Hello again!
In this Developer Diary, we wanted to go over the audio design in Mouthwashing. Since so much of the game's setting and atmosphere is essential for the game, getting the audio right has always been one of our main goals. Here’s a look at our thought process behind using audio to enhance the narrative and gameplay, the inspirations we took, and our workflow throughout development.
Audio for us was split into addressing two main areas of the game: The ambience present in any given scene (so SFX and music), and keeping the pacing of the game as a whole feeling good.
Ambience:
When it comes to the ambience of the game, we rarely wanted to use the audio to tell the story directly. Our mentality was instead to use it to assist the emotional tone of a segment, whether that be a cutscene or gameplay. We didn’t set out to create X number of tracks for the game’s OST for example and fit them where we felt was best. Every piece of music was made because a scene needed it. Martin, our audio designer, created all the audio for a scene as he saw fit. Then, if everyone felt it sounded good and fit the moment, we kept it. If not, we either iterated on it, or it was scrapped and something else was made in its place.
We recorded almost all sounds using the Zoom H1N recorder, except for larger-than-life effects like explosions, which were mixed using sound libraries and synthesized sounds. To achieve the late 90’s and early 2000’s horror game feel we used sound libraries popular at the time to to honor our inspirations.
Martin's recording set up
Throughout the entire game, a major inspiration for our audio was the 2022 indie horror film Skinamarink. Our aesthetic from the beginning of development has always skewed towards low fidelity, pixel-art but make it grungy. This same sentiment was applied to our audio. Throughout the game (except for very few silent scenes) there’s an audible cassette tape hum and noise floor underlying every chapter. This was done to make the environment feel gritty and grimy, and helps blend the sounds in the game together.
Another big inspo for us was Twin Peaks, so much so that we used often used the phrase “Twin Peaks in Space” as a shorthand way to describe Mouthwashing. The game has evolved a lot since then, but Twin Peaks has remained one of our biggest inspirations in our approach to music. One of the biggest examples we can talk about was our main theme. We wanted it to feel like a mix of Twin Peaks, A&W Lana Del Rey, and The Pure and the Damned from the movie Good Time. Mouthwashing’s main theme is meant as a mood piece, a calm before the storm type of song, hinting at what you’ll experience before you’ve begun playing.
Pacing:
Let’s say we’re making audio for a level in Mouthwashing. Our workflow has been to build up a “chapter” of a game in steps: A gameplay pass, an art pass, and lastly an audio pass. When Martin begins working on the audio, he has free range for that chapter to experiment, sometimes leading to unorthodox choices in terms of sound and music. This experimentation phase was only made possible because the game takes place in a small enclosed environment, meaning we have lots of room to add details as the groundwork has already been laid out.
When playing through certain scenes in the game, we definitely expect some people to question why the tone of the music is so different from the scene itself. It can at times be jarring to see what’s playing out narratively, while the music is causing some tonal friction in the background. Creating this contrast between a scene and the audio was one of the ways we tried to keep the pacing of the game fresh. To us, this mismatch creates tension and tries to make the player feel uneasy and unsure what to expect next.
SFX Breakdown:
The creation of the footstep audio is a great and non spoilery example. You’ll be hearing it a lot in game, so we wanted it to sound good. We started with the basics—a shoe hitting a surface—and then layer in secondary sounds like shoelaces, fabric movement, or even a jacket rustling. We make around 15 variations for each sound, then create three separate tracks that get randomly overlaid in the game.
These details may seem minor, but they make the game world feel more real and immersive. We didn’t want something as constant and prominent as footsteps to feel static or repetitive, especially in a game where atmosphere is everything.
We’ve also paid close attention to the ambience of the ship itself as you’ll be spending the majority of your time navigating the narrow corridors of the shipwrecked Tulpar. A dynamic ambience system was put into place, adapting to the timeline of the game, how broken the ship is and what systems still function. This serves two purposes: enhancing the atmosphere of the ship and notifying the player what part of the timeline you’re currently playing.
That’s all we can say for now.
There’s definitely a lot more we’d like to elaborate on the subject, but we’ll save that for post release, which is next week!
Don’t forget to ask questions if you have them for our upcoming Q&A post!
Thanks for reading,
Wrong Organ
