DD 5 - dev music of BR

HO HO HO! Happy holiday!

Forgive us for the hole in our regular devdiary, it was written and not published out of absentmindedness. Sorry! 

I'm Kuba Mazurek and as most of you probably don't know I'm the person responsible for audio design and programming in the game. 🙂 I work as a software engineer on a daily basis and besides that I build weird computer keyboards and make synthesizer music. 🎹

In this dev diary I'm going to introduce you to parts of my setup for creating Black Resin's sound design.

But first, here are some highlights from what we've been up to since the last update!

dev Highlights

- animations are going full speed ahead! 🏭 and also many other things like transfers of older art to new resolution

- there's now a thunderstorm in the game with particle rain effects 

- the main character now leaves a trace behind it 😮 

- we applied for a subsidy from the ministry of culture to aid in the game's development 😬

- improve our custom Aseprite -> Unity animation import tool 🎥

- we have a script and storyboards for the trailer

Eurorack 

I work primarly with modular synthesizers in what's called the Eurorack format (if you search for it and see lots of cables everywhere - that's the thing). What's great about them is they allow for lots of experimentation - you're (sometimes literally) building your own instrument before playing it!

Working with Eurorack is a balancing act - you have precise control over nearly every parameter, but once your system becomes complex enough it's more about "happy accidents", since you're always a couple of knob turns away from a completely different soundscape. 😄

VCV Rack

For the past three years I've been using a program called VCV Rack to create music and learn about modular synthesis hands-on. VCV Rack is an excellent tool for emulating these hardware synths with software. Did I mention it's also free and open-source? All of the sounds and music you can hear in our prototype on itch.io were either created or processed with VCV Rack! (screenshot of a section of one of the VCV projects for Black Resin's last iteration)

Brief and sketching

When creating audio for the game I usually start by having a chat with Pies to get an idea of the general feeling of the particular level or character. This idea should end up written down somewhere as a short brief which can be used as a reference later on. Once I have a brief (or better so, when I don't!) I start experimenting with synths and try finding the general mood I have in mind. For the current iteration of the game I've decided to try out a hybrid setup: I'm using my Eurorack case together with modules emulated in VCV Rack. Here's an example of this setup in action.

Accidents

As I mentioned before, it's often more of an exploration rather than a focused, deterministic process. You often end up in places you never really expected to visit in the first place. That's one of the things I really love about Eurorack!

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