Being an amateur-musician I consider sound design a high priority when making my games.

Only once before I submitted a entry where I had no time to put any music or sound effects. Even after two years it still kept bugging me, so wasn't gonna let that happen this time!

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Earlier during the jam I first considered making something with acoustic instruments. But because I started to run short on time I just did something with my usual setup that I'm comfortable with.

Audio-production in Linux is a different kind of beast. But since I've been dabbling around for years I've found my way of doing things more or less efficiently.

JACK Audio Connection Kit serves as the backbone of the whole process.

I usually connect a MIDI-keyboard to amsynth and link the output to calf-plugins. Most of the time I just keep browsing around some presets and then start turning knobs until I have something that pleases me.

And then it's time to start looping...

Back in 2016 was the first time I booted up this software called SooperLooper, and oh boy did it blow me away!

Live-Looping is such a interesting way to compose music because you're essentially "jamming with yourself". I really think that you don't know what it feels like before you've experienced it.

I usually record something from 5-10 tracks which are basically the building-blocks for the whole song.

I import all the tracks to Audacity where I repeat the raw-loops 10-15 times and start mixing.

The whole song comes together quite easily by just adding fades and mixing the tracks to a proper sequence. The final touch here was to take the short "solo" (track #6) which I extended to a long ambience-layer with good old PaulStretch.

Before that I felt it was missing something, but that truly nailed it!

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Usually I adjust the speed/pitch of the song to suit the games tempo/feel before doing a final export. But this time I decided to do that in the game's code.

Earlier I had implemented a "hidden HUD" in the game which displayed some rudimentary information to the player, but felt that beyond that it was a bit useless.

Since it was fairly easy to implement in Fusion, I decided to add a feature that allows you to mix the song's frequency yourself!

As of now it's basically just a gimmick that serves as a mood-enhancer. If I'll continue development post-jam I consider rigging the knob-values to the NPC's speed-attributes.

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I used this 15 year old webcam (Lifecam VX-2000) to record the sound-effects.

It's amazing how good microphone it has!

All of the sounds were basically me making sounds with my own mouth, and then pitched lower/higher. One expection was the plop when the creatures fall to the glass.

I dropped a small snack-carrot to a waterglass for maximum authenticity. :carrot: :potable_water:

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Well, I think that's it for now! I might do a post and elaborate some other aspects later.

Have a good day!

Tools used: OS: Lubuntu 20.04.6 LTS Software: Clickteam Fusion 2.5 (using Proton 5.13-6), Audacity, QJackCtl, amsynth, SooperLooper, Calf-Plugins, GIMP Hardware: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8600, 4gb RAM, MCP89 [GeForce 320M], MCP89 HD Audio, Epson EH-TW5300, Microsoft Lifecam VX-2000, ESI Keycontrol49 MIDI-keyboard, graph paper, Artline 200 marker