Hey there, friends! Welcome back on board of “San Francisco”, a huge spacecraft travelling far, far way from planet Earth.
Today we are going to discuss sound effects and music in the project. I think, we have been very lucky with the sound design, and main thanks goes to our sound designer Ivan Holodov and the authors of the game’s main theme – Lyuba “Princess” Terletskaya and Mikhail Mishenko.
But why did it go so well?
Let’s find out!
Long before we’ve outsourced the soundtrack, even long before I’ve started developing the game, I already knew how it should start. It would go something like this:
A huge spacecraft is flying slowly somewhere through silent darkness of empty and lonely space and a pure woman’s voice starts singing off-screen.
Yes, I knew how it should go, I knew what kind of voice I needed, but I had no idea where can I find this kind of soundtrack and what the song should be about...
As it’s often the case, chance came to my aid. I discovered Lyuba Terletskaya on YouTube (she is a blogger) and not knowing yet that she is a singer, while reading about her I already found the album and the song “Hold My Hand” that became the opening theme for the first episode. I knew right there – that’s what we need. Lyuba was glad to contribute to the project and sold us non-exclusive rights to the song.
As for our main sound engineer and composer Ivan Holodov – our publisher (HeroCraft studios) has helped us find him and his studio Creatorium Sound Design. It was truly one of the best discoveries for the project! All the music tracks you hear in the game and all wonderful sounds have been created by Ivan. He was incredibly responsible about his work and delivered superb content. While I was writing a technical task for the sounds I’d like to hear in the game, I’ve created a spreadsheet. When Ivan played through the game, he increased the number of sound three times! And I've never regretted it. We were extremely lucky to get such a high quality soundtrack for an indie project. So thanks again, HeroCraft!
I should mention that our simplified game engine has also helped here – credit goes to Ivan, he understood very quickly how things work and placed all the in-game sound in the text file with game logics all by himself, even though he has no programming experience. And the result turned out amazing! I sure hope that Ivan will continue working with us in the future.
All right, thank you for your attention, everyone. There is not much time left until the second episode release. Next time we will discuss the technical stability of the project.