Vesper

Sound Designer

January 2024 – April 2025

Project Details

Vesper was an interactive narrative platform where handcrafted fantasy adventures could be created by storytellers in a 3rd person game with narrative gameplay elements. In my role as Sound Designer, I also took on the responsibilities of audio direction, technical implementation, audio tooling and music composition. Here is a video of the final demo zone before development was stopped.

Audio Direction

When I started at Vesper, there had been no previous consideration for audio. I thought it important to start by defining Vesper’s expectations for the player experience before establishing what the music, sfx or even the audio systems the project might need. Since the project already had some foundational art and narrative direction, I drew inspiration from this to inform the eventual audio direction. What I settled on was a complimentary soundscape, where the player would feel like they were in a lighter themed fantasy world, though with some maturity. Leaning more into tactile, atonal sound design I created a more harmonic music space that could rely on melody over percussive elements. This video demonstrates the progression of the audio direction from January 2024 to April 2025.

Sound Effects (SFX) Events

An essential part of audio implementation was the ability to call sound effects whenever the story needed it. Since the framework of the project allowed changes to the story be made via a text editor on the backend, these SFX events needed to be called via string e.g. ‘Play sound of door opening from guest room door’ would trigger the sound of a door opening from the location of the guest room door in the level. This video details how that was possible as well as the custom tooling I created to make the implementation of SFX events easier.

Environment Ambience

The Procedural Generation of the worlds within Vesper posed a unique challenge for ambience creation and implementation. I was fortunate enough to work with a talented procedural generation programmer and we came up with a system that allowed us to create detailed environments with zone based ambience beds, terrain based spots and sweeteners that were both informed by the in game assets, and were assigned ambience assets logically based on the type of asset (for instance, a tree may have a bird in it etc). This video shows some of these systems in practice with the tooling created by the procedural generation programmer alongside trigger logic I created.

Dialogue Voicetypes

In a narrative game, dialogue is a cornerstone for player engagement. After many inter-team discussions we came up with a plan for how we would make dialogue engaging in a game where the story can be changed by a creator at any time. My contribution was creating what I called Voicetypes. These drew inspiration from games like Celeste, Animal Crossing and Cult of the Lamb. The system tracked how far through the dialogue a character was. It then analysed whether what was said was a question, statement or exclamation and modulated the voicetype SFX and pitch to create a more engaging dialogue experience. This video takes a deeper dive into the logic of this system.

Music Moods

One challenge when working on a narrative game is making narrative moments impactful. After discussions with the narrative designer, we decided that giving the storyteller the ability to control music transitions would be an important way to signify shifts in the narrative such as time of day or the big reveal of the baddie. I created a system that would dictate when these transitions take place. This video details the logic behind the composition and implementation of the transitions as well as how the music would react to the gameplay moments, promoting player exploration while keeping them engaged.