a very quick process. We were only given the scripts maybe an hour or so before, and then we were pretty much just going into recording takes. We recorded in like a meeting room, because at the time in that building, we didn't have an audio room. So we were just trying to get it as best as we could.
"It was very homemade, like we would try a few takes and then if it didn't seem to bond then we would go back and we would do them all again, so that we got it as consistent as possible. Obviously, I'm not American and it was tricky and I had to stop myself when I realised that I was saying things in more of an English accent again.
"We were trying to get the sound of a guy who basically just lives on whiskey and no sleep, that kind of guy and I couldn't get my voice as gravelly as that without it sounding forced. So, we settled on something more natural, but still with a little bit of a drawl."
Nikki: "Kev came to me one day in the office and asked if I wanted to do some voice work for the game jam. I hadn't planned to be part of it, so I was kind of surprised by the question, but I said that'd I'd love to take part. I do think part of it was because this whole thing take places in a little town in America, and being half American and still having a reasonably strong accent, I don't have to force it.
"When recording, we'd head up to an office upstairs and Danny, who was doing the sound design, had a full microphone set-up for us. We got given the script for it and were told to maybe ad lib or change things if we felt it'd flow better.
"With it being a game jam, there wasn't too much to record. I think we had three callers in the end, and there was generally two ways each conversation could go - whether they lived or whether they died. And I played both the producer and the high school girl caller.
"But at least from the voice acting point of view, it all seemed very relaxed. There was very little panicking at the last minute. There were no arguments, there was no drama."
Kev: "The thing about this game, was if Phil or Nikki had said no to lending their voice to it, then maybe it wouldn't have even happened. Because it was so, so dependent on having voice actors. And also, Danny and Oli, our sound designers, were a huge, huge part of this game.
"The amount of work they got through within those two weeks! I think there's like six original pieces of music composition that they provided for it. There's all the voice recording. There's a ton of sound design that goes into the voice recording as well. It all needed to slot into place in a really short amount of time."
The Online Response
Kev: "It's funny because it's not like a big game jam where you see an instant response. With Killer Frequency, you had that elation of meeting the deadline and it being finished and over, and then it kind of goes quiet for a little while and for the next couple of days, you're refreshing the page. You're looking for any little comment that you can get, any tidbit of information that people like it.
"It was probably about two weeks after the Jam had finished, before we started seeing people pick it up on YouTube. We got some fairly sizable streamers and influencers who were playing the game and we got pretty good engagement with the YouTube community.
"Killer Frequency was far above and beyond anything that we'd done before, so to see people engaging with it and streamers playing it and the reactions that it got. Yeah, really, really fulfilling. And that is the reward, that people actually like the thing that you spent that time making.
"And, it was the fact that people seemed to be having a good time with it on on YouTube and Twitch that really sort of helped make a more compelling argument that Killer Frequency might actually have legs as a full release."
Nikki: "It was very surreal. I had to laugh quite a lot, because the interval that they set for my producer's lines prompting the player to do something was like every 15 seconds or something like that. And it cracked me up every time, because when a YouTuber started up the game, there wasn't a start menu. It just dumped you directly into the gameplay. So, every 15 seconds you had my producer going, 'Hey Forrest, hit the button' and it often interrupted all their introductions.
"But it was just surreal seeing all these quite famous YouTubers playing this little indie game where both Phil and I were the vocal stars. It was a really nice feeling knowing that people appreciated it, and that quite a few did enjoy the voice acting for it."
Phil: Seeing those early videos go out and seeing YouTubers genuinely enjoying the game and knowing that it took us two weeks and how much work went into those two weeks, you just think 'I hope this is going to be good' and it was almost an immediate reward with Killer Frequency."
What makes Killer Frequency special?
Kev: "I think it's the setting and how we've derived gameplay specifically from the radio station setting. You're having to imagine what the world outside looks like through the context of the clues that you're given by the callers that call in, and that makes for some very challenging puzzle design for designers. But I think it makes for really unique puzzles for players. It feels like it stands out as a game that there just aren't too many similar examples of."
Phil: "For me, it's how the game communicates with the player. It works on a level that we all understand. It's almost like instead of just telling someone a ghost story, we've put them into it, and giving them the option of deciding what's going to happen. When you present a lovely, rich scenario that you can explore, the player will do some of the story writing on their own."
Nikki: "I think it's unique in its design. It doesn't put you directly in the footsteps of the survivor themselves like a lot of games do. This game puts you in the footsteps of someone who is helping the survivors get away. So you're kind of like the guy in the chair almost for these survivors, which is not a perspective that's ever really done for horror, because people like to put themselves in that situation, whereas this is a little bit different.
"But that doesn't mean that you don't get immersed, because suddenly you're responsible for the person on the other end of the phone who you might not know a heck of a lot about. You suddenly care about them just because of the way they've been introduced or the way they've been talking to you. I think that's a really interesting dynamic to have."
Killer Frequency hits the airwaves in Summer 2023. Wishlist today!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1903620/Killer_Frequency/