Devlog #05 – Audio & Music, Part 1: Giving Dread a Heartbeat with the Horror Box

Great to see you again, fellow keepers. Welcome to another dev log!

Before we jump into the development update, here’s a little behind-the-scenes moment: We celebrated our boss’ birthday just yesterday! 🎉🎉 It was a really nice chance for the team to take a pause and celebrate good times. Since (almost) all we did yesterday was eating cake and hot dogs our boss cooked for everyone!

Now, with the celebrations wrapped up, let's jump into what we've been working on. Like every horror game ever, it has to own a soul; whether it’s given or stolen. In DreadOut, we believe sounds, audio, music, or whatever you can hear are powerful and highly possible to embody a soul. When it's done right, it would turn to terrors that crawl from your ears to your chest before your eyes could ever recognise what’s in front of you. 

So, for the scoring in Dreadout 3, we work together with some cool guys from EXP Studio, Aldi, and Dissa. EXP Studio is basically a music production studio we’ve been working with through some of our titles, including DreadHaunt, Jurnal Risa: Dark Destiny, Broomstick Exorcist, and now, DreadOut 3. 

The blame is on Mark Korven

The audio team consists of seasoned music producers and composers. They have been producing music for various needs for artists, advertisements, video game scoring, and even fashion shows since forever. Working across so many genres and mediums keeps them constantly exposed to a wide range of working styles and figures in the music industry, including those outside the gaming and pop music horizons.

Constantly producing music for horror games sparked an idea to make something different. And of course, Mark Korven is on their radar so closely. Korven is a film and TV composer best known for his work on The Witch. He has his own acoustic box called The Apprehension Engine built by Iuthier Tony.

The engine is specifically designed to produce unsettling, eerie, atonal, and gritty textures that conventional musical instruments can’t exactly produce. 

Inspired by Korven’s approach, we wanted to try the same thing, making our own instrument. And so the Horror Box is born, a dedicated, highly resonant, atonal musical instrument for Dreadout 3 development. It’s played in an unconventional manner, relying heavily on bowing and vibrating techniques to produce sound textures that are unsettling and unstable. The qualities perfectly suited for building tension in a horror ambient.

To move on a little from sample banks

Might sound a little bit ambitious, but the team tried not to rely on instant sounds from sample packs for this game. We want to serve a new experience in the game as well as the development process. The team aims for the sounds that fill DreadOut 3 to be truly original, created directly from the Horror Box they built. The next step is to gather and compile the audio recordings from the box into an original sample bank for reuse in future projects.

Behind all these experiments is to create sounds that are as organic and acoustic as possible. The audio experience we want to deliver is intimate and vivid, not merely a sterile digital effect. This approach aligns with the spirit of DreadOut, which consistently seeks to evoke fear through elements that are close and familiar. With Horror Box, we hope to ensure that the vibrating scrapes and clinks you’d hear are eeriness you can truly feel.

Since you brought it up in the previous dev log..

Thank you for reading the previous dev log and sharing your thoughts! We love hearing your thoughts. With that said, let’s get through it!

The relationship between them is indeed a nice thing to explore. And in DreadOut 2 Linda also speaks her mind from time to time, e.g. when she’s in her bedroom. We’ll see what we’re gonna do about her and Ira in DreadOut 3.

You got keen eyes! More will be revealed later, because spoilers lol👀

Gotta be honest, it creeps us a lot too. Like we said in the previous update (link), in DreadOut 3 we gonna chase the horror aspects and go back to what makes DreadOut, dreadful.

Halooo! makasih banyak udah support DreadOut since day one!
Pas banget soalnya, kayak yg kita ceritain di devlog sebelumnya, DO3 nanti evirontmentnya bakalan pemukiman Indonesia bgt, alias padat penduduk XD Tungguin sneak peak lainnya di channel-channel DH yah!

Haiiiiiiiii, lucu amat namanya 😭
Makasih banyak support dan semangatnyaaa!! Hehe tenang aja, di yg ketiga ini kita bakalan balik lagi ke konsep DreadOut yg awal bgt. Jadi hopefully horrornya bisa lebih kerasa.

P.S. We want to hear from you too! 

We know by heart that the DreadOut series is not coming to life only through what we create, but also from what you share with us and the community itself!

So, if you have:

• Questions crossing inside your head

• Any theories of the lores

• Your very own Fanart or cosplay

Feel free to drop it in the comment section or Community Hub. We will happily feature what you sent in the next blogs as a part of this journey. And as always, if you haven't, don’t forget to wishlist DreadOut 3 and hit that follow button on our Steam page! 

All the love,

:DH