Hello there!! This weekend I’m at PAX East, mostly taking it easy but also showing off the game to a few folks. Exciting times!

While I’m gone, let’s finish interviewing Bleed 2’s sound designer Joonas Turner!

Interview (Part 2)

What kind of style did you decide on for Bleed 2, and how did you create it?

With Bleed 2 I had this idea of using musical instruments to build the sounds with, not necessarily as melodic or harmonic elements but more to explore all the weird sounds you can get out of them as a sound design element. So we recorded a bunch of guitars with my assisting sound designer Niilo Takalainen (who also recorded a lot of source elements for me to use) and then we recorded a bunch of synthesizers. As the game is very action packed and stylized I wanted a lot of the sounds to be quite “in your face” and “abstract” to match what was happening on the screen. That all said I wanted to keep some sense of reality or familiarity in the soundscape by having stuff like footsteps or clothes or walls breaking etc sound somewhat “realistic” using normal sources.

We didn’t want any spoken dialogue for the characters so to say, so we only recorded a bunch of short voice clips for actions that the players make. I wanted the voices to tie up together so that they didn’t feel like just random vocals so I came up with this little “kind-of-like-syllables-system” where for example if the character jumps they make a “HU” shout and when they swing a sword they make a “YAH” shout and when they hit an enemy they make a “NAH” shout so when all this happens rapidly it would be a hearty “HUYAHNAH!” and different actions have their own small “vocal snippet” and when you start tying them up you can kinda tell what’s up by just listening, the actions hopefully become familiar to the player like that. The voice of Wryn and Valentine are by the lovely voice of Isa And and the voice of the Rival is me.

So, as the playable characters have their own voices I decided that I want to give the numerous bosses of the game their own identities somehow as well. After getting to know the bosses I nominated various items that would be the ‘prominent layers’ you’d be hearing, for some boss it could be a distorted guitar, for some some it could be a RC Car or for some boss it could be the lush tail sounds of a industrial reverb to emphasize the environment it is in and so on!

Are there any really crazy lengths you’ve gone to get a particular sound, or unexpected sources they’ve come from?

Joonas: Hahah wow, this is always a question which is somewhat hard to answer as a lot of things have become “normal” to achieve some sounds. Some sounds I have recorded standing right at the corner of a highway with microphones capturing clanky whooshes of cars and trucks, some sounds I have recorded standing in a lake in my undies kicking water around, some sounds I have recorded on top of a mountain in Cape Town breaking dried up rocks. Actually now that I think of it, me and Niilo were in the middle of Finland during a thunderstorm attempting to record the storm and suddenly like thirty meters or something from us there was a huge explosion, with pants soiled we turn to look at the direction and BLAM another explosion and we decided it was best to leave and not long and a third explosion happened right there at the same spot! That’s a bit too specific to be a coincidence we thought and the next morning we heard that a tree had fallen on a big electric transformer box and it blew up and as a result the power station sent a automatic “hey turn back on” signal which caused another explosion and then the third one was someone sending manual “turn on” power to it. Sadly I lost the clips due to a hard drive malfunction.

Any advice for devs (or aspiring devs) reading this, on how to work with a sound designer? How can they make your job easier, more fun, etc?

Joonas: I can only talk of personal experiences but expressing your thoughts of what you envision for the game and then giving “free hands” for the sound designer from there is a good way to ensure that the person you hired to design the sounds will work up their magic in a bit more of a natural way. Of course that said, it’s a good idea to kinda look into their previous works if possible to see if they seem like a designer you might want to pursue on with!

Communication is really important both ways so you both know what’s up be it deadlines, changes, something that you might want to feel different and so on.

A good way to start working with a sound designer is to list all the actions you can come up with that need sound, like this you can easily see the scope of work and it’s a easy way to keep track on how it’s all going.

Remember, sound is there to enhance the experience!

Do you have any upcoming or favourite projects you wanna give a shout-out to? (Other than Bleed 2, of course.   ;D)

Joonas: Oh no I’m too shy for shout outs hahah… Well, apart from Bleed 2 I’m working on some fun games right now such as Fara & The Eye Of Darkness, Gunkatana (also with Niilo), Ed Keys’ new game called Forest of Sleep, my own game Tormentor X Punisher on which I’m also doing the Game Design/Programming on top of Sound Design.