Welcome back to our Dev Deep Dive series!
Today, we're starting a multi-part look into one of the most quietly powerful elements of Modulus: the audio. In this first part, we chat with Almut Schwacke, our sound designer, composer, and the voice you’ve heard in our trailers, with Mick Rüdiger joining us to offer insight from the implementation side.
Let’s dive in. 🎥 Watch the video version of the interview:
Setting the Scene: Meet the Audio Team
Jarvs (Head of Comms): Without further ado, here is Almut. What’s your job title on Modulus?
Almut: I basically doing everything audio; sound designer, composer, and I also do the voiceover in the trailers.
Jarvs: That voice is so good in the trailers. It has such a vibe. Honestly, “Audio Wizard” might be your real title.
We’re also joined by Mick, one of our developers.
Mick: I’m Lead Developer on Modulus, and I was the one who started out integrating a lot of the audio. So we’ve been the audio pair from both sides for almost the entire game. Recently Oliver has taken over some of it, but I still keep an eye on things.
How Would You Describe the Sound of Modulus?
Mick: For me, it’s very clockwork. The game is so rhythmic, everything is timed, and we put effort into making sure things run deterministically. So even simple sounds feel clockwork-y to me.
Almut: Yeah. I would have said: as informative as necessary, and as zen as possible.
Jarvs: That’s exactly the vibe, chill, rhythmic, with operators ticking along in a way that feels really relaxing.
What Atmosphere Were You Aiming For?
Almut: From the beginning it was clear we wanted a very zen environment, not something that makes people nervous or gets on their nerves. We expect players to spend a lot of hours in the game, so everything has to stay calm.
Jarvs: Right, you can’t zone out to something intense or in-your-face. The music and ambience need to feel like background vibes.
Balancing Factory Noise With Relaxation
Jarvs: Modulus is a factory game with lots of moving parts. How do you balance industrial sounds with something calm and meditative?
Almut: It… took a while. When I heard “factory game” I was excited! I have a foley background, so I have tons of rusty things to record. But we quickly realised that wasn’t the aesthetic we wanted. We needed something cleaner, nicer, more background-ish.
Early on, a lot of sounds were too big, too massive, too chunky. So it became a journey of experimenting and then toning myself down.
Mick: A lot of the initial sounds made sense for the object itself, but they wouldn’t work when you had several of them on screen. And people don’t realise how imperfect the process is at the start, sometimes you’re making sounds based on a screenshot and a one-line description.
Meanwhile the visuals, speed, size, colour… everything keeps changing.
There’s this invisible intuition language we develop over time. Art changes, gameplay changes, and the audio evolves with it. But we’ve never said “make it more extreme.” It’s always been “less, more quiet, more subtle.”
That’s the sculpting-stone approach: keep chiselling away.
How tightly do design, art and audio need to collaborate?
Mick: Very tightly. Sometimes art (Art Director Antoine Lendrevie) already imagines a sound while designing an object, which helps enormously. There’s an invisible shared language we build, iterations across art, audio, and code slowly sculpt how a feature feels.
Almut: We experimented a lot. It took time to land on the right subtlety, but now audio helps communicate information quietly: when things are working, when a machine is struggling, without being intrusive.
Jarvs: Any short, practical takeaways for players about the audio?
Almut: The audio is there to inform and relax. If you notice a sound, it’s probably communicating something useful, but mostly it’s designed to let you sink into the rhythm of your factory.
Mick: And from the implementation side, audio is one of the parts that benefits hugely from playtesting. Hearing people use features in the wild lets us refine timing, volume, and how sounds layer together.
That wraps up Part 1 of our Deep Dive into the sound of Modulus.
A huge thanks to Almut and Mick for sharing the process, challenges, and philosophy behind shaping a soundscape that stays calm, subtle, and deeply satisfying, even in a world full of moving parts.
Next time:
We’ll take you through how the sound for a single operator is created step-by-step, from first concepts to final in-game implementation. Make sure you follow the game on Steam so you're notified when Part 2 drops.
Don’t forget to wishlist the game, try the updated demo if you haven’t yet, and keep sending in your feedback, we genuinely love hearing from you.