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First of all thanks so much for all the love on our game! I think we’re all really proud of what we created and we certainly had a lot of fun working on it. If you've not played it yet you can find it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/cadence-of-glob

The Voices

The characters were voiced and recorded during the game jam by three of us, Ørjan voicing Ricky, Kroko voicing Minerva and myself voicing Yuri. Glob and Flob are 90% synthesizer and 10% Kroko. We essentially recorded us making some random noises to correspond with the different emotional states of the characters, default, surprised and sad.

The voices were processed in a very straight forward way, just EQ and Compression and then were chopped down into very short individual snippets, which in unity are played back with random pitch and amplitude modulation. There were around 3-5 voice snippets per emotional state per character as we wanted it to have that silly repetitive Banjo Kazooie style to it. If you looked at my changes to the project in unity it was mostly me making very slight adjustments to the pitches and interval of the voices and trying to make it so they were silly and unique without being too annoying.

Flob and Globs voices are a modified version of the “Meow Keys” preset for Ableton's physical modelling synthesizer Tension. Using the Filter envelope to control a resonant formant filter sweep and create a vocal sound. This was then played at a very low pitch to add a throat style quality to the sound and layered with a small transient sample of Kroko’s voice to add something so that it wasn’t too robotic sounding.

The Signal Receiver also has its own voice which works in a similar way to all the others being triggered in random short snippets and randomizing in pitch and amplitude. This is made up of filtered snippets of the alien voices, a tonal synth bleeping and an EMF recording of an electric guitar pickup. An EMF recording uses a special type of microphone to capture electromagnetic radiation rather than sound waves. It made for just the right type of crackly, buzzy, computational sound that I think helps sell that it is a signal that needs decoding.

The Music

A lot of the music in Cadence Of Glob is based around the same Motif, I’m sure you can probably remember it as it loops over and over again whilst playing the game. This motif appears in the main menu theme, the background lab music and a piece of music I saved as “Glob’s Anthem” for when the aliens arrive.

The theme and signal music takes inspiration heavily from the ape escape soundtrack using jungle inspired rhythms but with short transient drum hits and playful melodies. I used my Teenage Engineering EP-133 to create the drum beats and mostly Serum 2 to create the synth sounds. The synth sound used for the alien voices also is used in the signal music to correspond with the fact that these are signals coming from the aliens.

If you would like to work with me on anything feel free to send me an email at danlarkin@pm.me I'm experienced with FMOD, Wwise, Unity & Unreal. I'd love to see what you're working on! :sunglasses: