As my final post of notes I’ll be rounding out any last minute changes as well as attempting to solidify any things I haven’t outright stated in any previous posts.
Last changes
following my last tutoring session on this project, I will be making some alterations to the sounds of the scream in the intro to make it sound more haunting, as well as actually uploading my fabled scene 3 as I believe it fits in well with the learning objective I had for conveying position in a 3d audio environment.
DeadFright and the market gap
During my research into the games industry, to see which games inspired my decisions, I stumbled upon a game called DeadFright, a kickstarter crowdfunded videogame designed in, seemingly, the exact same way I had envisioned my game being designed. To be clear, I discovered this long after I had come to most of the same conclusions around how an audio-based horror game should be designed. The game never got a full release, however there is a playable demo available on itch.io and the steam page is still up, implying that it is still being developed, but the kickstarter page hasn’t been updated since 2020 and it failed to reach it’s initial $21,000 funding goal, with it’s kickstarter campaign ending in November of the same year having reached only $2,193.
This game’s potential existence highlighted what is essentially a gap in the market for these kinds of games, as the people who’ve played the demo seemed to have largely positive things to say about the experience, and the few websites that wrote articles about the game’s progressing development seemed to be . I think it’s telling, though, how I, someone who actively plays a lot of video games and is generally very aware of interesting and innovative gaming experiences in development, only managed to discover this game by accident while researching how a game like this should be made. I think that what essentially killed this project was a lack of marketing. it has a twitter page with one post, which is just a link to the kickstarter page, a fairly barebones instagram page which seems to be built purely to direct people to the kickstarter page, a facebook page with a few posts, some of which that do actually talk about some aspects of the game besides the kickstarter page, but with very little engagement and only being posted directly to the page and without any visible attempt to appeal to any kind of audience, their website, which seems to no longer be operable, and their itch.IO page, which is about as barebones as you can get. Despite this seeming lack of attempt to attract people to the game, it did get positive responses form the people that discovered it, which begs the question of what could’ve been, had this game had more powerful marketing and financing behind it. The main developer, Jorge Orta, also seems to have dropped off the face of the earth after the final post related to the game appeared on their facebook page on the 5th of November 2020, although his linkedin page still lists him as the head developer and founder of the company behind it, Korta Interactive.
Construction of the Sound Library
In organising my sound asset library, I based my structure on an article from ASoundLibrary.com called “How To Create A Sound Effect Library”. In this guide, it is recommended that sounds are broken down into sections to make the desired sounds easier to find. to follow this, I separated the effects I recorded or downloaded into 3 folders, Field recordings – for the recordings I did in the West Commons, Foley recordings – for the recordings I did in the Foley room in the audio theatre, and Freesound.com – for the sounds I downloaded from freesound, with the file names unchanged as to retain all information left by the original uploaders. Within the 2 folders of sounds I recorded, the recordings have been separated based on the main object used in creating the sound e.g. “stick vs rock” went into “stick”, and from there the sounds, if there were a lot, were further divided, e.g. “Stick vs Rock” went into “Impacts”. This meant that if I wanted the sound of a stick being thrown at a tree I could go Field Recordings -> Stick -> Impacts, and I would find every recording I did of a stick hitting a tree.
Variation in project concept
There were various points in development where I lost focus and started to talk or think more about what the actual game would be like as opposed to what the sound should be, like debating control schemes and plot elements etc. Early on I also threw around a UI concept which obviously wouldn’t exactly be necessary in a game made for people who can’t see, and definitely wouldn’t be necessary for an audio project focussed on the sound side of that game instead of the visuals.
The Name
I named the project “Teneberis Tenebris” because, to be perfectly honest, I was messing around on google translate seeing what some words were like in Latin. I started with blind and somehow ended up on darkness, which came out as Tenebris. I then accidentally typed Teneberis in when reverse translating to see how it translated from Latin to English, as google translate has a bit of a reputation for spitting out strange translations, and it came out “You will be kept”. putting these two together you get “you will be kept in darkness” or “Teneberis Tenebris”, which I found to be a pretty apt summation of the games premise, as well as being a strangely nice title.
